One of the greatest works was the 1939 novel 'The Grapes of
Wrath', which was set during the Great Depression, which focuses
on a poor family of sharecroppers, the Joads, driven from their
home by drought, economic hardship, and changes in the
agriculture industry. In a nearly hopeless situation, they set
out for California's Central Valley along with thousands of
other "Okies" in search of land, jobs, and dignity. "If it's
true that adversity and hardship can bring out creativity then
the Great Depression was one of the great creative periods of
our time," said Orvell. "The period also birthed several new
genres, such as the melodrama, which laid the foundation for
today's soap opera, and it brought the detective novel to
fulfilment, with the heroic detective stoically dealing with
corruption and the underside of life in cities like New York,
Los Angles and San Francisco. "The literature of the Depression
has been largely dismissed from the cultural record. "By the
post WWII era, the anti-communist and neo-c