The Grapes of Wrath — John Steinbeck

The Pulitzer Prize -- winning epic of the Great Depression, a book that galvanized -- and sometimes outraged -- millions of readers

At once naturalistic epic, captivity narrative, rood novel, and transcendental gospel, Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath is perhaps the most American of American classics. Although it follows the movement of thousands of men and women and the transformation of on entire nation during the Dust Bowl migration of the 1930s, The Grapes of Wroth is also the story of one Oklahoma farm family, the Joads, who are driven off their homestead and forced to travel west to the promised land of California. From their trials and their repeated collisions against the hard realities of this new America, Steinbeck creates a drama that is intensely human yet majestic in its scale and moral vision, tragic but ultimately stirring in its insistence on human dignity.