Books Like The Grapes of Wrath

Timothy Egan

This nonfiction account of the families who stayed in the Dust Bowl shows the black blizzards and ruined farms that drove the Joads west, told through real survivors' stories.

Kristin Hannah

A Texas mother flees the Dust Bowl for California and meets the same hostility, hunger and labour exploitation the Joads face, in a more emotional, character-driven contemporary novel.

James Agee, Walker Evans

Agee's prose and Walker Evans's photographs document Alabama tenant farmers in the 1930s, offering the real faces behind Steinbeck's fictional families and a similar outraged compassion.

John Steinbeck

Steinbeck's other great epic spans generations in California's Salinas Valley, with the same grand moral vision, biblical echoes and interwoven narrator commentary that gave the Joads' story its scale.

John Steinbeck

Only one Steinbeck pick fits here, so treat this as the alternative: a short, devastating story of drifting farmworkers chasing a dream of land, written in the same plain, humane style.

John Steinbeck

For a lighter Steinbeck, this warm portrait of misfits on the Monterey waterfront shares the Joads' Depression setting and love of ordinary people, but with humour instead of tragedy.

Upton Sinclair

Sinclair follows immigrant workers ground down by Chicago's meatpacking industry, an earlier muckraking novel that, like Steinbeck's, exposes how powerful interests exploit the powerless.

Richard Wright, Richard Wright - undifferentiated

Published a year after Steinbeck's novel, Wright's story of a young Black man in Chicago's South Side shares its naturalism and fury at the economic and racial forces crushing people.

Barbara Kingsolver

Kingsolver's Appalachian novel about a boy surviving poverty and the opioid crisis carries Steinbeck's anger at corporate greed and tenderness for forgotten rural Americans into the present day.

Cormac McCarthy

A father and son travel through a ruined America with nothing but each other, echoing the Joads' desperate journey and their stubborn insistence on decency amid collapse.

William Faulkner

A poor Mississippi farm family hauls their mother's coffin across country, a darkly comic, many-voiced road story of rural hardship that pairs well with the Joads' trek.

Jeanine Cummins

A mother and son flee Mexico for the United States, riding freight trains toward a promised land, a modern migration story with the same urgency and fear as the road to California.