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The Grapes of Wrath pretty much has a V.I.P. pass to every "Top 100 Books of All Time" list in the universe. It's a huge deal. It won the Pulitzer Prize in 1940 and helped John Steinbeck nab the Nobel Prize in 1962—they gave Steinbeck the Nobel for (among other things) his "keen social perception."

And you don't get much keener than the social perception showcased in Grapes. This understanding of society's ills is razor sharp, and cuts deep.

And a lot of that has to do with the fact that this novel is brutally honest.

At the time of the Dust Bowl, when tens of thousands of Americans migrated to California in search of a better life, Steinbeck was writing a series of seven articles about migrant worker communities for the San Francisco Chronicle. He spent a whole lot of time getting to know families who lived in various migrant worker camps in towns like Bakersfield and Visalia, and was infuriated and disgusted by the amount of heartbreak and suffering that he witnessed, and he channeled that fury as he wrote The Grapes of Wrath.

Published in 1939, The Grapes of Wrath vividly portrays life during the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl in America as it follows a family of Oklahoma tenant farmers traveling westward. It explores the strength and goodness of the human spirit in the face of gruesome, truly dismal circumstances.

When first published, Americans had a love/hate relationship to this novel. Some people applauded Steinbeck for capturing so honestly the lives of migrant farm workers during the Depression. Other (jerks) accused him of being a socialist and of championing communist beliefs (i.e., share the wealth, friends). Californian farmers loathed Steinbeck's unsavory depiction of, well, Californian farmers. In short, this novel sent America into a bit of a frenzy.
Eleanor Roosevelt took note, and, as a result, she called for congressional hearings on migrant worker camp conditions. Labor laws were changed.

The Grapes of Wrath has been banned, burned, and bought over and over again. And that's why we love it. That's why it's still around. It struck a nerve. It upset people deeply. It literally changed the face of American labor.

References to the novel continue to be made in movies, music, art, and TV. Allusions to this epic tale have surfaced in both South Park and The Simpsons. The Joads are a fictional family, and yet they (and what they represent) are part of the American story.

If anything, we should read The Grapes of Wrath because it affords us front row seats to one of the darkest chapters in American history. Author T.C. Boyle sums it up beautifully: "You can read (about the lives of migrant workers) in your textbook… but if you read it in Steinbeck's version, you get to live it and breathe it."