The Grapes of Wrath
JOHN STEINBECK
1939

INTRODUCTION

The Grapes of Wrath (1939) shines light into the darkest corners of the American dream. It is John Steinbeck's greatest novel and an undisputed American classic, but upon publication, the book garnered immediate attention and fierce controversy. It soared to the top of bestseller lists, sold almost half a million hardcover copies, and received scores of positive reviews. A year later, the book was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. An indicator of its enduring significance is the fact that, since its publication, The Grapes of Wrath has sold more than fifteen million copies.

Steinbeck was inspired to write the novel after researching and producing a series of articles for the San Francisco News about migrant workers in California. He reported on the hundreds of thousands of families that fled drought- and dust-ravaged farms in the Midwest to earn money as fruit, vegetable, and cotton pickers in California's fertile fields. Masses of fleeing workers endured a treacherous trek west only to find little work and unfair wages when they arrived. The onslaught of desperate, poverty-stricken people created a situation of unrivaled tension, violence, and want. Steinbeck saw the germ of an epic story and began taking notes and plotting its development while he wrote the seven newspaper articles he had been assigned to write.

Steinbeck's masterpiece is more than a tale of the plight of migrant farm workers, though. It is, according to critic Robert DeMott, "part naturalistic epic, part labor testament, part family chronicle, part partisan journalism, part environmental jeremiad, part captivity narrative, part road novel, part transcendental gospel." In the introduction to the 2006 Penguin Classics edition, DeMott quotes a radio interview in 1939, in which Steinbeck explained,

Boileau said that Kings, Gods, and Heroes only were fit subjects for literature. The writer can only write about what he admires. Present day kings aren't very inspiring, the gods are on a vacation, and about the only heroes left are the scientists and the poor…. And since our race admires gallantry, the writer will deal with it where he finds it. He finds it in the struggling poor now.

Part of what makes The Grapes of Wrath such an enduring success is the fact that as history and culture evolve and change, Steinbeck's novel, an ode to the gallant struggling poor, remains steadily and forcefully relevant. Americans still go hungry in a land of great riches. Americans still seek spiritual comfort and the hope that it brings. Americans still understand that if one human suffers, we all suffer. More specifically and somewhat shockingly, migrant farm workers still struggle to make ends meet by doing backbreaking work in unsafe conditions for very little money. Over the decades, The Grapes of Wrath has been named by such cultural luminaries as Edward R. Murrow, César Chávez, and Bruce Springsteen as a critical influence on their professional and personal lives. Gerald Haslam, a California writer, says, "The great, the ennobling theme of Steinbeck's work—we are a human family, together in this, and collectively we can transcend life's challenges—reached into me and stretched my soul."

In fact, the novel had an immediate and intense impact on American political affairs at the time of its publication. Steinbeck was branded a communist and a troublemaker by California landowners seeking to discredit his work. Oklahoman political leaders sought to ban The Grapes of Wrath for its supposed derogatory view of migrant workers. Others saw the raw, rough language spoken by its protagonists as profane and attempted to censor it. Despite what its detractors had to say, and continue to say about it, The Grapes of Wrath is etched into America's collective literary and cultural conscience, while the controversy it once created is little more than a footnote.

BIOGRAPHY

JOHN STEINBECK

John Ernst Steinbeck was born on February 27, 1902, in Salinas, California, to parents of modest means. Steinbeck spent childhood summers working as a hired ranch hand, which gave the future author a profound appreciation for the California landscape and its people. Although he took a series of writing and literature courses at Stanford University from 1919 until 1925, he never earned a degree. While living in New York City and working on his first novel, Cup of Gold, Steinbeck worked as a laborer and journalist. After the novel was published in 1929, Steinbeck and his new wife moved to Pacific Grove, California, where the author continued to write and publish. Not until the publication of Tortilla Flat in 1935 was Steinbeck able to claim financial security and popular success as a writer. The late 1930s found the author writing about the California labor class in In Dubious Battle (1936), Of Mice and Men (1937), and the novel many consider his finest work, The Grapes of Wrath (1939). The book was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1940 and served as the basis for the decision to award Steinbeck the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962. He wrote a total of seventeen novels and was nominated for an Academy Award for screenwriting in his career. Steinbeck died on December 20, 1968, of heart disease in New York City.

