John Ford won the Academy Award for Directing, and Nunnally Johnson was nominated for Best Screenplay for this 1940 adaptation of John Steinbeck’s award winning 1939 novel. Ford’s accomplished adaptation recounts the story of a family forced to leave their farm in Oklahoma and become migrant field workers during the Great Depression, but diverges sufficiently from the text to create to a work of artistic originality. Indeed, Steinbeck considered it superior to his novel.