The topsoil lifts off the Oklahoma plains in curtains of dust, and the Joad family loads a broken-down Hudson sedan with everything they own and drives west toward California, where handbills say there is work picking fruit. Steinbeck alternates their journey with panoramic interchapters that widen the lens from one family to an entire people on the move, dispossessed by drought and bank foreclosure, herded into roadside camps, exploited at every turn. Published in 1939, the novel was banned, burned, and awarded the Pulitzer in the same year. Its anger has not cooled. Rose of Sharon's final gesture, offering her breast to a starving stranger, remains one of the most radical acts of compassion in American fiction.