Why Is The Grapes Of Wrath A Disastrous Drought

To quote Ma Joad in the film The Grapes of Wrath, “I ain 't never gonna be scared no more. I was, though. For a while it looked as though we was beat. Good and beat. Looked like we didn 't have nobody in the whole wide world but enemies. Like nobody was friendly no more. Made me feel kinda bad and scared too, like we was lost and nobody cared....Rich fellas come up and they die, and their kids ain’t no good and they die out. But we keep a comin’, we’re the people that live. They can’t wipe us out; they can’t lick us. We’ll go on forever Pa, ‘cause we’re the people.” This statement captures the resilience of the American working class since the birth of the country. Ma 's speech can be read as a proclamation of necessary fictions to bolster the morale of the family. She is the uncomplaining maintainer of status quo in the home, the ultimate mother figure who not only attends to physical needs, but mental needs as well.

One year later after the novel was published, the movie was born – 1940 it became a drama film. “In an old truck, 34-year-old newspaper reporter John Steinbeck traveled throughout his native state of California and talked with people who had fled the Dust Bowl” (Watson 1). In the 1930s, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Wyoming, Nebraska, Southeastern Colorado, Southwest Kansas, panhandle of Oklahoma, and Texas were the driest region of the Plain, which was affected by the Dust Bowl. The Grapes of Wrath was during the great depression in the dust bowl; it was about the adventure of a man who named Joad. Joad was a prisoner and had been returning home from jail. Joad, Casey (a former preacher who Joad met on the road he returned home) and his family released his own plain in Oklahoma State when he realized that all around the farm were the desert. The living of farmers became more and more hardship. There were nothing to eat, nothing to plant, hard to breath, and the market had exhausted by the wind of dust. Cause he did not seem like another who just stayed at the dead place and face

Steinbeck exploits a disturbing and melancholy tone in The Grapes of Wrath in order to describe the desolation and destitution of California, once the Joad family arrives. A majority of the novel supports Steinbeck’s disturbing tone, especially with the novel set during the Great Depression; moreover, the setting of the novel proves parallel with Steinbeck’s disturbing tone. Many families traveled to California in attempts to begin a better life; however, many of the migrants discovered that California’s lifestyle did not meet any of the expectation many of the families had. The poverty, low wages, and unemployment that the Okies faced in California proved disappointing, and Steinbeck continually illustrates the struggles the Okies face to

In the year of 1939, the Great Depression affected the lives of many located within the United States. This was a severe, and most widespread depression which affected people across the world. For the reason that there was a fall of the stock market, a drought ravaged the agricultural heartland. Those who were dependent on their farmland to provide for their families became imposed by coercion to retreat and re-locate their entire families. This migration was a struggle during this period because the lack of resources and money to survive. Among other elements, starvation and homelessness caused many to die at an early age. John Steinbeck's, The Grapes of Wrath, exhibits the Joad's, a family who undergoes the collapse of the agrarian

Source 1- The Dust Bowl is a popular name for the approximately 388,500-km2 (150,000-mi2) area that includes the Oklahoma and Texas panhandles and adjacent parts of Colorado, New Mexico, and Kansas. The area is characterized by light soil, a low annual rainfall of 380 mm (15 in), and high winds. The federal government replanted grass, planted trees, and introduced scientific agricultural methods; as a result, farming became possible again. The Dust Bowl endured other, less severe droughts in the 1950s and '60s. The migration and hardships of the Dust Bowl farmers are described in John Steinbeck's novel The Grapes of Wrath (1939).

    The Dust bowl was an ecological and human disaster in the Southwestern Great Plains regions of the United States in the 1930's. The areas affected were Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, and Colorado. The poor handling of the land and years of drought caused this great disaster (Jones "History"). During this time the "Okies"--a name given to the migrants that traveled from Oklahoma, Texas, Kansas, or anywhere in the Southwest or the northern plains to California--encountered many hardships. These hardships are brilliantly shown in John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath. Scholars agree, "The most important fact about the dust storms was not scientific but human: their tragic effect

The movie does not discuss in depth the vast significance of this route. On the other hand, Chapter 12 of the novel describes how Route 66 is a river of immigrants. This interchapter explains how the thousands traveling Route 66 are refugees from the troubles in the East, giving a better description of the time period. Finally, the movie never describes in depth the economic situation of California during the 1930's. In the movie, the story ends leaving the viewer with the image of California as a land of prosperity. However, the novel attacks the economic situation of California with rage in Chapter 25. In this interchapter, Steinbeck describes how a surplus can make prices so low that the farmers have no income, or how the supply of farm goods can be so scarce that the goods are priced too high to sale. This situation plagues California, and farmers are thrown in poverty. This chapter shows how California is not a safe haven for farmers, but a harsh, devouring environment. The interchapters in the novel form of Grapes of Wrath describe in detail the time period of the storyline, while the movie leaves the spectators unaware of the actual situation of the migrant farmers in the 1930's.

