John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath is an inspirational source of historical fiction that creatively portrays a fictional family's journey to California in the time of the Great Depression. It forces the reader to think about the strife and suffering of the past and to wonder what kind of similar mistakes are being made in the present. But it also has a very unique writing style, in which Steinbeck displays animals or inanimate objects as symbols of the actual characters in the story. The story he writes is both intriguing and detailed, with the added symbolism giving a more advanced position in which to view the book.

Every two or three chapters, Steinbeck inserts a chapter that is, at a glance, unrelated to the story. However, Steinbeck uses these chapters to detail the setting and what's happening around that area at that time. The whole of the first...