One of my favorite novels of all time.
Nostalgic and starry-eyed lefties should be required to read Grapes...if only for Steinbeck’s slap against FDR and the Agricultural Adjustment Acts (AAA) Roosevelt oversaw the destruction of countless tons of produce and hundreds of thousands of livestock animals at a time when millions of people were going hungry. It also had the effect of putting thousands of cotton sharecropper types like the Joads on the street because the landowners could make more money from letting the fields lie fallow (government subsidies) than from collecting rents on the sharecroppers.
Remembering the Forgotten Man, my a$$.