The Grapes of Wrath Essay

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The Grapes of Wrath

This event occurred in the era of the Great Depression in the United
States, which was in the late 1920's and early 1930's, when the whole nation had to go through hardships because of the scarce resources in the country.
Beginning with the stock market crash of 1929, poverty and oppression spread across the nation like a wild fire taking everyone by surprise. The Dust Bowl helped continue this movement. Many different things caused this event. For example, when the Great
Depression occurred, many peoples land were taken away leaving them penniless and forced into poverty. In this case, the Joads were kicked off their land by the bank, which owned it because the drought from the Dust Bowl had
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Hoover. The people believed that it was because of him this depression was caused, so the author uses his name as one of the cities in the book called Hooverville. It was this same city where one of the conflicts between Tom Joad and a deputy sheriff occur causing Tom to get arrested. The author tries to tie in what is happening in the world around them into their lives. Such as the conflict in Hooverville shows the kind of efforts the president was making for the people. On the other side of a president that people thought had disappointed them, then later came the president that was supposed to help them with his " New Deal." This president is known as Franklin
D. Roosevelt. Though he becomes president in later years at the end of the decade that the book was written, he still is part of the era. He tried to help his people out, and doing so, you can see the slow changes at the end of the book on how things are starting to come in to place. To get back in the story, the main
Protagonist was Tom Joad because the conflicts in the story did revolve around his life and the people in it. He basically represented the migrant workers and had a plan to organize people to improve living conditions. He realizes the effects of capitalism and what it had done for the people on the earth. Even though it wasn't so much a single person, but the government also did play an important role. The government portrayed as both good and evil in this book, a type of

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