A Different Light on The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

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John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath captures a facet of American history, but it does not truly explain the horrors of the 1930’s Dust Bowl. It had extreme short term effects along with a few long term effects on the terrain and the lives of the people impacted by it. It is such a terrible disaster that one could publish a full sized encyclopedia volume on the many hardships of the people living in the Dust Bowl and those who moved away when they were foreclosed upon. There are so many causes of so many different factors of the Dust Bowl that it can only truly be told as a grizzly horror story.
Although The Grapes of Wrath focused on the migrants, it still shows the Dust Bowl and how it affected the lives of so many people; therefore, to truly understand the problem, one must look at its roots. It started with the Enlarged Homestead act of 1909. The government wanted people to start expanding farmlands out west (Burmester). When the first people to till the land came, they didn’t realize that there were long periods of alternating rain and drought that could last for years. There were promoters from banks advertising that the land as an amazing place to live and own land and they put out pictures of watermelons the size of small cars, basketball sized grapes, hulking ears of corn, and cotton bolls the size of large boulders. The promoters said that it was a “garden of Eden. If only they would have the courage to go out challenge the land. The people went, claimed their land, and started work. The first years were bountiful. New technology comes with every era and soon tractors came out in the 1920’s and could plow up to fifty acres a day (Chana). Bankers came to the Great Plains. “Suitcase farmers” they were called. The suitcase ...

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...ot to the publisher, Steinbeck had published The Grapes of Wrath and the publisher had to refuse her novel because of Steinbeck’s novel’s success. Two novels of the same subject on the market would not have sold as well. Babb’s novel was eventually published in 2004, a year before she died (Burns).
The drought did eventually end and new farming practices helped the people of the southern plains reclaim their land, though the Dust bowl left a lasting imprint on society as we see it today. The facet of the Dust Bowl captured by The Grapes of Wrath was terrible indeed, but some of the realities were more terrible and gruesome.

Works Cited
Burmester, Charles. Interview. Personal interview. 23 April 2014.
Steinbeck, John. The Grapes of Wrath. New York: Penguin Classics, 1992.
Surviving the Dust Bowl. By Gazit Chana. 1997. DVD.
The Dust Bowl. Dir. Ken Burns. 2012. DVD.

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