The Grapes of Wrath The Grapes of Wrath The Grapes of Wrath is an American realist novel written by John Steinbeck and published in 1939. The book won the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize for fiction, and it was cited prominently when Steinbeck was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1962. Set during the Great Depression, the novel focuses on the Joads, a poor family of tenant farmers driven from their Oklahoma home by drought, economic hardship, agricultural industry changes, and bank foreclosures forcing tenant farmers out of work. Due to their nearly hopeless situation, and in part because they are trapped in the
Murder of the Lawson family Murder of the Lawson family The murder of the Lawson family refers to the Germanton, North Carolina event on December 25, 1929, in which sharecropper Charlie Lawson murdered his wife and six of his seven children. In 1911, Charles Davis Lawson married Fannie Manring, with whom he had eight children. The third, William, born in 1914, died of an illness in 1920. In 1918, following the move of his younger brothers, Marion and Elijah, to the Germanton area, Lawson followed suit with his family. The Lawsons worked as tenant tobacco farmers, saving enough money by 1927 to buy their own