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
Southern Tenant Farmers Union went mainly to the plantation owners and left tenant farmers and sharecroppers unemployed without any aid from the federal government. East and Mitchell created the Unemployed League with other farmers in Tyronza, Arkansas, to fight the local plantation owners' retention of federal relief payments under the New Deal. The Unemployed League was able to distribute this aid among the land workers of Delta; soon after the league disbanded. The cause and organization were revived in 1934 when the STFU was created. STFU's main goal was to advocate for the distribution of New Deal subsidies from plantation owners to tenant farmers.