The Grapes Of Wrath

The Grapes Of Wrath

Introduction

John Steinbeck wrote a series of newspaper stories for the San Francisco News that Steinbeck used as the basis for his novel, The Grapes of Wrath. To obtain information for his work, Steinbeck visited the labor camps of rural California. John Steinbeck was able to see the living and working conditions of farm workers. John Steinbeck did not like the conditions and situations he saw in the labor camps he visited. These same situations found their way into The Grapes of Wrath. Steinbeck was able to present a very realistic view of labor camps that were based on these real life scenarios (Sternsher and Judith, 1990).

Discussion

The book Grapes of Wrath is a very interesting story about the great depression in which occurred about half a century ago by the famous author, John Steinbeck. The preconceptions I had before reading this book was that the author was going to tells exactly how the dust bowl of the 1950's affected the grapes in America because I knew that during this time there was a huge drought in the America and windstorms killing farms. I enjoyed reading this book because it told me about the hard times people face during the dust bowl. The thing that motivated me to read to the end was the fact that I wanted to know how the Joads family would come out at the end from their struggle. My initial impression of the work's purpose was informative, I learned how people were being mistreated in the 1950's if you came from another state to California to look for a job and the hardship of workers that lost everything and traveled all the way to California to find out there are not that much jobs there to find. The book was fairly easy to read but I did have some words I needed to look up the definition of. The impression I received at the beginning of the book didn't change as I finished the whole story. This was because the author made clear about how the family had problems from place to place they went.

The type of literary style the author Steinbeck uses is in “nonfiction prose,” it includes travel history and history of the farmer's journey of loosing homes, moving with their whole family on a long treacherous trip, their mistreatment from being outsiders, having to do labor for very low wages and loosing family members due to starvation and the suffering during the great depression. Steinbeck uses imagery to show the reader what the times were really like and allows the reader to put themselves right in the situation that the farmers and their families are in. The author also uses the element of language which helps with the set up of the novel because most of the novel is conversations between the characters. The easy vocabulary of the book helps the reader really understand what is going on. The situation where Ma is yelling at everyone to ...