PLOT SUMMARY

Chapter 1

The Oklahoma soil becomes cracked and parched during a long summer drought. The cornfields dry up and the wind fills the air with dust. The ruined crops lay covered in dust and the men become silent. Their wives and children look to see if the men will break and are relieved to see that they are "hard and angry and resistant," a sure sign that they will not break.

Chapter 2

Tom Joad has just been released from the McAlester State Penitentiary where he served four years for killing a man. Wearing stiff new clothes, he convinces a driver with a "No Riders" sign on his car to drive him a short way to his family's farm. Having been away and out of touch with his family for the length of his sentence, he is unaware of the fact that most farmers in the area have either been "dusted out" or "tractored out" of their farms. The driver tells him, "Croppers going fast now…. One cat' takes and shoves ten families out." The driver talks about how lonely it gets on the road and asks Tom about himself. Tom admits that he has been in prison. "Homicide…. That's a big word—means I killed a guy. Seven years. I'm sprung in four for keepin' my nose clean." The driver lets him out along a dirt road leading to the Joad farm.

Chapter 3

A turtle makes its way along the scorching highway. A woman swerves to avoid the creature, but a man in a truck aims to hit it. The turtle flips over, rolls off the highway, and resumes its journey.

Chapter 4

Tom discovers the turtle, wraps it in his coat, and carries it with him. He comes upon a tattered old man that he recognizes as Jim Casy, the preacher who baptized Tom when he was a boy. Casy relates the story of how he decided to stop preaching, saying that his habit of taking girls "out in the grass" after church caused him to feel so conflicted, he began to doubt his faith. After much thought, Casy decides, "Maybe all men got one big soul ever 'body's a part of."

Tom tells Casy why he went to jail: "I killed a guy in a fight. We was drunk at a dance. He got a knife in me, an' I killed him with a shovel that was layin' there. Knocked his head plumb to squash." He talks about the niceties of prison, clean clothes and regular meals, and tells a story about a fellow inmate who preferred the conveniences of the jail to life on the outside. When Tom prepares to move on, Casy asks if he can come along. Tom welcomes him, saying his family always thought highly of the man when he was their preacher. When they get to the Joad place they find it deserted.

Chapter 5

Because the farms are tenant-farmed, they are not owned by the farmers that live on them. This means that the landowners and the banks have the right to evict the farmers from the land. They come onto the land and tell the "tenant men" they have to get off the land. "The tenant system won't work any more. One man on a tractor can take the place of twelve or fourteen families," the narrator explains. Some owners are cruel, some are kind, but they all come bearing the same bad news. When the farmers ask what they are supposed to do, the owners suggest they head west to California where there is work. Tractors driven by neighbors earning three dollars a day arrive on the land. They have orders to plow down the property, including the house, whether the farmers have left or not. When the displaced farmer asks who gave the orders to plow his land, that he wants to shoot him, he is told, "I don't know. Maybe there's nobody to shoot. Maybe the thing isn't men at all. Maybe, like you said, the property's doing it."

Chapter 6

When Tom and Casy find the Joad homestead untouched they assume the neighbors have abandoned the area, too. Muley Graves comes along and explains what has happened to the Joad homestead. He tells Tom that some company has bought up all the land in the area and kicked out all the farmers. He says that Tom's whole family is living with Tom's Uncle John, picking cotton in hopes of earning enough money to buy a car and drive to California. Muley shares the rabbits he has caught with Tom and Casy and, after they eat, they go to the cave where Muley sleeps. They have to be careful the police do not catch them on the land and arrest them for trespassing. Tom is bewildered by the idea of being arrested for sleeping on his own farm and Casy is unable to sleep for thinking of all he has learned that night.

