Depression In John Steinbeck's The Grapes Of Wrath

Dust and depression swept through America at an alarming rate. The devastation and poverty caused during this era will haunt this countries history forever. However, factual history is hard to attain for each historian, writer, or even photographer tells his or her own story. The terrible storms shook the nation to its foundation and sent thousands of people to new lands in search of work and a better life. The Dust Bowl, the migrations, and the search for true factual evidence will shape the accounts of this dark era.
Beginning in early May of 1934 dust swept through the western plains of the nation. Huge dark clouds traveled through cities, into homes, and over countless miles of land. As the rain stopped and the earth dried, dust seemed

In Steinbeck’s novel, The Grapes of Wrath, he tells the story of the Joad family who were forced into migration due to the dust. However as Steinbeck wrote that during the 1930s most migrants came form Oklahoma, but what historians later found out of the “million new residents in California during this period only about 15,000 to 16,000 were form Oklahoma (291). This new finding brought light to how really Steinbeck “portrayed laborers, farm workers, and Dust Bowl migrants not only from Oklahoma but also Arkansas, Texas and Missouri” (291). In addition to Steinbeck, Dorothea Lange seemed to document one of the most famous pictures of the Dust Bowl period. However, she did not just take pictures of what she saw. Davidson and Lytle stats that she was known to pose her subjects and retake multiple pictures to obtain the pictures she need to find the most compelling shot (289). The struggle of historians is “bringing statistics to life so that they tell a story” (291). With Steinbeck’s novel and Lange’s photographs the world remembers what their works described of the time period and not of whether the facts are al