Oklahoma migrant families believed the novel demeaned their image, as James Gregory notes in American Exodus, nevertheless as a fabular tale of dashed illusions, thwarted desires, inhuman suffering, and betrayed promises—all strung on the slenderest thread of hope—The Grapes of Wrath summed up the Depression era’s socially conscious art. “Steinbeck shaped a geography of conscience” in The Grapes of Wrath, novelist Don DeLillo claims in his centennial reflection, “for it is a novel in which there is something at stake in every sentence. ” And beyond that—for emotional urgency, evocative power,
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