In The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck “created a literary portrait that defined an era. His account of the ‘Okie Exodus' in The Grapes of Wrath became the principal story through which America defined the experience of the Great Depression.”
However, according to this New Criterion article by Keith Windschuttle,  Ã¢â‚¬Å“there is now an accumulation of sufficient historical, demographic, and climatic data about the 1930s to show that almost everything about the elaborate picture created in the novel is either outright false or exaggerated beyond belief.”