Essays on Grapes of Wrath

The film shows the plight of ordinary American people in the events of America’s Great Depression. They become migrant workers when they end up in a ranch in California. They are in search of work and opportunities for their family, but the best of opportunities are not given to them by the people they work for and live under. Food prices are ridiculously high on purpose such that they cannot afford good food; bottom line the ranch owners they work for oppress them. The camp in which they live in is crowded; the immigrants are starving and desperate. ...

Introduction

Much of the human suffering and economic disadvantages that occurred during the Great Depression (1929-1933) were a result of the boom mentality and unregulated business practices of the 1920s. People with a corrupt kind of business acumen exploited the weakest segments of society in the poorest regions. Praying on a naïve boom psychology, businessmen led a devastating attack on the Midwest that ultimately was not curbed by politicians or financial institutions until the middle 1930s. New businesses exploited weak government controls and took on many of the same exploitative practices as the Robber Baron businessmen of the 19th ...

Introduction

This paper aims to discuss how the different innovations in the modern society made us look like we have reached the pillar of modernity with all the fabulous results, while the overall consequence is destruction. In the book Short History of Progress, the historian and author Ronald Wright, implied that the modern society is trapped into problems that came about as people, through their ingenuity, worked towards the betterment of the lives and the society as a whole. The author suggested that the common people, as well as those in the position to impose societal policies are always eager ...

The Grapes of Wrath, a novel written by John Steinbeck, is acute reaction to the social and economic situation of America during the 1930's. Summer 1937 brought severe drought and dust bowls, which caused the greatest damage to the crops and made thousands of broken farmers leave their lands in order to survive. The novel offers the chance to stand in the shoes of poor and desperate families, whose fertile lands went barren and were taken away by the bank agents. The shock comes with understanding that the Government is indifferent to the lives of this people and they don’ ...

Renaissance has the connotation of a rebirth age after the dark age. It signifies changes, improvements, and development of a culture or a country from the chaos of the dark ages. One revolutionary cultural movement that happened in the span of 1920s is called as the Harlem Renaissance. Harlem Renaissance was previously referred to as the New Negro Movement which is named after the anthology in 1925 by Alain Locke. The new African-American movement that included their cultural expressions all over the urban areas of the North eastern as well as the Midwestern part of the United States that were affected by ...

The book “The Grapes of Wrath” written by John Steinbeck and originally published in the year 1939 is one of the unique literary works in the genre of history. The book dates back to the period of Great Depression in America, which started in the year 1929 due to the crash of the stock market and lasted until the beginning of the Second World War . The period saw drought and high winds affecting several parts of the country, especially the Midwest region of America, including the Oklahoma state. Several residents of the state of Oklahoma moved to other places ...

FDR – Advocate of the American People

In his seminal essay, David M Kennedy speaks about Franklin Roosevelt’s politician’s sensibility which he brought to the White House. According to his press secretary Theodore Joslin, Roosevelt had an incredible memory especially of localized politics and the officials who populated several far flung counties across the whole United States. Kennedy also compared Roosevelt with Hoover with the latter having a mathematician’s taste for things while Roosevelt was much more the consummate politician in every way. Kennedy’s essay focuses on several important elements which revealed Roosevelt’s unique personality especially the Cermak incident where the ...

The Grapes of Wrath is a novel written by John Steinbeck as he gives the story revolving around the family of Joad. The novel illustrates oppression and hardship that faced the migrants’ workers during the great depression. In depth it is a political tract that governed collectivist action on oppressing those looking for jobs. In the same sense, the speech that was delivered by Martin Luther King on the oppression of the black people has a lot of similarities as compared to the The Grapes of Wrath. Martin Luther speech covers the oppression nature of the blacks as well. The Declaration's ...

A road trip can be defined as any journey by road, regardless of destination or stops en route. Characteristically, road trips in the contemporary society relates to long distances by automobile. Road tripping is typically about dreams; it encompasses dreaming on landscapes and cities and looking forward to exploring them. Road tripping and also entail hardships, paddling down rivers, slogging though thick canopies, confronting suspicious people, testing ones adaptability, exploring hostile places and anticipating for some kind of revelation. Both John Steinbeck and Dorothea Lange engaged in documenting what they saw on their road trip, one through books and ...

Introduction

The Great Depression was a worldwide economic depression that took place in the decade preceding the Second World War. In most nations, it started in the year 1929 to the middle 1940s. This was the longest, deepest, and most widespread depression in the 20th century. This tragedy put millions of American citizens out of work, resulting in government involvement in society and the economy.

Cultural and Historical Context

The Great Depression took place at a time when many people had become interested on the stock market. Many others were working in industries and the economy was doing quite well. The local farmers produced enough to ...

John Steinbeck wrote The Grapes of Wrath during the Great Depression that led to various problems in the United States’ history. The Great Depression lasted from the Black Tuesday’s Stock Market Crash of October 1929 to the Second World War, which got the people working again into the war. During this long time that lasted for about twelve years, a long period of drought and high winds affected a huge part of the American Midwest, which created a phenomenon referred to as the Dust Bowl. Most of the people in the lower Midwest, hoping to find fertile land to settle and ...

Literature

A.) Hemingway’s “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” has integrated the period of Modernism in this short story. The author used modernism to depict women as trivial and castrating (Armstrong 42). However, this issue is often questioned by the fact that it is the cultural construction of women that is at risk. The story talks about Modernism since the values and beliefs of women who wanted to stay alive as opposed to the principle of man who believes that he is destined to die on the mountain. The modern view of the protagonist Harry, who decided to live a life of ...

Having considered the image presented by D Lang, the obvious character which comes to mind from Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath is that of Ma Joad who plays the matriarchal figures within the story. However, looking beyond the centre figure in the picture there are also two younger children who could be seen as evoking the characters of Ruthie Joad the youngest daughter in the work and or Winfield Joad the youngest male child in the work.

Having reviewed the picture, one may consider that the image is quite emotional stirring feelings of empathy for the harsh realities of ...

The Dust Bowl has been associated with the Midwestern plains, especially the southern part of the country such as in Texas and Oklahoma. The Dust Bowl area suffered black outs from the blowing dust and the loss of good soil in the 1930s. Some of the dust storms were so terrible they were called dust blizzards. The history of that tragic time is chronicled by Donald Worster in his book Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s, the 25th Anniversary Edition. The book was first published in 1979 and it won the Bancroft Prize that year; a prize which ...

In John Ford’s 1960 film The Grapes of Wrath, ex-convict Tom Joad and his family cross the country looking for work during the Depression, only to find themselves undergoing increasingly bad situations. Henry Fonda’s performance of Joad is a powerful, intense performance that blends into the background and stands out at the same time. In this essay, some of the acting techniques used by Henry Fonda in The Grapes of Wrath are examined, including representational acting, motivation, given circumstances, physical character work, concentration and focus, and soliloquies.

Henry Fonda equips Tom Joad with a very naturalistic, down-to-earth swagger, a very strong ...