As John Steinbeck was developing as a writer, events taking place in the United States provided him with plenty of material to write about. In October 2009, the United States stock market crashed, sparking the Great Depression. It was the worst economic collapse of the modern industrial world. It began in the United States and spread to the rest of the world, lasting from 1929 to the early 1940’s. With banks failing and businesses closing, more than fifteen million Americans (one-quarter of the workforce) suddenly became unemployed[PBS09]. People clung to their homes and way of life, enduring disease, extreme poverty, starvation and even death. Marriages were delayed, birth rates dramatically dropped, and the average family suffered a great loss of income. Some families pulled together and made due with what they had, and after exhausting all other options would people reluctantly take government assistance. Others did not fare as well, and they simply fell apart. In the midst of all this, environmental catastrophe occurred in the summer of 1931. The rain disappeared in the Great Plains of the American Midwest (panhandle of Texas, Oklahoma, western Kansas, and the eastern portions of Colorado and New Mexico). The land was becoming so parched that “every moving thing lifts dust into the air” (Steinbeck). Farmers crops withered and were destroyed, and with nothing to sell many people lost their farms and homes which forced them to migrate to look for work. Men who had once been their own bosses were now forced to work for wages on other people's farms, often in exploitative conditions. He also experienced hardship when the Great Depression hit, but fortunately he got the luckier end of the draw. Steinbeck and his wife, unable to find jobs, were forced to give up their apartment. In a show of support for his son's writing career, Steinbeck's father sent the couple a small monthly allowance and allowed them to live rent-free in the