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
A Death in the Family aired in 2002. Samuel Barber wrote "Knoxville: Summer of 1915" (1947, revised 1950) on commission from the American soprano Eleanor Steber, who had asked for a work for soprano with orchestra. William Mayer wrote an opera based on the novel; it premiered in 1983. A Death in the Family A Death in the Family is an autobiographical novel by author James Agee, set in Knoxville, Tennessee. He began writing it in 1948, but it was not quite complete when he died in 1955 (with reputedly many portions having been written in the home of his friend Frances Wickes). It was