The Ghost of Tom Joad guitar work and the lyrics on many of the tracks are a somber reflection of life in the mid-1990s in America and Mexico. The character of Tom Joad entered the American consciousness in John Steinbeck’s 1939 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, "The Grapes of Wrath", set against the economic hardships of the Great Depression. This spawned a film version starring Henry Fonda, which in turn inspired folk singer Woody Guthrie to pen "The Ballad of Tom Joad". The album's release was followed by Springsteen's solo acoustic Ghost of Tom Joad Tour, which ran from 1995 to 1997 and consisted of mostly small
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men dusty yards in the Depression-era nowhere of the deep south—and Agee's detailed notes. As he remarks in the book's preface, the original assignment was to produce a "photographic and verbal record of the daily living and environment of an average white family of tenant farmers". However, as the "Literary Encyclopedia" points out, "Agee ultimately conceived of the project as a work of several volumes to be entitled "Three Tenant Families", though only the first volume, "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men", was ever written". Agee considered that the larger work, though based in journalism, would be "an independent inquiry into