A Brief History
On January 24, 1940, The Grapes of Wrath, a drama film directed by John Ford, was released in theaters in the United States of America. The film was based on John Steinbeck’s 1939 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of the same name. The screenplay was written by Nunnally Johnson and the executive producer was Darryl F. Zanuck. The film tells the story of the Joads, an Oklahoma family, who, after losing their farm during the Great Depression in the 1930s, become migrant workers and end up in California. The motion picture details their arduous journey across the United States as they travel to California in search of work and opportunities for the family members. The film is widely considered as one of the greatest American films of all time. In 1989, this film was one of the first 25 films to be selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.”
Digging Deeper
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Historical Evidence
Some content in this article is adapted from this article on Wikipedia. It is reproduced here per the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike License.
For more information, please see…
Ford, John, dir. The Grapes of Wrath (The Ford at Fox Collection). 20th Century Fox, 2007.
