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. First published in 1939, Steinbeck's Pulitzer Prize-winning epic of the Great Depression chronicles the Dust Bowl migration of the 1930s and tells the story of one Oklahoma farm family, the Joads--driven from their homestead and forced to travel west to the promised land of California. Out of their trials and their repeated collisions against the hard realities of an America divided into Haves and Have-Nots evolves a drama that is intensely human yet majestic in its scale and moral vision, elemental yet plainspoken, tragic but ultimately stirring in its human dignity. 
 
A portrait of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless, of one man's fierce reaction to injustice, and of one woman's stoical strength, the novel captures the horrors of the Great Depression and probes into the very nature of equality and justice in America. At once a naturalistic epic, captivity narrative, road novel, and transcendental gospel, Steinbeck's powerful landmark novel is perhaps the most American of American Classics. 
 
John Steinbeck, Jr. (1902 - 1968) was an American writer best known for the novel Grapes of Wrath, for which he won a Pullitzer Prize, and the novella Of Mice and Men. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962. 
 
Despite his literary success, Steinbeck remains a controversial author, due to anti-captialist themes in Of Mice and Men and Grapes of Wrath, and his books have been banned from various schools and libraries since their publication. Other notable Steinbeck works include East of Eden (1952), Travels with Charley (1960), and In Dubious Battle (1936).