John Steinbeck The Grapes Of Wrath Analysis

John Steinbeck was born in Salinas, California, on February 27, 1902. He attended Stanford University without graduating, and though he lived briefly in New York, he remained a lifelong Californian. Steinbeck began writing novels in 1929, but he garnered little commercial or critical success until the publication of Tortilla Flat in 1935. Steinbeck frequently used his fiction to delve into the lives of society’s most downtrodden citizens. A trio of novels in the late 1930s focused on the lives of migrant workers in California: In Dubious Battle, published in 1936, was followed by Of Mice and Men in 1937, and, in 1939, Steinbeck’s masterpiece, The Grapes of Wrath.

During the early 1930s, a severe drought led to massive agricultural failure in parts of the southern Great Plains, particularly throughout western Oklahoma and the Texas panhandle. These areas had been heavily overcultivated by wheat farmers in the years following World War I and were covered with millions of acres of loose, exposed topsoil. In the absence of rain, crops withered and died; the topsoil, no longer anchored by growing roots, was picked up by the winds and carried in billowing clouds across the region. Huge dust storms blew across

However, in writing his novel, Steinbeck attempted not only to describe the plight of migrant workers during the Depression but also to offer a pointed criticism of the policies that had caused that plight. In light of this goal, Steinbeck’s characters often emerge as idealized archetypes or epic heroes; rather than using them to explore the individual human psyche, the author presents them as embodiments of universal ideals or struggles. Thus, the novel stands as a chronicle of the Depression and as a commentary on the economic and social system that gave rise to