“A gentle wind followed the rain clouds, driving them on northward, a wind that softly clashed the drying corn,” wrote John Steinbeck in Chapter 1 of “The Grapes of Wrath,” his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel charting the stormy upheaval faced by those who toiled on the American prairie in the 1930s. “Little by little,” he wrote, “the sky was darkened by the mixing dust, and the wind felt over ...