1940 – John Steinbeck is awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his novel The Grapes of Wrath.
The Grapes of Wrath is an American realist novel written by John Steinbeck and published in 1939. The book won the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize for fiction, and it was cited prominently when Steinbeck was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1962. Set during the Great Depression, the novel focuses on the Joads, a poor family of tenant farmers driven from their Oklahoma home by drought, economic hardship, agricultural industry changes, and bank foreclosures forcing tenant farmers out of work. Due to their nearly hopeless situation, and in part because they are trapped in the Dust Bowl, the Joads set out for California on the "mother road," along with thousands of other "Okies" seeking jobs, land, dignity, and a future.
The Grapes of Wrath is often listed as among the greatest novels in the English language and as a contender for the Great American Novel. When preparing to write the novel, Steinbeck wrote: "I want to put a tag of shame on the greedy bastards who are responsible for this [the Great Depression and its effects]." He famously said, "I've done my damnedest to rip a reader's nerves to rags." His work won a large following among the working class, due to his sympathy for the migrants and workers' movement, and his accessible prose style. Steinbeck scholar John Timmerman sums up the book's influence: "
The Grapes of Wrath may well be the most thoroughly discussed novel – in criticism, reviews, and college classrooms – of 20th century American literature." At the time of publication, Steinbeck's novel "was a phenomenon on the scale of a national event. It was publicly banned and burned by citizens, it was debated on national radio; but above all, it was read." Soon, it won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and its Armed Services Edition went through two printings. During his writing career, Steinbeck authored 33 books, with one book coauthored alongside Edward Ricketts, including 16 novels, 6 non-fiction books, and 2 collections of short stories. He is widely known for the comic novels
Tortilla Flat (1935) and
Cannery Row (1945), the multigeneration epic
East of Eden (1952), and the novellas
The Red Pony (1933) and
Of Mice and Men (1937). The Pulitzer Prize–winning
The Grapes of Wrath (1939) is considered Steinbeck's masterpiece and part of the American literary canon.
