The family left their farm in Okemah, Okla., on Nov. 6, 1936. Their Chevrolet, deep black with red spoke wheels, pulled a small, two-wheel trailer packed with a new Maytag washing machine, clothes, tools, canned fruit, a farming journal and a wedding album. The three young boys stared at the buttery-pale landscape out the back window. The three adults focused on the road ahead.

The Bras family had less than $100 when they set out, six in the car, for California. They had lived through floods, followed by drought and dust storms. Finally, the bank took possession of their 80-acre farm.

The Bras family moved across country, from despair to poverty, from living in a tent in Visalia and picking cotton until their hands swelled, to finding that better life. It mirrors the story that American novelist John Steinbeck told through the Joad family in “The Grapes of Wrath,” published 75 years ago this month.

“I call myself a ‘Grapes of Wrath’ kid,” said Jack Bras, the oldest of the three boys, who is now 85 and a retired architect in Pleasanton. “We had a lot of experiences that the Joads had.”

Steinbeck’s story, published April 14, 1939, is immortalized as one of the greatest American novels ever written, with timeless themes of family struggles, poverty, injustice, and the pursuit of an illusory Promised Land. And it is personalized by the real-life Joads — or “Okies” — who lost everything they had, left everything they knew, and fought against all odds for a better life.

The Steinbeck story resonates across the Bay Area and California, where these migrants — once marginalized and shunned — are now proud to be called Okies.

“What he wrote about in ‘The Grapes of Wrath’ is timeless,” said Thom Steinbeck, John Steinbeck’s only living son. “There are always going to be Okies.”

Filmmaker Ken Burns, whose documentary “The Dust Bowl” tells the story of the calamitous Oklahoma dust storms that caused the diaspora of refugees, said, “Everything about this story — Steinbeck’s story, the story of the Dust Bowl — is with us today. The social upheaval. The refugees. The obvious environmental cautionary tale. The heroic story of human perseverance.”

Historian Kevin Starr, who has written a multivolume series of books on the history of California, said, “.‘The Grapes of Wrath’ is one of the 10 great American novels. It’s also a book that helps California define itself. It’s a masterpiece of California literature, and helped bring an awareness of California to the rest of the world.”

John Ernst Steinbeck, born in 1902 in the farming town of Salinas, lived in Los Gatos while writing “The Grapes of Wrath.” The book had roots in a seven-part series of articles, “The Harvest Gypsies,” which Steinbeck wrote in 1936 for the pro-labor newspaper, San Francisco News.

At the time, hundreds of thousands of Dust Bowl refugees had arrived in California from the Central Plains. Steinbeck traveled to the makeshift labor camps — the “ragtowns” or “Hoovervilles,” as he called them — with Tom Collins of the San Francisco office of the Farm Security Administration to report on the squalid conditions and human woes. The Dorothea Lange’s photographs that appeared with Steinbeck’s articles are classics as well.

In a “Voice of America” radio interview after the publication of the book was published, Steinbeck said, “When I wrote ‘The Grapes of Wrath,’ I was filled with certain angers at people who were doing injustices to other people.” He believed that the migrants who came to the Golden State would “change things almost as much as did the coming of the first American settlers.”

The publication of “The Grapes of Wrath” was met with both praise and condemnation as well as praise. The book was banned and burned, but sold 428,900 hardcover copies in the first year. Eleanor Roosevelt went to visit the migrant camps and later defended Steinbeck’s portrayal as accurate. Congressional hearings were held on the conditions of migrant workers, and labor laws were changed. The book won the Pulitzer Prize in 1940, was made into a film starring Henry Fonda, and was the cornerstone of Steinbeck’s 1962 Nobel Prize.

“The book was so controversial when it was first published,” said San Jose State Professor Susan Shillinglaw.

“People thought the book was communist,” said Shillinglaw, a scholar at the National Steinbeck Center in Salinas and Steinbeck biographer whose most recent book is “On Reading The Grapes of Wrath.” “It was banned in the San Jose Public Library. It was burned in Salinas. There was a countywide ban in Bakersfield. Critics said he exaggerated conditions. It’s almost like the migrant story today. What is the truth of living in squalor? This was the book that put poverty in everybody’s face.”