The storms of the great Dust Bowl had barely settled when Steinbeck published The Grapes of Wrath, which follows a family of impoverished "Okies," the Joads, as they chase the mirage of a good life westward from their devastated midwestern farm to California. The Joads find only bitterness, squalor and oppression as migrant agricultural workers living in "Hoovervilles," but their indomitable strength in the face of an entire continent's worth of adversity makes Steinbeck's epic far more than a history of unfortunate events: It's both a record of its time and a permanent monument to human perseverance.—L.G.