The writing of the migrant farmers held a great deal of allure to Steinbeck because their predicament was so opposite of what American identity was comprised. When one thinks of American Identity, the immediate connotations that enter one's mind are the notion of economic success, roots in a home, the development of a happy family, and a general sense of contentment in one's setting and the world in which one is enveloped. However, in writing about the migrant worker in the 1930s, this state of reality is entirely contrasted with the predicament that faced the migrant farmer. Struggling for work, they moved from place to place without a clear sense of home in an almost rootless existence driven to find work and a means of subsistence. As
