What was the title of John Steinbeck's 1940 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel?

The Grapes of Wrath was John Steinbeck’s 1940 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel.

Published in 1939, the novel follows the Joad family as they leave Oklahoma during the Dust Bowl and travel to California in search of work. Their journey reflects the displacement of many farming families during the Great Depression, when drought, debt, bank foreclosures, and mechanization transformed rural life.

Steinbeck combines the Joads’ personal story with broader chapters describing economic exploitation and migrant labor. The book’s title comes from “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” whose lyrics refer to “the grapes of wrath.”

The novel won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1940 and helped establish Steinbeck as a major American novelist. It is sometimes confused with Of Mice and Men, another Steinbeck work about economic hardship, but that novella did not win the fiction Pulitzer.