One of America’s most beloved books is John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. The book portrays a family, the Joads, who leave Oklahoma and move to California in search of a more prosperous life. Steinbeck’s book garnered acclaim both from critics and from the American public. The story struck a chord with the American people because Steinbeck truly captured the angst and heartbreak of those directly impacted by the Dust Bowl disaster. To truly comprehend the havoc the Dust Bowl wreaked, one must first understand how and why the Dust Bowl took place and who it affected the most. The Dust Bowl was the result of a conglomeration of weather, falling crop prices, and government policies.

The Grapes of Wrath is a historical and fictional novel that was written by John Steinbeck in 1939. He wanted to show his point of view of life in US during the years of Great Depression. This essay will talk about the lifestyle the public had during that time which dramatically changed conditions that the environment in we stern part of US had.

The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck, pays homage to the critical impact the Great Depression had on dust bowl farmers. The growing demand for wheat products forced farmers to overgraze their property. This reduced the overall usefulness and biodiversity of the land, and attributed to the desertification of their establishments. With this, the once lush fields turned to dust, which blew away with the commencement of the severe drought in the early 1930s. Steinbeck utilizes the lives of the Joad family to depict how farmers were often forced to flee their homes in search of better jobs during this time period. Because of the stock market’s demise, no one was purchasing their crops. Banks were required to drive farmers out of their homes, as they could not afford to keep supporting them without profit. The agricultural devastation of the Dust Bowl intensified the economical impact of the Great Depression and added to the misery of the migrant workers.

The States of Colorado, New Mexico, Nebraska, Texas, Arkansas, Kansas, and Oklahoma was hit by a terrible drought that was known as Dust Bowl in 1930s to 1940s. The Dust Bowl made the farmer families in this affected States not able to pay their debts and so the government and bank closed the family farm. The movie “The Grape of Wrath” directed by John Ford depicts the life of a family from Oklahoma that was affected by the Dust Bowl in 1930-1940. The family left Oklahoma and moved to California which they call the promise land but when they got to California starvation, poverty, and injustice welcomed them. The Dust Bowl in 1930s and 1940s made the people’s lives miserable and made the whole country suffer.

The 1930s were a time of hardship for many across the United States. Not only was the Great Depression making it difficult for families to eat every day, but the Dust Bowl swept through the plains states making it nearly impossible to farm the land in which they relied. John Steinbeck saw how the Dust Bowl affected farmers, primarily the tenant farmers, and journeyed to California after droves of families. These families were dispossessed from the farms they had worked for years, if not generations (Mills 388). Steinbeck was guided by Tom Collins, the real-life model for the Weedpatch camp’s manager Jim Rawley, through one of the federal migrant worker camps. He was able to see for himself,

The "dirty thirties," as many called it, was a time when the earth ran amok in southern plains for the better part of a decade. This great American tragedy, which was more devastating environmentally as well as economically than anything in America's past or present, painstakingly tested the spirit of the southern plainsmen. The proud folks of the south refused at first to accept government help, optimistically believing that better days were ahead. Some moved out of the plains, running from not only drought but from the new machine-controlled agriculture. As John Steinbeck wrote in the bestseller The Grapes of Wrath, "it was not nature that broke the people-they could handle the drought. It was business farming, seeking a better return on land investments and buying tractors to pursue it, that had broken these people, smashing their identity as natural beings wedded to the land."(pg. 58) The machines, one-crop specialization, non-resident farming, and soil abuse were tangible threats to the American agriculture, but it was the capitalistic economic values behind these land exploitations that drove the plainsmen from their land and created the Dust Bowl.

The devastating effects of the dust storms mainly in western Oklahoma and the preceding rain failure caused families to flee to California. The banks repossession for their property and homes pushes them further into depression. Unguaranteed about a better future or even about the next meal, the families take their chances. Their arrival into California is however a disappointment as there are no jobs for them. Most ‘okies’ in the Hovervilles end up dead due to starvation as they can’t find work. This highlights the plight of many families that had to struggle in a foreign city for Survival. The unfriendly weather is blamed for the atrocities that befall this community. There are social and economic

The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck uses numerous literary techniques to advocate for change in the social and political attitudes of the Dust Bowl era. Simile, personification, and imagery are among the many devices that add to the novel’s ability to influence the audience’s views. Moreover, through his use of detail, Steinbeck is able to develop a strong bond between the reader and the Joad clan. This bond that is created evokes empathy from the audience towards the Joads as they face numerous challenges along their journey. The chapters go between the Joad’s story and a broad perspective of the Dust Bowl’s effect on the lives of Mid-western farmers in which Steinbeck illustrates dust storms devastating the land, banks evicting tenant