The 1940 film version of The Grapes of Wrath was deemed too depressing by some movie-goers even though director John Ford added inspiring monologues by Ma and Tom Joad.

What provoked him? Unfairness and complacency are at least part of the answer. When the soil in the Great Plains grasslands literally dried up and blew away in a seven-year drought that began in 1931, many ranchers and workers were especially hard hit. Middle and upper class Americans seemed content to ignore the plight of poor and politically frail people.

Making the trek from the Midwest to California was not an easy undertaking. In The Grapes of Wrath, the Joads flee conditions in the "Dust Bowl" to make the difficult journey to the Pacific West. Kicked off their land and beaten down by hardships on their way, the Joads rely on spiritual strength. Steinbeck creates this family as the archetypal dispossessed and displaced American farm family.

John Steinbeck, author of The Grapes of Wrath, won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962.

Things aren't any easier in California. It didn't turn out to be the "promised land" that the Joads and real-life Okies anticipated. The cities were grueling and the pitiful "ditchbank" camps where they had to live offered no relief. Truth be told, the Great Depression had ravaged the economy; finding work and feeding one's family were nearly impossible.

Steinbeck was disturbed that migrant workers, ranchers, and farmers had to persevere through so many hardships. His heart went out to all people suffering under historical, cultural, and environmental conditions they could not control. Whether they were the victims of active discrimination or simply displaced by natural forces, such as climate and weather, Steinbeck was passionate about their plight.

Steinbeck described the natural dignity of the Okies: "Because they were all lonely and perplexed, because they had all come from a place of sadness and worry and defeat, and because they were all going to a new mysterious place, they huddled together, they shared their lives ... in the evening a strange thing happened: the twenty families became one family."

Children were among the hundreds of thousands fleeing the Dust Bowl in the 1930s.

Here, then, was the possible solution to enduring an increasingly selfish society: respect for the power of community.

The Grapes of Wrath reveals, through spotlighting one humble family's fight against all types of physical, social, and economic adversity, an appreciation for gaining strength through deprivation. One moral message, drawn from Old and New Testament symbolism in the novel, is that long-suffering instills a dignity and consciousness into life. There can be optimism in the midst of cruelty — people may rise above it, even if they cannot escape it.

There was dissension, of course. As with any unveiling of social exploitation and discrimination that the typical American did not want to see or acknowledge, some found The Grapes of Wrath too full of exaggeration, subversion, socialist propaganda, and inaccuracies. Many others, however, were happy to see it receive the Pulitzer Prize.

Steinbeck's study of migrant workers traveling from Oklahoma to California between 1937 and 1939 had shown him first-hand experience of the dashed hopes and expectations of laborers just trying to get by. The gentleness and beauty of the novel's unfolding narrative illustrates the heartfelt sympathy Steinbeck had for these noble yet downtrodden people, while arousing compassion for their way of life.

The novel achieves its purpose. It is a distinctly social, political, and historical American text that holds the readers' eyes wide open while moving them to tears when they least expect it.

	The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quicklime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is a failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.

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Farms that had to be abandoned because of draught were an all too common sight during the time in which John Steinbeck set The Grapes of Wrath.

Today, in an era when hype and publicity surround everything competing for our attention, it may be hard to appreciate Steinbeck's refusal to publicize his book, insisting that the story had to stand on its own power. He also refused to tone down the language or the politics to make it more acceptable. "I've never changed a word to fit the prejudices of a group and I never will," he wrote boldly.

Although banned and burned, The Grapes of Wrath did stand on its own merit as a bestseller, proving its message prevailed regardless of persecution. And, for every negative response, each positive review hailed the novel as a sincere protest written with great humanity and compassion — precisely what Steinbeck was hoping to achieve.

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