The story
The Grapes of Wrath, published by Viking Press on April 14, 1939, follows the Joad family, tenant farmers evicted from their Oklahoma land, as they drive Route 66 to California in a battered truck in search of work. Along the way, Tom Joad, recently released from prison, and his mother Ma Joad hold the family together while the former preacher Jim Casy turns to organizing workers. In California they find low pay, hostility and exploited labor.
John Steinbeck, a California writer, had reported on migrant farm laborers in a series of articles for the San Francisco News in 1936, 'The Harvest Gypsies', and visited the camps. The book grew out of the Dust Bowl, the drought and wind erosion that ruined farms across the Great Plains, and the Great Depression, which pushed hundreds of thousands of people west. Its structure alternates the Joad story with short interchapters on the larger economic forces. The title comes from the Battle Hymn of the Republic.
The novel was a bestseller and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1940, and John Ford's film version with Henry Fonda followed the same year. It was also attacked: some Oklahoma and California officials and large growers called it propaganda, and it was banned and burned in places such as Kern County, California. Eleanor Roosevelt defended its accuracy after visiting migrant camps. Steinbeck received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1962, and the book is still taught widely in the United States.
Why it mattered
- The novel brought the plight of migrant farm workers to national attention and fed support for camps and labor protections.
- It became the central literary record of the Dust Bowl migration, with the word 'Okie' tied to it.
- John Ford's 1940 film made its images of the road west part of American memory.
- Its anger at corporate agriculture influenced later protest writing and the farmworker movement.
Sources
- The Grapes of Wrath (Students) Britannica
- John Steinbeck, biographical Nobel Prize
Community notes
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