John Steinbeck observed the plight of the dispossessed --the Okies--during the Great Depression and then wrote the epic Novel, "The Grapes of Wrath." The first half of "Steinbeck's bitter fruit" details his observations of the Depression years of the 1930s--the second half shows how close we may still be to the dark decade of the 1930s .The "bitter fruit" in the title are the grapes in "The Grapes of Wrath".