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
To Make My Bread To Make My Bread To Make My Bread is a novel written by Grace Lumpkin about the Loray Mill Strike. It was published in 1932. Lumpkin chronicles the McClures, a family of poor Appalachian tenant farmers, during the industrialization of the south. Released in the heart of the Great Depression, the story takes the McClures to the mill town of Leesville, North Carolina, after their land was taken by a logging corporation. Soon after their optimistic arrival induced by economic conditions, they find the worst is yet to come as they endure a new, challenging life of being a part