(CAPITOL CITY NOW) – Most of us read The Grapes of Wrath in school. But a University of Illinois English professor emeritus – who has written a book about Depression-era literature – says that’s only the beginning.

Steinbeck’s classic is “such a big blockbuster that it erased from our cultural memory lots of other writing from the Great Depression about the Great Depression,” said Robert Dale Parker, adding his book “recovers dozens of forgotten writers, or forgotten works by remembered writers, about the suffering of the Great Depression that we have simply forgotten.”

The works referenced in Parker’s The Literature of Extreme Poverty in the Great Depression, almost without exception, have no happy endings.

“We don’t necessarily always want to see the most wonderful things happening,” said Parker. “We are interested in conflict. We are interested in suffering, and we’re interested sometimes in hope. But if it is all hope all the time, it starts to seem false to our experience.”