About the author
John Steinbeck was an American novelist and Nobel laureate closely associated with California. His fiction follows laborers, migrants, families, and outsiders while joining plainspoken sympathy to anger at economic arrangements that make suffering routine.
The Joads are tenant farmers in Oklahoma when the drought and the banks take their land. They pack the family — Pa and Ma, the grandparents, the pregnant Rose of Sharon, Uncle John, and Tom, just out of prison — into a converted truck and head west on Route 66, drawn by handbills promising work in California.
Where to start
Start with The Grapes of Wrath. The Joad family loses its Oklahoma farm and joins the migration to California, where the promised land turns out to be a trap.
