The next morning, Tom and Casy go to Uncle John's. They have moved away, but Muley refuses to leave the area. Graves says the banks have evicted all the farmers. Disconcerted and confused, Tom and Casy meet an old neighbor, Muley Graves, who says the family is at Uncle John Joad's home nearby. Arriving at Tom's childhood farm home, they find it deserted. While hitchhiking to his home near Sallisaw, Oklahoma, Tom meets former preacher Jim Casy, whom he remembers from his childhood, and the two travel together. The narrative begins just after Tom Joad is paroled from McAlester prison, where he had been incarcerated after being convicted of homicide in self-defense. A celebrated Hollywood film version, starring Henry Fonda and directed by John Ford, was released in 1940. The Grapes of Wrath is frequently read in American high school and college literature classes due to its historical context and enduring legacy. Due to their nearly hopeless situation, and in part because they are trapped in the Dust Bowl, the Joads set out for California along with thousands of other ' Okies' seeking jobs, land, dignity, and a future. Set during the Great Depression, the novel focuses on the Joads, a poor family of tenant farmers driven from their Oklahoma home by drought, economic hardship, agricultural industry changes, and bank foreclosures forcing tenant farmers out of work. The book won the National Book Award Īnd Pulitzer Prize for fiction, and it was cited prominently when Steinbeck was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1962. The Grapes of Wrath is an American realist novel written by John Steinbeck and published in 1939.

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