Who wrote the novel 'The Grapes of Wrath'?

John Steinbeck wrote the novel The Grapes of Wrath.

Published in 1939, the novel follows the Joad family, tenant farmers forced from Oklahoma during the Great Depression by drought, economic hardship, mechanization, and bank foreclosures. Their westward journey to California exposes the exploitation and insecurity faced by thousands of Dust Bowl migrants.

Steinbeck drew on his reporting about migrant labor, including a series of 1936 newspaper articles later known as The Harvest Gypsies. The novel quickly became a national event: it was praised by many readers, attacked by critics who objected to its politics, and even banned or burned in some communities. It won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and it helped establish Steinbeck as one of America’s major novelists.

The title is often mistaken for a purely biblical phrase. Steinbeck’s title echoes Julia Ward Howe’s “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” which itself draws on imagery from the Book of Revelation. The phrase captures the novel’s themes of injustice, anger, solidarity, and hoped-for collective action.