The Grapes of Wrath
by John Steinbeck
Summary
Tom Joad comes home from prison on parole to find the Oklahoma tenant farm empty, the family evicted, and the land going under the tractor. The Joads, three generations of them plus Jim Casy, a preacher who has lost his calling, load everything onto a truck and take Route 66 for California, where the handbills promise picking work and good wages.
The handbills are a lie, and the novel is the discovery of how the lie works. Grampa and Granma die on the road. The family arrives into a labour market deliberately flooded so that wages collapse, into roadside camps and a clean federal one, into deputies, vigilantes and growers who need the migrants desperate. Casy, who has been working out a rough theology of solidarity the whole way, leads a strike and is killed for it, and Tom, who kills the man who kills him, has to vanish. His farewell to Ma is the most quoted passage in American protest literature.
Between the chapters Steinbeck sets short panoramic interchapters, the dust, the used car lots, a land turtle crossing a road, that widen one family's story into a national one.
It ends in a flooded barn with Rose of Sharon, her baby stillborn, nursing a starving stranger: an image readers have argued about since 1939 and nobody has improved on.
Around four hundred and fifty pages, plain, driving prose.
Best for readers who want the great American novel of dispossession, angrier than its reputation and better written than its imitators.
Historical Context & Significance
The Grapes of Wrath won the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel in 1940 and the National Book Award, and its publication in 1939 was a national event: 430,000 copies were in print by February 1940, denunciations from Congress and California growers, and copies publicly banned and burned. Those suppression campaigns helped push the American Library Association toward the Library Bill of Rights. Nothing about the anger was abstract; Steinbeck had reported on the migrant camps for years.
John Ford's 1940 film with Henry Fonda arrived within months and became a classic alongside the book rather than instead of it.
When the Swedish Academy gave Steinbeck the Nobel Prize in 1962 this was the work the Swedish Academy singled out, and it has anchored his reputation through every fluctuation since: the sales never stopped, the assignments in schools never stopped, and neither did the challenges to it, which have kept it on banned book lists ever since publication.