The Grapes of Wrath

The Grapes of Wrath, the best-known novel by John Steinbeck, published in 1939. It evokes the harshness of the Great Depression and arouses sympathy for the struggles of migrant farmworkers. The book came to be regarded as an American classic.

Plot summary

The narrative, which traces the migration of an Oklahoma Dust Bowl family to California and their subsequent hardships, is interspersed with prose-poem interludes that explain the wider circumstances of the world with which the protagonists contend.

Tom Joad, newly released from prison after serving a sentence for manslaughter, makes his way home, and along the way he is joined by Jim Casy, a former preacher. Tom learns that his family has been evicted from the farm and has moved in with Uncle John. When the two men reach Uncle John’s home, they find the family, enticed by handbills advertising farm-labour jobs, preparing to drive to California. The Joads and Casy head out along Route 66, joining an exodus of poor tenant farmers heading west. They encounter many obstacles on the journey, as well as warnings that the jobs they expect in California are illusory. Grampa and Granma Joad die along the route, and Tom’s elder brother, Noah, decides to abandon the enterprise.

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Upon arrival in California, they find that their trials are far from over. They stop in a migrant encampment, where they speak with a man named Floyd Knowles, who informs them that jobs are scarce, available pay is poor, and families are literally starving to death in the makeshift migrant camps. Connie, the husband of Tom’s pregnant sister, Rose of Sharon (called Rosasharn by her family), abandons her. When a man arrives seeking workers to pick fruit, Floyd asks for the proposed wages in writing. A policeman accuses him of communism and tries to arrest him. A fight breaks out, and, when the policeman shoots at the fleeing Floyd, Casy knocks him out. Casy is arrested, and the Joad family heads to another town, where they are met by a hostile crowd gathered to keep “Okies”—migrants from Oklahoma and nearby states—away. However, they later find the government-run camp Weedpatch, which is kept clean and organized by committees of residents, and Tom finds work.

After a month in the camp, Ma Joad declares that they must move on because of the scarcity of work. They soon are offered jobs picking peaches, but the pay is so low that they cannot afford an adequate dinner. Tom finds Casy, who is now organizing striking peach pickers—the Joad family was hired to be strikebreakers. A group of men approach the meeting under cover of darkness, and one of them strikes Casy with a pick handle, killing him. An enraged Tom kills that man before returning to his family. Fearful that Tom will be arrested, the Joads leave the peach farm.

They subsequently find good work picking cotton, as well as a home in a boxcar that they share with another family. Tom, who has gone into hiding, decides to become a labour organizer. When the season for cotton ends, the Joads again struggle to find work. Endless rains cause flooding, and Rose of Sharon’s baby is stillborn. When the rising waters begin to fill the boxcar, the Joad family leaves. They soon reach a barn, in which they find a small boy and a starving man. The book ends with Rose of Sharon feeding the man her breast milk.

Analysis and reception

The families and workers are exploited by organized business, and Steinbeck uses Christian religious imagery to press his arguments that using cropland as a source of profit for business rather than food for people causes widespread suffering and that political and spiritual unity is necessary to overcome the forces causing the dispossession of farmworkers. Ultimately, the migrants learn to rely on one another, and the insularity of the Joads—Ma’s obsession with family togetherness, Tom’s self-centredness, and Rose of Sharon’s materialism—gives way to a sense of universal community, a shift from an emphasis on “I” to “we.”

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Steinbeck masterfully depicted the struggle to retain dignity and to preserve the family in the face of disaster, adversity, and vast, impersonal commercial influences. He based his epic on his visits to the migrant camps and tent cities of the workers, seeing firsthand the horrible living conditions of migrant families. His novel, with its easily accessible, colloquial style, was widely welcomed and hailed by working-class readers, though it was just as widely panned by business and government officials who took umbrage at its socialist overtones and denounced it as “communist propaganda”; some local areas, including Kern County, California, where the Joad family settles, branded the book libelous and even burned copies of it and banned it from libraries and schools. Nonetheless, it was the top-selling novel of 1939, and it won a Pulitzer Prize in 1940, the year of John Ford’s acclaimed film adaptation of the book. The Grapes of Wrath also did much to earn the author the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962. Steinbeck plainly stated his purpose in writing the novel: “I want to put a tag of shame on the greedy bastards who are responsible for this [the Depression and the plight of the worker].”