I hadn’t read John Steinbeck’s magnum opus since high school until rereading it while compiling my current list. What I found is that The Grapes of Wrath still packs a punch: a realist novel intended as a kind of exposé of the trials and hardships of the hundreds of thousands of “Okies”—poor farmers from the Great Plains driven from their Dust Bowl homes in the mid-1930s—who poured into California following the promise of work and finding scorn, abuse and hatred from the residents and exploitation, corruption and abuse from employers and law enforcement in this fallen “Eden.” Steinbeck had written a series of articles for the San Francisco News in October of 1936 entitled “The Harvest Gypsies,” in which he discussed the plight of migrant workers in California. He was so angry at what he learned that he was inspired to tell the story of these displaced Americans in a novel that would, as he out it, “rip a reader’s nerves to rags.” And chiefly, he proclaimed, he wanted “to put a tag of shame on the greedy bastards who are responsible” for the situation.
Steinbeck’s righteous anger kindled an equal fervor among the reading public, both in sympathy with his presentation of the workers’ plight and the inevitable backlash it inspired. The Associated Farmers of California condemned the book as “communist propaganda,” while others decried his description of conditions in the migrant camps, or “Hoovervilles” as they are called in the book, saying such descriptions were exaggerations of the difficulties there made purely for political purposes. Steinbeck, however, had visited such camps while composing the novel and defended the accuracy of his depiction. So did Eleanor Roosevelt, who visited the migrant camps herself in 1940 and told reporters “I have never thought The Grapes of Wrath was exaggerated.” She also called for congressional hearings on the question, and the Senate, led by Robert M. La Follette, concurred with Steinbeck and the First Lady, finding that, if Steinbeck may actually have underestimated the human rights violations inflicted on the migrants in California.
Largely as a result of these controversies, the novel sold half a million copies during its first year, making it the best-selling novel of 1039. It also won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize in 1940 and Hollywood, fresh from the unprecedented success of Gone With the Wind, very quickly found itself in a bidding war among the larger studios for the rights to the novel. Daryl F. Zanuck won the bidding war for 20th Century Fox and the film was rushed into production, in time to be nominated for Best Picture of 1940. Directed by John Ford and starring Henry Fonda as Steinbeck’s protagonist Tom Joad, with John Carradine as the novel’s Christ figure Jim Casy, and Jane Darwell as Ma Joad, the film won two Oscars: Ford for Best Director and Darwell as Best Supporting Actress. The film’s success only augmented the novel’s popularity, and eventually the book has gone on to sell an estimated 15 million copies, and so become, at one time anyway, a staple in American high school English curricula. And it was largely on the basis of this single novel that Steinbeck was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1962.
Despite—or perhaps because of—the controversy it invoked in its time, The Grapes of Wrath has been honored by its inclusion on many of the “Top 100” book lists of recent years. I appeared as number 10 on the Modern Library’s list of the Greatest English Language Novels of the 20th Century. It also appeared on Time Magazine’s best books since 1923 list, as well as the Guardian’s list of the greatest English language novels of all time. In 2003, on the BBC’s “Big Read” survey, UK readers voted Steinbeck’s classic number 29 on their 100 favorite books, while in 2018, on PBS “Great American Read” survey, Americans voted The Grapes of Wrath as number 12 on their favorite books list. Penguin Classics’ “100 Must-Read Classics, as Chosen by Our Readers,” The Grapes of Wrath came in as number 46. In 2009, the London Daily Telegraph published a list of “100 Novels Everyone Should Read,” including Steinbeck’s book as number 28. In 1999, the French newspaper Le Monde ranked the “100 Best Books of the 20th Century,” and they ranked The Grapes of Wrath as number 7—the highest ranking of any English language novel on their list. And on the “Greatest Books of All Time” website, which gives an aggregate of 375 different “Great Books” lists, The Grapes of Wrath ranks as number 10 among English language novels. And finally, of course, it’s listed here as book #79 (alphabetically) on my list of the “100 Most Lovable Novels in the English Language.”
The book is structured with typically alternating chapters: one that describes the general situation of the dust bowl crisis (failed crops, soil erosion and bank foreclosures), or the migrant workers heading west to California (some two and a half million of the dispossessed), or the animosity of workers, farmers, or law enforcement in the face of this great influx of economic refugees, facing the same kinds of difficulties as other immigrant groups; followed by another, longer chapter narrating the fictional story of the Joad family of Oklahoma, caught in this great upheaval.
