The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck (1939)

The dust comes first, settling over Oklahoma in a film so fine it greys the standing corn and the faces of people watching from their doorways as the land they farmed turns to powder. The banks send tractors to knock the houses flat, and the Joads, three generations of them, pile a mattress and a butchered hog and Grandma onto a wheezing Hudson and drive Route 66 toward California, where the handbills promise orchard work and nobody starves. What makes _The Grapes of Wrath_ enormous is the way Steinbeck keeps widening the lens: a chapter of the Joads, then a chapter pulling back to the whole westward flood, a hundred thousand families turned to one moving thing. And Ma Joad holds it together by sheer will, deciding what the single box can carry, feeding strangers from a pot that cannot stretch. The ending waits in a barn, an image so plain and so merciful you may not breathe. Steinbeck's anger never cooled, and neither will yours.