Book of the Week. Episode 9. John Steinbeck. The Grapes of Wrath
...A man in his thirties walks along a dusty road through the cornfields of Oklahoma. This is Tom Joad. After serving time in prison for an accidental murder, he is returning home to his farm. He is being released early and therefore is not allowed to leave the state. The large Joad family is supposed to be waiting for him at the farm: his grandparents, his father, his mother, three brothers, and two sisters. Along the way, Tom meets former Jehovah's Witness preacher Jim Casey. They continue on together. But Tom doesn't yet know that the farmers are being evicted from their land...
The work of American writer John Steinbeck is a notable chapter in world literature. Steinbeck is a winner of the Pulitzer and Nobel Prizes.
After the publication of his novel "The Grapes of Wrath," Theodore Dreiser called its author one of "the most talented prose writers of our generation."
In the late 1930s, many central states of the United States suffered from a severe drought and dust storms. Thousands of ruined farmers and tenant farmers fled their homelands, and a wave of settlers literally swept across thriving California. This "migration of peoples," with all its attendant dramas and hardships, the Joad family's difficult journey to California, their resilience and courage, was captured by John Steinbeck in his finest novel.