Claim: The multi award-winning book, the Grapes of Wrath about poor families of tenant farmers during the Great Depression, was written by John Steinbeck after he was given some notes written by Sanora Babb, which caused her delay of publishing her own book on the same topic.
Evidence: The Grapes of Wrath is an American realist novel written by John Steinbeck and published in 1939. The book won the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize for fiction, and it was cited prominently when Steinbeck was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1962. Set during the Great Depression, the novel focuses on the Joads, a poor family of tenant farmers driven from their Oklahoma home by drought, economic hardship, agricultural industry changes, and bank foreclosures forcing tenant farmers out of work. Steinbeck was known to have borrowed from field notes taken during 1938 by Farm Security Administration worker and author Sanora Babb. After Steinbeck's novel appeared, to critical acclaim, Cerf shelved Babb's novel, telling her "Obviously, another book at this time about exactly the same subject would be a sad anticlimax!" Babb attempted to interest other publishers in Whose Names Are Unknown but ultimately put her manuscript in a drawer.. She turned to writing poetry, short stories, and non-fiction, and would not publish another novel for almost 20 years.