The Grapes of Wrath

(Newser) - In the Grapes of Wrath, the Joad family gets a hard lesson in economics, when they follow a handbill for jobs to California—only to find there are no jobs. Why, he asks, did they put out the handbills? A fellow homeless man replies that if you’ve but one...

(Newser) - Many have made the parallel between the current economic slump and the Great Depression. Interested in pursuing the connection, Rafael Alvarez visited Sallisaw, Okla., an icon of the troubled 1930s as the setting of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, he writes for the Christian Science Monitor. The downturn...

(Newser) - John Steinbeck would relish our economic decline if he were alive today, writes Rachel Dry in the Washington Post. The author of the Great Depression classic Grapes of Wrath, which is regaining popularity these days, romanticized economic hardship and grieved over the affluence of post-WWII America. "He'd think that...