ABSTRACT
In 1940, John Steinbeck won the Pulitzer Prize for this story published the year before of the plight of destitute farm workers who left their homes in Oklahoma, Arkansas, and other states for an even grimmer life in what they had dreamed would be the promised land of California. From the time of its publication, the book was attacked and banned across the nation. In 1939 copies were burned by the St. Louis public library and barred from the Buffalo, New York, library because of vulgar words. It was also banned that year in Kansas City, Missouri, and Kern County, California, where the novel was set (Doyle, 1994, p. 61).
