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
Causes of the Great Depression monetary shocks, productivity shocks, and banking shocks – but those developments become positive after 1933 due to monetary and banking reform policies. According to the model Cole-Ohanian impose, the main culprits for the prolonged depression were labor frictions and productivity/efficiency frictions (perhaps, to a lesser extent). Financial frictions are unlikely to have caused the prolonged slump. In the Cole-Ohanian model there is a slower than normal recovery which they explain by New Deal policies which they evaluated as tending towards monopoly and distribution of wealth. The key economic paper looking at these diagnostic sources in relation to the Great Depression