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 Family (Shimazaki novel) The Family (Shimazaki novel) The Family is a Japanese novel written by Tōson Shimazaki, first serialized in 1910–11 under the title "Ie" (家). This autobiographical novel deals with the disintegration of two provincial families, the Koizumis and the Hashimotos. "The Family" covers a period of twelve years in the lives of the Koizumi and the Hashimoto families, from 1898 to 1910. (These two families are based on the real-life families of Shimazaki and Takase: one was Tōson's own family and the other the family into which his eldest sister married.) Originally well respected, the families find themselves slipping down the