Out Of The Dust Analysis

The dust bowl was a tragic time in America for so many families and John Steinbeck does a great job at getting up-close and personal with one family to show these tragedies. In the novel, “The Grapes of Wrath”, John Steinbeck employed a variety of rhetorical devices, such as asyndeton, personification and simile, in order to persuade his readers to enact positive change from the turmoil of the Great Depression. Throughout the novel, Steinbeck tells the fictional narrative of Tom Joad and his family, while exploring social issues and the hardships of families who had to endure the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression. Steinbeck’s purpose was to challenge readers to look at

Daughters of the dust revolves around an early 20th century African American family from Ibo Landing which is a time not shy of racism and slavery, especially in middle America. The scene depicted in the movie where a young girl is running through the forest in an all-white dress with a blue ribbon who seems to be being followed by a man in a hide and seek manor. The young girl disappears and the man stumbles upon a plot of land that is a graveyard, with headstones made from wooden planks, the man observes his surroundings. Presumably, this girl in white is the young voice narrating the next scene which pans through steam over to a flash back of the ancestors who were slaves. We look across a field of men and women who are working over these steaming wells, as well as the people in the background hanging soaked sheets up to dry. We see these people mixing over a steaming hole in the ground scraping around a grey paste. The workers then begin to pull the paste out of the steaming pits and scrape it into wooden molds. They appear to be making cement blocks as a young boy watches and older man collect all the wooden brick molds and systematically knocks the brick from the mold and piles them orderly on both his left as well as his right. While doing so he sings an old hymn, the boy seems to enjoy watching this process. Throughout the entire scene, there is a narration of a girl which speaks

The main idea is that the dust is getting stronger and impacting more. First of all, The dust is killing all the crops. So now Billie Joe and her family are getting not enough crops and the amount they do bring in does not get the amount of money they need to live. Also, Billie Joe got a job with Arley. That shows that Billie Joe’s family is really struggling and that they need the cash to move along with the dust. Lastly, all the banks were closing. That shows that people really need the money and can't afford to live on their own anymore. The dust is getting worse and harsher, so Billie Joe's family needs to be on their toes to keep up with the dust.

Hayden was born on August 4, 1913. His parents separated before that, and he spent most of his time in foster care. Hayden was interested in reading which helped him to became a good writer. After high school in 1932, he received a scholarship to the Detroit City College (now Wayne State University). In addition, in 1936, he finished his degree and became interested in African-American history and culture. Robert was very interested in writing as a poet when he was a child. However, in 1940, he began her career as a poet, and he published his first anthology: Heart-Shape in the Dust. Moreover, Robert got married to Erma Inez and converted to her religion. In 1944, he graduated from Michigan with master degree,

The printed work of the Dust Bowl written by Donald Worster tells of the devastating man-made events that occurred between 1929 and 1939. Worster described this time in history as the darkest moment life in the southern plains encountered in the twentieth-century (4) which was a time where drought, poverty, and famine were of concern. Worster also ties the Great Depression with the Dust Bowl and said that the same society produced them both because of the weakness of America (5). He strongly believes that the Dust Bowl was not a disaster created by nature, but a crisis created by man due to capitalism. Dust Bowl gives a powerful stance on how man ignored the limits of the land which led them into the dirty thirties; however, his beliefs cause him to disregard the disaster as the fault of nature, and specifically blamed man.

The high temperatures, high and fierce winds and the drought caused the disastrous dust storms that scraped the Earth bare. Withering plants scattered across the plains and livestock suffocated by the dust, all gone in an instant. These storms were huge, rolling clouds of dust, that would go on for hours, sometimes even days. The storms were so powerful that even the best protection people could make, was still not enough to avoid the storm’s powerful strength. To reduce the dust coming in, people would use a paste of flour and water; dip strips of cloth into the mixture, and seal cracks in the house.

