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
The Woman Who Was Poor The Woman Who Was Poor The Woman Who Was Poor () is an 1897 novel by the French writer Léon Bloy. It follows a woman, Clotilde, who becomes involved with the Paris art and literary scene in the 1880s. It was Bloy's second novel. An English translation by I. J. Collins was published in 1939. Ernest Boyd of the "Saturday Review" wrote in 1939 about the English-language edition: The translator duly apologizes for his squeamishness, although none of our current exponents of the "Anglo-Saxon" monosyllables would have been deterred by Bloy, even if disgusted by his deliberate and unnecessary blasphemies.