The Grapes of Wrath (Penguin Classics)

For whatever reason, I started this book several years ago and did not finish it. I think I was reading too quickly and it did not draw me in. My daughter had to read it so I got an audio version for a road trip the two of us went on. The reader nailed it. He read slowly and had far better voices than my own mind conjured up. After that, I read some chapters at a much slower pace, and what a difference that made. So, that is all I want to add to what others may have written. Over the top fantastic book.

Few novels portray the Hunger of the human spirit with more compassion and talent than Grapes. This was Steinbecks strong suit. Say what you will about his leftist, "Socialist", leanings, I believe Poore said it best; "Steinbeck didn't need the Nobel Prize the Nobel judges needed him." Poore concluded: "His place in [U.S.] literature is secure. And it lives on in the works of innumerable writers who learned from him how to present the forgotten man unforgettably." And this, Steinbecks masterpeaice, remains their blueprint.

"Ya gotta eat..." Dad used uto say if we thanked him for taking to the local hamburger stand; he could have, just as easily, been stating the obvious theme of Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath. One can easily imagine Tom Joad or, more to the point, his sister Rosasharon saying it in her "sharing" scene in the closing pages of the book. I read this book, the first time, in sophomore study hall just before lunch in small town Wisconsin; largely as a result of the wretched deprivations depicted in the book, I remember rushing home, sure I would starve to death if I didn't immediately ingest the bowl of soup and sandwich my mother had waiting for me. As the Joad family move out of Dustbowl Oklahoma toward the promised land of California, the Joads must survive on fried dough and unripe fruit (from which they are warned they may "get the skitters"); Along the way they meet tragedy and, in most cases, their dreams of a better life are smashed like last year's fallen fruit...And, yet, they still hope for the best. Maybe the next Hooverville will be different, maybe the next fruit ranch; if they could only make it there. Government offered little or no help. Long before the rest of the nation hit the skids, farmers were getting the short end of the stick; they never saw any of the prosperity of the 1920's, and the Dustbowl didn't help either. But Tom Joad sees hope in numbers, "Wherever a guy is hungry, I'll be there...", he says, urging the readers to come along, to fight injustice wherever they can: a challenge as urgent today as when Tom made it in this wonderful book.

If you have not read this book, what are you waiting for? Is it because it was written before you were born? (1939) Does its name scare you, as it did me, into imagining it would be about all sorts of odd things, as I did? Well don't let your preconceived notions fool you. It's a terrific novel. It is a great piece of literature that won Mr. Steinbeck a well-deserved Pulitzer Prize, and eventually, with his other contributions to literature, earned him a Nobel Prize.

What can I say about the Joads that has not already been said in the past sixty-odd years? How could I have missed knowing them earlier? I read this story, with its "country speech" and "country ways" and wanted to take them all in. I wanted to comfort them all. I didn't know what I would find at the Joads when we first meet Tom going home. Who is this Tom Joad Jr. and why was he in jail? He must have had a HORRIBLE life to end up there, he must have. Then you meet the 'fambly.' You live with the 'fambly.' You see proud Pa try so hard to be the head of the home during the Dust Bowl migration. This family, who for generations upon generations, upon generations lived off their land. The land wasn't a piece of property, it was family. It fed them, it housed them. They raised a crop to sell, so they can pay off the loans they took when times were tough before. When the rains stopped coming, and the payments to the bank stopped being made, the 'banks' came and told all these people to leave. Imagine someone coming to tell you that the land you have lived on all your life, the land of your fathers and grandfathers belonged to the banks and you had to leave right now. Imagine the dread. All your life spent in the same place, with the same neighbors, the same strong values; "Yes Sir! Yes Ma'am!" No talking back, everyone knew their place. And then the dust came, and took away everything you knew.


The Joads sell everything they own, load up a beat-up truck with the necessities (food, water, mattresses, clothes, pots, pans) and head towards the promised land of California. Along with 500,000 other displaced people. All looking for land to work; it's all they know. You get land, you work it, it's yours. They had no idea what life outside of Oklahoma was really going to be like.


There's Ma, trying so hard to keep the family strong. She's the backbone. She eventually takes charge, which, back on their farm, was unheard of. Times were changing.


Ma & Pa, 6 kids, Grandma & Grandpa, Uncle John, the Preacher Casey, and Connie, the husband of one of Ma's daughters. Thirteen people in one truck.


I wanted to bring them home, let them eat, give them a hot bath, tell them it'll be ok. I wanted to simultaneously smack the heck out of Rose of Sharon (Rosasharn) and comfort her in the end; tell her she really did do good in God's eyes at that very last paragraph. I saw Ruthie grow in those 7 or 8 months into someone I did not like. She was mean, she was vindictive, she was 7. I saw humanity at its worse. Things like this really did happen in the early 1930's, after the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl. These "Okies" were treated with contempt. They were kicked off their lands, treated like animals, paid meager wages or in some cases, they were paid with a loaf of bread for 16 hours of work, and it's disgusting. How would you fare? What would you be willing to do to feed your starving family?


It's a terrific book. I wish I knew how Noah fared. I wish I knew what happened to that spineless Connie. Is Tom ok? Did he take up the cause that Casey so tragically and instantaneously had taken from him? I imagine so. I imagine Tom forcing these cities who spurned them, who burned them out, who arrested them, to have to accept them; 500,000 strong. If not directly, then inspiring others to go on and on. The packing plants who throw away food, while these people sit outside the gates dying. The orange growers who sprayed kerosene on the overstock of oranges rather than give them away for free. The food thrown in rivers, with armed guards making sure no one took the food. Pigs slaughtered because they could not sell them, and hungry people staring, not understanding that there's a profit to be made.


"And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listening to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quicklime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is a failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage."

Steinbeck's novel of social injustice was from the beginning considered a Great American Novel selling over 300,000 copies in its first year, "a phenomenon on the scale of a national event. It was publicly banned and burned by citizens, it was debated on national radio hook-ups; but above all, it was read." Steinbeck scholar John Timmerman sums up the book's impact: "The Grapes of Wrath may well be the most thoroughly discussed novel - in criticism, reviews, and college classrooms - of twentieth century American literature." Within a year John Ford made a major movie starring Henry Fonda and in 1962 the Nobel committee cited The Grapes of Wrath as a "great work" and as one of the committee's main reasons for granting Steinbeck the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Perhaps it's most fundamental message is the equality of life, there is no difference between the poor and rich, other than a bank account, all life is sacred. Treat a poor person with dignity and respect and they will and can do as well as anyone else. It is a timeless message and one that bears constant repeating, although Steinbeck's treatment is a bit folksy and sentimental.

Contemporary critic Carl Van Doren said "This novel did more than any other Depression novel to revise the picture of America as Americans imagined it." The American image of the frontier pioneer moving westward had shifted to the Joad family. The Joads encapsulated the American character and spirit of independence, scrappy can-do hard-working virtuous, an American hero archetype. Martin Seymour-Smith says the work is fundamentally flawed because Steinbeck can not show why the California businessmen's behavior is wrong - after all, they are just trying to make a living, would the Joad's in their shoes have acted any different? "There is a conflict in him [Steinbeck] between the philosophical unanimist and the humane socialist," in other word how the Joad's treat animals (as objects) but demand equality in humans. Thus the books message of all life being sacred, no matter its circumstance, is fundamentally contradicted.

In the end Grapes of Wrath is of epic proportions and a gripping story. It's often seen as the quintessential American novel of the 1930s and certainly one of Steinbeck's best (along with Of Mice and Men).