the worst hard time

Drought, destroying the natural grass, and increased mechanization caused a series of terrible storms lasting almost a decade. The Dust Bowl is so important today because there is a high demand for food and water since more people live here in America. We know not to make to same mistakes that farmers made almost 90 years ago. The Dust Bowl serves as a warning for the future, a warning to keep our lands healthy and always look

The dust bowl was a tragic time in America for so many families and John Steinbeck does a great job at getting up-close and personal with one family to show these tragedies. In the novel, “The Grapes of Wrath”, John Steinbeck employed a variety of rhetorical devices, such as asyndeton, personification and simile, in order to persuade his readers to enact positive change from the turmoil of the Great Depression. Throughout the novel, Steinbeck tells the fictional narrative of Tom Joad and his family, while exploring social issues and the hardships of families who had to endure the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression. Steinbeck’s purpose was to challenge readers to look at

“We watched as the storm swallowed the light. The sky turned from blue to black, night descended in an instant and the dust was on us…Dust lay two feet deep in ripply waves across the parlor floor, dust blanketed the cookstove, the icebox, the kitchen chairs, everything deep in dust.” -Karen Hesse’s Diary, April, 1935 (Dust Bowl Diary Entries). In the 1930s, a phenomenon called the Dust Bowl swept the people of the Great Plains off their feet. This paper defines the Dust Bowl and its impact on the US economy and American citizens.

The novel, The Grapes of Wrath, is a story that construes the journey of the Joad family through the brutal migration from Oklahoma 's destroying Dust Bowl to California corrupt promised land. Through the depiction of events and portrayal of characters, the bible takes part in the novel as one whole allusion. The anecdote of the struggle for survival in the fallen state of Oklahoma and in the “promised land” of California, reveals the same ideas shown as we explore in the bible. In The Grapes of Wrath, author John Steinbeck integrates the allegory of biblical references and values to create the image of a family’s journey to California during the Dust Bowl of the early 1900s.

The documentary, Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s by Donald Worster paints a surreal mosaic of life on the Great Plains during the dirty thirties. He does this by illustrating various causations and correlations as well as specific rural towns in the Dust Bowl that exhibit them, and public institutions whose objective was the restoration of the Great Plains to a fertile state as before the coming of the Capitalistic agriculturist that wreaked havoc on the ecosystem. Worster then uses the above as a fulcrum to his main argument, “…there was in fact a close link between the Dust Bowl and the Depression – that the same society produced them both, and for similar reasons. (p.5) He further goes on to explain that the crisis in the Great Plains was primarily caused by man and not nature (Worster, p.13). This was primarily due to the fact that man had never truly lived in equilibrium with the land on the high plains; they exploited the prairies to produce beyond their capacity, thus causing severe environmental breakdown. The fault was not all the agriculturists of course, part of the blame, as Worster points out, is rooted culturally in our capitalistic, industrialized values and ideals. One spokesman stated, “We are producing a product to sell, and that profitability of that product depended on pushing the land as far as it could go.” (Worster, p.57) To fully illuminate the problems at hand, he uses Cimarron County in the Oklahoma panhandle, and Haskell County,

Natural disasters can cause massive damage, but few realize that many barely last a few days. If so much can be done in such a minute amount of time, imagine what a decade would do. The dust bowl was a weather event that lasted for the entirety of an eight-year drought and lingered for multiple years after. The result: Economic devastation for the agriculture of the area. The dust bowl was a large contributor to agriculture’s role in the great depression and defines how we approach environmental protection today.

“Much of the Roaring '20s was a continual cycle of debt for the American farmer, stemming from falling farm prices and the need to purchase expensive machinery.” (“The Farming Problem”). Tractors had just graced the U.S. markets which boosted the production of goods greatly. Most would think this was good, but it was more of a problem, the farmers would overproduce goods without enough people to buy them all which made the goods almost worthless. The farmers had to borrow money to pay for their tractors, assuming they would be able to pay back the debt with the money that the tractor made, but when they found they could not it set them up having no money and a debt with no way to pay it back. “When the stock market crashed in 1929 sending prices in an even more downward cycle, many American farmers wondered if their hardscrabble lives would ever improve.” (“The Farming Problem”). The stock market crashing made the stocks the farmers though they would be able to get some money from virtually worthless.

In his novel Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck integrated many biblical references and values throughout the book. This provided a more intriguing and complex style of writing that he used to tell about the Dust Bowl of the early 1900’s and the arduous journey the Joad family and many others took to reach California.

The unconventionally written intercalary chapters of Steinbeck's novel, “The Grapes of Wrath”, are designed to show the readers a view of economic depression and social aspects of America during this time period. Steinbeck tells the reader about the situation through a macroscopic point of view, when he writes the intercalary chapters. It is through these intercalary chapters that Steinbeck tells us about the struggle of many migrant farmers who are pushed out of their homes and start to live their lives on the road, while trying to find places for them to work. Between each of these intercalary chapters are narrative chapters where Steinbeck gives the readers a microscopic view of the situation, by giving us an example of one of the migrant

The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck uses numerous literary techniques to advocate for change in the social and political attitudes of the Dust Bowl era. Simile, personification, and imagery are among the many devices that add to the novel’s ability to influence the audience’s views. Moreover, through his use of detail, Steinbeck is able to develop a strong bond between the reader and the Joad clan. This bond that is created evokes empathy from the audience towards the Joads as they face numerous challenges along their journey. The chapters go between the Joad’s story and a broad perspective of the Dust Bowl’s effect on the lives of Mid-western farmers in which Steinbeck illustrates dust storms devastating the land, banks evicting tenant

   When Steinbeck wrote The Grapes of Wrath, our country was just starting to recover from The Great Depression.  The novel he wrote, though fiction, was not an uncommon tale in many lives.  When this book was first published, the majority of those reading it understood where it was coming from-they had lived it.  But now very few people understand the horrors of what went on in that time.  The style in which Steinbeck chose to write The Grapes of Wrath helps get across the book's message.

I hope this proposal will assist the reader in understanding our Earth’s critical condition and ways even an individual can attribute to the betterment of our environment.

In the first chapter of The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck sets the idea of how life was in the time period. Not only does he set the entire novel in motion by describing the layer of dust as the oppression of life, but how the people react to it and each other. Steinbeck talks about the land being the man’s and

“They had no argument, no system, nothing but their numbers and their needs. When there was work for a man, ten men fought for it – fought with a low wage. If that fella’ll work for thirty cents, I’ll work for twenty-five”(Steinbeck). The renowned novel, The Grapes of Wrath, is a realistic portrayal of life and social conditions during the 30’s when the Dust Bowl swept across the nation, causing many to fall deeper into the depression. This caused many families to leave their homes in search of a safer and more hopeful land. The Grapes of Wrath follows Tom Joad, his family, and many other migrant farmers as they migrate from their Oklahoma farms into their new, hope filled life in California. The struggles that these characters endure

The Dust Bowl, a series of severe dust storms in the 1930’s, left the southern plains of the United States as a wasteland. The storms occurred due to the lack of use of dryland farming techniques to prevent wind erosion. Powerful winds would pick up loose soil and carry the sediment around the countryside. Called “black blizzard” or “black rollers”, these storms had the potential to black out the sky completely. Due to the inability to grow and sell crops, banks evicted families and foreclosed their properties, leaving them homeless and without an income. The author of The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck, wrote his American realist novel to allow readers to understand the experiences of the migrants from the Dust Bowl era. Not many