The story begins as Tom Joad is returning home to Sallisaw, Oklahoma after four years in prison after killing a man in self-defense. He meets Jim Casy, a former preacher Tom remembers who is also returning to the area. They find the Joad homestead deserted, and met a neighbor named Muley who tells them all the sharecroppers have been evicted by the banks and moved away. The Joad family are nearby at Tom’s uncle John’s home preparing to leave, but Muley refuses to go. When Tom and Casy get to Uncle John’s house, they find Tom’s family loading their possessions into an old truck. They have no option but to move to California to look for work. Tom’s mother and father, grandmother and grandfather, brothers Noah and Al and pregnant sister Rose of Sharon with her husband Connie, two younger children Ruthie and Winfield, and Uncle John, will all head west on the truck, and Tom invites Casy to come along.
As the Joads travel west on Route 66, they spend nights in makeshift camps and hear disheartening stories from folks returning from California who did not find it the promised land. they also have to deal with the deaths of grandpa and grandma, and their desertion by Connie and by Noah. While Pa is overwhelmed by conditions and frustrated by his lack of control, Ma Joad steps in and holds the family together, which she sees as the highest good in this difficult time. “She seemed to know that if she swayed the family shook,” Steinbeck writes. “And if she ever really deeply wavered or despaired the family would fall, the family will to function would be gone.”
California proves to be a nightmare. There is far too much labor for the jobs that need doing, and the great landowners exploit the situation by cutting wages to starvation levels because the most desperate of the laborers. Smaller farmers are suffering from falling prices, and if they wish to pay good workers a fair wage, the farmers’ association, run by the big corporations, forces them to pay the standard low wage. Law enforcement is in the pockets of the rich growers. The Joads are frustrated at every turn, but every once in a while someone will surprise them with kindness. “If you’re in trouble or hurt or need–go to poor people. They’re the only ones that’ll help–the only ones,” Ma says at one point, and later: “Our people are good people; our people are kind people. Pray God some day kind people won’t all be poor.”
At the first migrant camp the Joads stay at on their arrival in California, Casy is arrested by a deputy sheriff he has interfered with to keep him from shooting a fleeing worker. Later, when the Joads are hired by a peach orchard asl strikebreakers, Tom touches base once more with Casy, who is now organizing workers into a union. There is a serious confrontation coming between the authorities and the organized workers, and rather than tell you what ultimately happens to Casy and Tom, and what happens after the birth of Rose of Sharon’s baby would be to engage in a lot of spoilers for those of you who have not read the book, so I’ll leave it there.
In the end, The Grapes of Wrath touches us through Steinbeck’s deep conviction of a social injustice that many of his fellow Californians were a party to. Having been born on a farm himself, Steinbeck felt a great empathy with the victims of the economic hardships of the “dust bowl” days. But the issues of the novel remain relevant even today, some 85 years after its publication. The ever-growing gap between the wealthy and the lower classes, particularly those who work for an inadequate minimum wage. The rights of workers in a time when unions have virtually disappeared from the American landscape, and the plight of the workers who harvest our food, are all issues the book forces us to consider—as well as the tendency to demonize immigrants or any “others” who move into our communities. The book’s title—taken from the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” (which took it from the Book of Revelation)—suggests a reckoning that Steinbeck sees coming if these issues are not addressed: “and in the eyes of the people there is the 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.”
There is also, as these images suggest, a religious undercurrent in the novel. The flight from the dust bowl to the promised land of California echoes the biblical Exodus, and like the Israelites in the Land of Canaan, the Okies have battles to fight before they can win the land. Jim Casy (J.C) is a Christ figure—a lapsed preacher who rejects the Pharisees of his time, whose religion is one of judgment and not love: “The hell with it!” he says. “There ain’t no sin and there ain’t no virtue. There’s just stuff people do. It’s all part of the same thing. And some of the things folks do is nice, and some ain’t nice, but that’s as far as any man got a right to say.” And he chooses love, ending up trying to organize the workers so that they can live. Like Christ, he will be a sacrifice, whose last words, like Christ’s, are “You don’t know what you’re doin’!” And finally there is Rose of Sharon, who frankly hasn’t been much more than a whiny teenage girl through most of the novel, but who rises in the end to a personification of the all-merciful Mother of
God by the end.
In a university class I have been auditing with my daughter this semester focusing on American history in the Great Depression and World War II, the professor asked the class how many of them had read The Grapes of Wrath. When my daughter and I—both of us a good deal older than the traditional students in the class—were the only ones to raise our hands, I was deeply chagrined. If people don’t read such books, how can they ever develop a sense of empathy? If you haven’t read the Grapes of Wrath, please restore my faith in the younger generation and do so real soon.