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 Kallikak Family side of the Kallikak family included poor farmers but also school teachers, an Army Air Corps pilot, and a bank treasurer. It has been argued that the effects of malnutrition were overlooked in the Kallikak family. Goddard's peer, Davenport, even identified various forms of diseases now known to be caused by diet deficiencies as being hereditary. Another perspective has been offered that the Kallikaks almost certainly had undiagnosed fetal alcohol syndrome. In addition to poverty and malnourishment, prenatal alcohol exposure can create craniofacial and other physical anomalies that could account for their peculiar facial features. Furthermore, prenatal alcohol exposure may