The Great Depression was a time of economic crisis around the world from the time period 1929 to World War II. To help capture the feeling in this period, John Steinbeck published The Grapes of Wrath. The main plot of of the story is about the Joads, a farming family forced from their home sent to search for work in California. Steinbeck includes a series of intercalary chapters to help paint a picture of migrant workers and the challenges they faced. In chapter 9, Steinbeck explores the emotional trials the tenants forced to endure when they are required to leave their homes and their lives, this chapter is an appeal to pathos. To convey pathos Steinbeck employs syntax and dreary diction to obtain an emotional response from the reader.
In the book, The Worst Hard Times, author Timothy Egan explains the hard times that the families in the high plains experienced during the years near the Great Depression. Egan writes about "The Great American Dust Bowl" which originally was a place of lushes thick grass where the bison could graze and where the Indians in the area could hunt, until Texas cowboys took over the land for big cattle drives making the area a huge ranch. During the years that these cowboys worked the land, they noticed that before they started the cattle runs, the grass that was in the area kept the top soil in place on times of drought. Now that the cattle had been grazing and the cowboys had been working the area, the grass was not prospering creating huge dust storms when the wind blew and there was no rain or plants to keep it down. The dust storms posed a worry to the ranch owners that they would lose cattle and therefore lose profit that they decided to divide up and sell the world's biggest cattle
This negatively affected the people who were migrating and were in direct competition for jobs with longer- established residents and would keep creating conflict with those people. “Many people were not able to make a living in drought-stricken regions and were forced to migrate to other areas in search of a new livelihood. ("Drought in the Dust Bowl") Many people had no choice to leave which affected them in a personal way because they had to forced to leave in search of a new livelihood because they will mostly not survive through the Dust Bowl.”In addition, because of poverty and high unemployment, migrants added to local relief efforts, sometimes overburdening relief and health agencies. ” ("Drought in the Dust Bowl")People were super poor and were not making enough money to pay for things while migrating so this would affect people and families and it was too much for relief and health agencies.“The poor economy displaced more than just farmers as refugees to California; many teachers, lawyers, and small business owners moved west with their families during this time.( "Dust Bowl")The wealth and
Can you imagine waking up in the morning and its pitch black outside? Would you be able to stand the dirt and the little rocks hitting your face everyday? Could you stand to inhale the dirt while you took a breath or eating dirt that falls into your food? In the 1930’s in the Southern Plains, these people went through a horrible experience for nearly a decade. No sunrays, just a big black cloud covering the whole land with fast winds and rocks hitting your face. This storm was a natural disaster and the worst man made storm which was known as the Dust Bowl. There were good and bad that came from this storm. Some people believe that this storm was going to be the end of the world. What could have caused this storm to be created?
The tone of chapter 11 in John Steinbeck's, “The Grapes of Wrath,” is sympathetic, sad and hopeless. His word choice and syntax show how the sad houses were left to decay in the weather. His use of descriptive words paints a picture in the reader's mind. As each paragraph unfolds, new details come to life and adds to the imagery. While it may seem unimportant, this intercalary chapter shows how the effects of the great depression affected common households.
Having grown up in the bleak area of the Oklahoma Panhandle, during the great depression, Billie Jo and her family encounter many economical problems.
The setting mainly took place in south of Soledad, California, near the Salinas Valley, during the Great Depression in the 1930’s. Salinas Valley had many substantial farms during the Depression. This was essential because colossal farms employed a massive number of workers, often up to hundreds. Since farm workers with no steady employment, would often head to these communities, it was logical that Salinas Valley was George and Lennie’s destination. Migrant farm workers were perfect examples, to highlight the solitude and loneliness engendered by the Depression. These men had no place to call home, and had only a few belongings to call their own. They were perpetually at the mercy of the farmers. They would promptly become friendless.
he early 20th century was a period of social change and urbanization which followed by the Great Depression. The dust become a way of life. A dust bowl survivor described what daily life was like during the dust bowl: “ In the morning the dust hung like fog, and the sun was as red as ripe new blood. All day the dust sifted down from the sky, and the next day it sifted down. An even blanket covered the earth. It settled on the corn, piled up on the tops of the fence posts, piled up on the wires; it settled on roofs, blanketed the weeds and trees” [2]. Strong wind blowed all the time. The sky was cloudy and dusty. The sun hides between the thick layers of dust. Dust blown everywhere and covered everything including houses. Layer of dust piled
The early 1900s came with an abundance of changes. There were multiple waves of immigration causing increased social separation. There was also increased industrialization. The increase in industrialization provided many jobs for the incoming immigrants. However, these immigrants took on a lot more than just a new job when they came to America. Immigrants faced harsh living and working conditions, racial strife, poverty, as well as social class issues. Upton Sinclair’s novel The Jungle explores many of these hardships immigrants had to face through the lives of Lithuanian Immigrants. Throughout his novel, Sinclair focuses on poverty and thoughts of what America was supposed to be like to portray hardships immigrants faced when coming to America.
