In six pages Depression era family experiences during the Great Dust Bowl as portrayed by Steinbeck in his novel are examined. Seven sources are cited in the bibliography.
Name of Research Paper File: JR7_RAgrape.rtf
Unformatted Sample Text from the Research Paper:
The land, and the people who till that land, although often ignored or looked down upon by the upper class, are the heart and soul of this country. That is
why the Dust Bowl of the 1930s served to create such a devastating reality for the entire country, as well as simple families who had nowhere to go, no skills
to employ, and perhaps no hope. The Dust Bowl was a time when families whose tradition lay in farming found themselves lost and desperate as land was destroyed and the
future was dim. John Steinbeck, in "Grapes of Wrath," presented us with incredibly truthful and vivid images of these people, these families, who were uprooted, finding themselves in a world
of confusion and despair. In the following paper we present an examination of Steinbecks novel, as it involves families during the Dust Bowl. The paper then illustrates some of the
real life situations and conditions which clearly reflect much of what Steinbeck wrote. The Grapes of Wrath The family that we witness in Steinbecks novel is the Joad
family. They are the heart of the nation and people of this country as they lose their ability to make a living and set off to search for a way
to survive. They were a people, a family, that illustrated how "The movement of people on the Plains was...profound" (Anonymous The Dust Bowl dust.html). Steinbeck illustrates this, not only through
the Joad family, but through the general movement, stating, "And then the dispossessed were drawn west- from Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico; from Nevada and Arkansas, families, tribes, dusted out,
tractored out. Car-loads, caravans, homeless and hungry; twenty thousand and fifty thousand and a hundred thousand and two hundred thousand" (NA). He illustrates how the Joads, and others, "streamed over