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 Southerner (film) subculture. A native of Tennessee, Agee was very knowledgeable about the South and in particular about tenant farmers and "croppers". In fact, he had first-hand experience observing the day-to-day challenges facing poor cotton farmers. He had lived for two months in Alabama with sharecroppers in the summer of 1936 and had recorded in great detail their families' troubled histories and meager existence at the time. Later that written record, accompanied by the photographs of Walker Evans, formed the highly acclaimed book "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men", which was published just four years prior to the release of "The Southerner."