Chapter 7

This section is narrated by a used car salesman. He describes the many ways he cheats poor families seeking transportation for their trek westward. He brags about filling engines full of sawdust to hide transmission problems and replacing working batteries with cracked ones. The farmers are easily duped as they know little about cars and are desperate to buy.

Chapter 8

Casy, Muley, and Tom walk the several miles to Uncle John's house. On the way, Tom describes his uncle's guilt about not calling a doctor when his pregnant wife complained of stomach pains many years prior. When she died, he blamed himself and has never been able to get over the loss. To repent, he performs random acts of generosity, like giving candy to children and bags of meal to needy neighbors. These acts do nothing to assuage his guilt.

Tom is reunited with his family at Uncle John's. Neither of his parents recognizes him at first, and both then express their fear that he has broken out of jail. He explains that he has been paroled and that he will be able to join them on their trip to California. His mother asks, "They didn't do nothin' in that jail to rot you out with crazy mad?" He answers, "I was for a little while. But I ain't proud like some fellas. I let stuff run off'n me." He greets fiery Grampa and Granma Joad and slow brother Noah and they gather to share a breakfast that Casy blesses with a non-traditional prayer. After they eat, Pa Joad shows Tom the truck Tom's younger brother Al helped him pick out. The sixteen-year-old arrives soon after, full of admiration for Tom. Tom learns that his youngest siblings, Ruthie and Winfield, have gone to town with Uncle John and that their sister, Rose of Sharon, has married a neighbor boy, Connie, and is expecting her first child.

Chapter 9

This very short chapter describes how "tenant people" go about preparing for the trek to California. They face the heartbreaking task of deciding which of "their belongings and the belongings of their fathers and their grandfathers" to leave behind or sell to raise money for the trip. The farmers are forced to accept ridiculously low sums for farm equipment and good work horses because the buyers understand that the desperate men are in no position to demand more. Even the most sentimental items must be left behind, sold, or destroyed before the families leave their farms for good.

Chapter 10

Ma Joad tells Tom she is worried about what the family will find in California, although she trusts what the handbill she read says about their being able to find work. Pa Joad returns from town feeling dejected after selling off the family's belongings for a mere eighteen dollars. The family gathers and decides to take Casy with them on the trip. They do not see any point in waiting to pack, so they set about the task immediately. First, they slaughter the pigs and pack the meat in salt. Casy offers to help Ma pack the meat, but she claims it is woman's work. He replies, "They's too much of it split it up to men's or women's work. You got stuff to do." Connie and Rose of Sharon arrive, and the family prepares to leave, then Grampa claims he plans to stay and live off the land. The family laces his coffee with a sleeping tonic, waits until he has fallen asleep, then loads him onto the truck along with the rest of the family and all that they own. Their journey westward begins.

Chapter 1l

The land is vacant once the farmers abandon it. Men on tractors come and work the land, but they have no connection to it. "The machine man, driving a dead tractor on land he does not know and love, understands only chemistry; and he is contemptuous of the land and of himself." Gophers, field mice, weasels, cats, and brown owls take over the abandoned farmhouses, which quickly fall apart.

Chapter 12

Highway 66 is packed with families headed to California. They are cheated by salesmen when they try and buy car parts and are met with hostility when they stop at service stations for gas and water. But they also witness moments of hopeful beauty. "The people in flight from the terror behind—strange things happen to them, some bitterly cruel and some so beautiful that the faith is refired forever."

