Dorothea Lange Photography

Grapes of Wrath Movie 1940
 

Grapes of Wrath - First Edition Cover
 

The Grapes of Wrath 1939 by John Steinbeck, won the Pulitzer Prize 1940 and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962. Set during the Great Depression, the novel focuses on the poor Joad family of sharecroppers driven from their Oklahoma home by drought, economic hardship and changes in financial and agricultural industries

At the height of the Great Depression Lange photographed the woman and her two small children. It came to epitomize the poverty & suffering of those displaced. Dorothea Lange’s photography was to inspire Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath” which in turn inspired John Ford’s film adaptation.