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
Great Depression in the Netherlands was unable to structurally improve the situation. As most other countries the Netherlands experienced significant social unrest during the Great Depression. But except for a number of impressive events this unrest was actually quite limited in scale. Statistics of labour strikes for example show that during the 1931-1937 period strikes were actually less common in the Netherlands than in the previous years of economic stability from 1925 to 1930. At the height of the Great Depression in the Netherlands the number of strikes was lowest. [4] Another form of protest was rentstriking, the refusal by a tenant to pay rent