The Joad family, driven from Oklahoma by the Dust Bowl, travels to California seeking work and finds only exploitation. Steinbeck wrote this in five months of furious composition, alternating the Joads' story with interchapters that generalize their experience into American tragedy. The novel won the Pulitzer Prize and contributed to the Nobel that came later. It was banned and burned in California. Ma Joad's endurance, Tom Joad's radicalization, Rose of Sharon's final gesture: these images have entered American consciousness. The novel insists that we are one family.