Like the bestselling book’s displaced farm family, the Joads, thousands of real-life Americans fled drought and poverty in Oklahoma, Texas and neighboring states during the Great Depression and traveled west along Route 66 in search of employment.Ĭontrary to myth, Steinbeck never ventured from Oklahoma to California with migrants as part of his research for “The Grapes of Wrath,” although the author did drive west on Route 66 with his wife in 1937. In his Pulitzer Prize-winning 1939 novel “The Grapes of Wrath,” about Dust Bowl migrants of the 1930s, Steinbeck devoted a chapter to Route 66, which he dubbed “the mother road,” a nickname that stuck.
US novelist John Steinbeck (1902 – 1968).
