Classics, United States, Literary, Literature 

An epic story of the nineteen-thirties' Depression which traces the story of one destitute family among the thousands who fled the Dust Bowl to the promise of California, THE GRAPES OF WRATH awakened the conscience of a nation. 

Publisher Comments
Today, nearly forty years after his death, Nobel Prize winner John Steinbeck remains one of America's greatest writers and cultural figures. Over the next year, his many works published as black-spine Penguin Classics for the first time and will feature eye-catching, newly commissioned art.
Of this initial group of six titles, The Grapes of Wrath is in a new edition with a completely revised introduction and, for the first time, detailed notes by leading Steinbeck scholar Robert DeMott.

Penguin Classics is proud to present these seminal works to a new generation of readersand to the many who revisit them again and again.

Review
"Steinbeck's best novel." Time Magazine
Review
"Steinbeck has written a novel from the depths of his heart with a sincerity seldom equaled." The New York Times Book Review
Review
"The first book I remember that really grabbed me was a book that Miss McGuffey made us read, a book called Tortilla Flat by Steinbeck. When I read it, I really enjoyed the book. So I went to her and said,'I like this.' She was shocked that I would show any interest in what she was making us do. So she said, okay, read this. The next one was, Of Mice and Men. So she sort of fed the Steinbeck books to me. When I read The Grapes of Wrath — we saved that for last — I knew that was a very powerful book. I don't know if it had anything to do with my writing style, or me as a writer, because I wasn't thinking about it back then. It had a lot to do with the way I viewed humanity and the struggles of little people against big people. It was a very important book for me." John Grisham
Synopsis
One of the greatest and most socially significant novels of the twentieth century, Steinbeck's controversial masterpiece indelibly captured America during the Great Depression through the story of one Oklahoma farm family, the Joads.
Intensely human yet majestic in its scale and moral vision, tragic but ultimately stirring in its insistence on human dignity, The Grapes of Wrath (1939) is not only a landmark American novel, but it is as well an extraordinary moment in the history of our national conscience.


About the Author
Born in 1902 in Salinas, California, John Steinbeck attended Stanford University before working at a series of mostly blue-collar jobs and embarking on his literary career. Profoundly committed to social progress, he used his writing to raise issues of labor exploitation and the plight of the common man, penning some of the greatest American novels of the twentieth century and winning such prestigious awards as the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. He received the Nobel Prize in 1962, "for his realistic and imaginative writings, combining as they do sympathetic humour and keen social perception." Today, more than thirty years after his death, he remains one of America's greatest writers and cultural figures. 

Material Type: Fiction
Document Type: Book
All Authors / Contributors: John Steinbeck; Brad Leithauser

ISBN: 1857151542 9781857151541
OCLC Number: 490539170
Awards: Winner of Pulitzer Prize Novel Category 1940
Runner-up for The BBC Big Read Top 100 2003
Short-listed for BBC Big Read Top 100 2003
Description: 1 v. (XXVII-578 p.) ; 21 cm
Series Title: Everyman's library, 154.
Responsibility: John Steinbeck ; with an introduction by Brad Leithauser.