F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote The Great Gatsby in the late 1920s, and John Steinbeck rote The Grapes of Wrath a decade later in a very different America. Yet, there are certain perceptions common to both writers, for they are analyzing the American scene and the American character, though from different levels of the social scale. Each novel is motivated by an America-wide crisis. The people depicted in The Great Gatsby have been left without their common anchor in American optimism because of the brutal reality of the First World War and the social turmoil that followed that war, and the people depicted in The Grapes of Wrath have been separated further from the economic optimism of the 1920s, an optimism dashed by Black Tuesday and the crash of the stock market in 1929. Fitzgerald writes about America's aristocratic class, and Steinbeck writes about the people closest to the earth, the farmers and outcasts who find that the upper classes in society have abandoned them in the face of the current crisis.
Between the two World Wars, the major worldwide event was the Great Depression, an event for which the seeds were sown by the First world War and which in turn contributed to many of the forces that would lead to World War II. The Great Depression in the 1930s signaled a world economic disorder that was difficult for the various countries of the world to weather and that presented them with a problem they only dimly understood. Had the nations of the world understood what was happening better, they might have avoided the coming war with a more sound economic policy. Between 1924 and 1929 there was an immense expansion in international loans, but this was not accompanied by a corresponding increase in production, employment, and the international exchange of goods. The era came to an end in a new era of financial failures, and the Great Depression set in produced an era of economic nationalism more intense than had been seen befo...