John Steinbeck's quasi-documentary study of Dust Bowl immigrants inspired John Ford's film, The Grapes of Wrath. Like Steinbeck's book, the film follows the Joads, an Okie family trying to get to California in an overloaded jalopy filled with crying children, beaten-down people, and dying grandparents. It is a sympathetic look at the fate of the farmers who fled the Dust Bowl for brighter futures in California, but encountered there instead the same class system and prejudices that had impoverished them back home.