“We ain’t gonna die out. People is going’ on – changin’ a little, maybe, but goin’ right on.”
In November of 1933, a vast dust cloud rose over an area stretching from Texas to the Great Plains, the beginning of an ecological disaster that would blacken the sky all the way to Chicago. Over the next five years, the Dust bowl forced thousands of Americans to take to the road in search of work.
John Steinbeck, witnessing the bleak conditions in the California migrant camps, resolved to write a “big book,” chronicling the ordeal of the displaced and disenfranchised. That book was The Grapes of Wrath, his most celebrated and controversial novel, a national bestseller and winner of the 1939 Pulitzer Prize. Browse our current inventory.