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
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men dusty yards in the Depression-era nowhere of the deep south—and Agee's detailed notes. As he remarks in the book's preface, the original assignment was to produce a "photographic and verbal record of the daily living and environment of an average white family of tenant farmers". However, as the "Literary Encyclopedia" points out, "Agee ultimately conceived of the project as a work of several volumes to be entitled "Three Tenant Families", though only the first volume, "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men", was ever written". Agee considered that the larger work, though based in journalism, would be "an independent inquiry into