Don’t look now, but Tom Joad is on Twitter, and Adam Trask has a webpage. If those two names seem vaguely familiar to you, it’s probably because they are characters in a pair of American literature classics written by John Steinbeck. Joad is the protagonist in The Grapes of Wrath, and Trask is a wealthy Salinas Valley ranch owner in East of Eden.
Students in Jocelyn Ellis’s pre-Advanced Placement English class at HISD’s Carnegie Vanguard High School are creating the characters’ Twitter exchanges, websites, and even Pinterest pages as part of a class project.