ABSTRACT
John Steinbeck’s epic novel The Grapes of Wrath plots the Joads’ desperate struggle for survival. Like thousands of other poor tenant farmers, they are ‘tractored’ off their land by the bankers and financiers who see the opportunity to exploit the potential of technology to maximise their profit from the land at a time of deep economic depression and drought. Steinbeck captures, inter alia, the hardships and harsh realities at the sharp end of the shift from an agrarian to an industrial economy. It is a shift navigated by those who hold power with no concern for the impact upon the lives of thousands of people as their land is repossessed and they are forced to join the mass migration in search of work and a means to survive.
