The Grapes of Wrath, the best-known novel by John Steinbeck, published in 1939. It evokes the harshness of the Great Depression and arouses sympathy for the struggles of migrant farmworkers. The book came to be regarded as an American classic.

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.

Lesson Summary John Steinbeck’s classic novel The Grapes of Wrath was intended to personalize the injustice dealt to many migrants on the road during the Great Depression. Steinbeck succeeded in raising awareness, which became the impetus for political activist movements.

Steinbeck’s writing style, as displayed in The Grapes of Wrath, takes readers on a front seat ride through the Dust Bowl, Great Depression and the struggles of people during the time. Through his prose, he creates tones of passion, anger, sadness and desperation, which helps to realistically convey the story.

The sentence that best explains the significance of the novel’s title, The Grapes of Wrath, is D. Steinbeck describes the migrants’ anger as “fermenting”. The Grapes of Wrath (1939) tells the story of the Joads, a poor family of farmers that leave their home in Oklahoma in search for a better life.

Terms in this set (10)

• Anaphora: Also called enanaphora.
• Apposition: The addition or application of one thing to another thing.
• Simile: A figure of speech in which two unlike things are explicitly compared, as in “she is like a rose.”.
• Asyndeton: Rhetoric.
• Personification:
• Parallelism:
• Polysyndeton:
• Alliteration:

Casy’s song reflects the character’s distrust of organized religion. Combining a popular melody with religious lyrics, the song becomes a parody. Casy deliberately exaggerated the devotional in order to make fun of organized religion, the Bible, and the image of the upright priest.

Banks as Monsters in The Grapes of Wrath We would also come to understand that Steinbeck depicts banks as monsters, because he sees them as an evil which feeds on the misfortune of farmers and land owners. Instead of feeding on brains, the bank monsters feed on the labor, payments, and taxes of tenets and land owners.

A hand plow, which has been rendered useless by the tractor, fetches only fifty cents for the weight of the metal. The tenants caution the buyers that they are not merely buying equipment but also bitterness: “You’re not buying only junk, you’re buying junked lives.