I think the point of the story Lyddie is to show just how hard it was for young women to get by back then. In Lyddie's story, she has to go endure many hardships such as losing her farm, having poor working conditions, and having to walk and walk to become a factory girl. The place she stayed at was an small inn. The in was very overcrowded with 2 women sharing a bed. This could potentially be harmful to the girls if for example there was a fire they would not all be able to make it out alive. In this essay, I will be talking about all the hardships that Lyddie had to push through and how bad their lives were back then.
In the context, what the Joads suffer the most not is not from physical environment and the dustbowl, but from the businessmen, who are not concerned at all about the livelihood of the farmers but their self-earnings. They banish the farmers off their land, their root, where they have been dwelling for generations. Furthermore, the California landowners, who are fully aware that the farmers need to survive, continue to lower the wages and to spread falsehood that California was a thriving place, leading more people to migrate to California. The modern men of industry manipulate the society as they intend, while living detached from the farmers and dehumanize them. In this sense, the Joads, like other immigrants, are deprived of equal opportunities and the pursuit of happiness in life. Even today the American Dream is not fully accomplished. Homelessness is still plaguing many metropolises in America, while the disparity between rich and poverty is still distinguished. We have to strive forward and transform the society—or America would live through another age of Grapes of
The trip to California was inspired by some flyers that Pa Joad received one day. The Joads heard that California was in need of a larger work force, they then began dreaming of an amazing land where they prospered together as a family. But once the Joads arrived in California they realised it is not as stunning and lucrative as advertised. By the time the Joads had arrived, the job market had deplete due to the rush of migration to California, therefore Pa Joad was unable to find a lucrative job to support his family. The Joad family bounced around poverty camps, known as hoovervilles, and fought to keep food on the table. Despite having a strong ambition of finding a better life, their plan was not successful, and the American dream for the Joads was not
The author of “The Day the Tractor Came” creates a hopeless tone by using personification. The narrator says, “.. in five minutes, the tractor was able to reduce Pa to nothing.” At the point where this was said, we are able to comprehend that the character lived through the Dust Bowl of the 1930 's due to all of the mention of colossal black cloud of dust. Also, his family had tried to construct a living as farmers, although the dry land unfortunately failed to produce crops, which in the end made them no money. “... the tractor, the arrogant tractor, took my small life and shattered it into a million pieces…” The tractor is acting as the only perpetrator to destroy the narrator and his family’s home and farm. Not being able to provide for
Upton Sinclair wrote a book from the early 1900’s called The Jungle. The book is centered around a family who immigrated to America. The family goes through a lot of hardships and troubles during the industrialization era. Life back then was hard for the average person. Most people did not have much money to buy food and necessities, and many lived in rural areas, mostly immigrants. Industrialization upgraded machines, but downgraded people’s health due to more pollutants getting put into the air. Along with this there were very poor working conditions that decreased people’s health. Upton Sinclair showed that industries should have safer and more sanitary working conditions before employing people to work and distributing their product, in order to decrease the amount of injuries and illnesses, in The Jungle.
The Dust Bowl, beginning in the 1930s, added to the struggle of American farmers as lands out west in states such as Oklahoma and Kansas were over-plowed, causing the topsoil to become uprooted, creating massive dust storms. These dust storms left the land unusable to farm, displacing many Americans in the agricultural industry. Steinbeck’s The Harvest Gypsies displays the struggles these farmers faced when moving west to California, hoping to find some sort of work. Many displaced farmers lived in squatters’ camps, temporary dwellings for those looking for work. Steinbeck described these camps as having awful living conditions, saying that “From a distance it looks like a city dump, and well it may, for the city dumps are the sources for the material of which it is built.” In The Harvest Gypsies, Steinbeck also describes decreasing morale in the displaced farmers as he says “the dullness shows in the faces…and in addition there is a sullenness that makes them taciturn.” The difficulty of finding adequate work to support a family during the Dust Bowl was extremely high—and as the work was competitive, these farmers implicated the work ethic that began at the beginning of the 20th