The Grapes of Wrath

Highly recommend this classic tale of an American experience that should not be forgotten. The Okies endured many trials in their migration west. This book does a great job in capturing their story.

I ordered it for my granddaughter.

A must read classic especially in these trying modern times and the message embedded within the story. Everyone should read this one.

Good classic book that I wanted before they took it off shelves

In the tight-knit, dust-and-dirt community of Pine Hollow, Minnesota, where the 1930s stretched long and thin for most, a girl named Marianna Lewis found solace in the world around her. At seven, she whiled away hours chasing the neighborhood children through sunlit meadows, her pockets stuffed with scraps of fabric and bits of string she’d repurpose into dolls and toys. While other kids played tag or hide-and-seek, Mari often wandered alone, sketching the curves of old barn wood or the way dandelion fluff floated like tiny parachutes in the breeze. Her friends rarely understood her quiet obsessions—when she asked to borrow a knife to carve a figure from a discarded wooden spoon, they laughed, but she didn’t mind. She was already building a world in her head, one brushstroke at a time.By her teens, the town’s hardships pressed in like the cold. Jobs were scarce, and even simple pleasures like new pencils or paper were luxuries. Mari traded chores with neighbors for art supplies: sweeping floors for a set of crayons, mending clothes in exchange for a used sketchbook. She painted on anything she could—sacks, old wallpaper, the back of newspaper clippings tucked under porch steps. During one particularly harsh winter, when the school’s heating gave out, she and a group of kids huddled in the library, sharing stories to keep warm. Mari drew their faces in the margins of a library book, capturing the way frost clung to their breath and the determination in their eyes. A passing librarian, noticing her work, slipped her a few pennies and pointed to a bulletin board advertising a distant art school, its location a whisper of possibility.Mari’s childhood was stitched with small sorrows. She watched neighbors lose homes, heard the murmur of families splitting up to survive, and felt the sting of going to school in patched clothes while others wore store-bought dresses. Yet in those struggles, she found her voice. She turned discarded objects into canvases—a tin can became a still-life study of sunlight, a broken wheel inspired a painting of motion and resilience. When other children teased her for daydreaming, she retreated into her imagination, where colors bloomed even in the grayest days.By her late teens, her work began to draw attention. A local shopkeeper, moved by a mural she painted on a faded warehouse wall, offered to sell her pieces. The sales were modest, but they bought her more supplies and kept her spirit alive. Years later, when Marianna Lewis’s name appeared in magazines and her paintings sold for sums she once couldn’t have imagined, she would recall the pinch of hunger, the ache of cold, and the neighbors who shared what little they had. Fame, she liked to say, wasn’t about talent alone—it was about learning to see beauty in the broken pieces of life and refusing to look away.Long after she left Pine Hollow, the town remembered the girl who saw art in everything, turning scarcity into a canvas for dreams.