People of Oklahoma are lucky to escape the grasp of Valley Fever, a plague the Dust Bowl is notorious for. As for families and their farms, the livestock would suffocate from the blowing dust. Corn stocks are blown over and have the covering of tiny golden nuggets, draining any means of life. Oklahoma life was growing to be unfathomable for the Joads. Farmers remain reluctant to make profit on their land, and put all their finances into it. Steinbeck describes the farmers to put “blood, sweat, and tears into the land.” (31). Farmers were in debt to the corn, in order to be able to live on the farm. "In an effort to save the farms, landowners begin planting cotton instead of corn, even though cotton is water hungry, and will drain what water is left in the soil", As Jennier Vanburen stats from her article in Demand Media. Only one of the crops are able to grow amidst the dust, that it cotton. Steinbeck presents that all the farmers have the knowledge that cotton would swallow their farm land dry. With the nature’s unstable wind,dust tearing the fertile land, and unstable funds. The monster is the symbolization to describe the affects of the Great Depression and Dust Bowl on the people of Oklahoma.

Egan also describes the physical effects of the Dust Bowl, in which many children and weak adults suffered, from diseases such as dust pneumonia, livestock’s insides were packed with soil, thus blocking their stomachs and so they died of starvation. People couldn’t hug or even hand shake because the static electricity was enough to knock someone down. He also described the way of life they had, in which in order for dust to not leak into houses, they had to seal cracks around the windows and the door with wet sheets, and however the next day they still had to throw away the soil with a shovel. In order to discharge the static electricity in cars, they had to trail chains. Many were affected economically when they started losing their savings; banks, schools, and businesses closed. Black Sunday, on April 14, 1935, became the worst dust storm ever witnessed. Egan describes the story of a man who was lost in this storm; he became blind for the rest of his life. Temperature raised up to 141 degrees, such weather increased the population of rabbits, grasshoppers, tarantulas, and black widows. These insects were killed with boiled water and, “on Sundays, a mob of people with clubs herded rabbits into a corral and smashed their skulls.” Egan shows a similarity between the homesteaders’ thirst for extreme harvest and the grasshoppers devouring the rest of what was left in the plains,

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 Dust Bowl, a series of severe dust storms in the 1930’s, left the southern plains of the United States as a wasteland. The storms occurred due to the lack of use of dryland farming techniques to prevent wind erosion. Powerful winds would pick up loose soil and carry the sediment around the countryside. Called “black blizzard” or “black rollers”, these storms had the potential to black out the sky completely. Due to the inability to grow and sell crops, banks evicted families and foreclosed their properties, leaving them homeless and without an income. The author of The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck, wrote his American realist novel to allow readers to understand the experiences of the migrants from the Dust Bowl era. Not many

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 text structure that the author used was cause and effect. The reason that I think this is because many events lead up to the dust storm that don't cause it but some of them explain what could have caused it.Throughout the book they also show examples about how it took one girl's life and spun it around like a Ferris wheel. For example in the story the author makes one statement that said "But now,sorrow climbs up our front steps, big as Texas, and we didn't even see it coming, even though it'd been making its way straight for us all along." if you look deep into this statement you can pick out that they were feeling as if they were blind.It was like she was a owl that could see at night and knew that something was coming for her but she

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

The clock buzzes four thirty in the morning as I continue pouring over the same biology textbook as I had been all night. My attention span has been incinerated due to exhaustion, and my eyes slowly drift to the white desk I’ve been sitting at for hours. That’s when I see it: dust. I am filled with an inexplicable sense of awareness as my mind is consumed completely by the thought of dust.

Dust, written by Judith Wright, discusses the concepts of a destroyed, empty world and a mother reflecting on the days when the “Earth was kinder”. Through her poem she shows the audience her fears for the world and how the world will become barren and “sick” if the environment is not cared for. This is typical of Judith Wright, with environmental themes central to many of her poems. The emotive responses that are evoked while reading this poem are extremely strong. A great sadness is experienced as she describes the barren new word and contrasts it to the previous one. To convey the moral of this poem Wright has employed many different literary and poetic techniques. These range over three major categories, imagery, structure and