Chapter 13

Tom's brother Al, a skilled mechanic, drives the battered and overloaded Hudson, "every nerve listening for weaknesses, for the thumps or squeals, hums and chattering that indicate a change that may cause a breakdown." Al becomes "the soul of the car." When the family stops to rest, their dog gets hit by a car. Rose of Sharon worries that witnessing something so violent will hurt her unborn child. At the end of a long first day of driving, the Joads pull into a ditch to camp beside Ivy and Sairy Wilson, a couple whose car has broken down. The couple is hospitable and warm, and the Joads are grateful for their kindness. Sairy invites Grampa, who has taken ill, to come and rest in their tent. He dies of a stroke while Casy prays over him and the family is forced to bury the old man along the roadside. Al fixes the Wilsons' car and the two families agree to travel to California together.

Chapter 14

Westerners are nervous about the change they feel coming. The "hunger in the stomach, multiplied a million times" is the cause; the result is a mass migration upon their land. The influx of hundreds of thousands of hungry farmers threaten those "who hate change and fear revolution" because they know that the weak, when united with others like themselves, become strong. "The danger is here, for two men are not as lonely and perplexed as one."

Chapter 15

A waitress named Mae and a cook named Al work at a coffee shop along Highway 66. Mae looks forward to the truckers who stop, for they make her laugh, do not steal, and leave the biggest tips. Two of her favorites stop in for pie and coffee and they talk about the mass migration of Midwesterners on the road. A ragged man and two small boys come in asking to buy a loaf of bread for a dime. Mae initially rebuffs the man, saying she needed the bread for sandwiches. Besides, the loaf would cost him fifteen cents. After Al growls at her to give him the loaf, she gives in and takes ten cents for it. The grimy, tired children eye the candy case and their father asks if the "stripy ones" are penny candy. She gives him two for a penny even though they really cost a nickel each. The truck drivers notice her generosity and leave her a huge tip.

Chapter 16

The Joads and the Wilsons drove for so long, "the highway became their home and movement their medium of expression." After three days on the road, the Wilsons' car breaks down again. Tom and Al leave the family to wait for them while they find parts in a car lot in town. Once they find the parts and fix the car, they make their way to a campsite where everyone can rest for the night. A ragged, bitter man tells an assembled group of campers that he is on his way back East after a disastrous experience in California. Although they've been warned they will not find work, Casy tells Pa that the Joads' experience will be different.

Chapter 17

The many families driving the same road and camping along the same springs begin to form little communities. "In the evening a strange thing happened: the twenty families became one family, the children were the children of all." Codes of behavior, laws, and leaders emerge as well as methods of enforcing those laws.

Chapter 18

The Joads and the Wilsons arrive in Needles, California, and pull up to an encampment beside a river. They still have to make their way across the desert before they get to fertile picking fields, so they decide to stop and rest before moving on. While bathing in the river, a father and son tell the men that they are headed back to where they came from as they cannot earn a living in California. They warn the newcomers that the natives will treat them badly and call them "Okies," which "use' ta mean you was from Oklahoma. Now it means you're a dirty son-of-a-bitch. Okie means you're scum." Noah tells Tom that he is not leaving the river, that he will "catch fish an' stuff" to survive. Ma Joad and Rose of Sharon watch over Granma in a makeshift tent because she is sick and hallucinating. A policeman pokes his head in and rudely demands that they move on. The intrusion is very upsetting to Ma, who becomes even more upset after Tom tells her that Noah has left the family to live by the river. When the Joads pack up to cross the desert that night, they are forced to leave the Wilsons behind due to Sairy's failing health. When the family is stopped for a routine inspection, Ma begs the officer to let them go on as her mother is deathly ill. Once they arrive in the valley, Ma tells the family that Granma died early on in the journey. She had lain with the body all the way through the night.

Chapter 19

Once California belonged to Mexico, but American squatters, hungry for land, stole it away from the Mexicans. Once they owned it, they "imported slaves, although they did not call them slaves: Chinese, Japanese, Mexicans, Filipinos," to work it, then paid them slave wages. Then the Okies came and the "soft" California landowners became afraid and their fear turned to hate for the "strong" Okies: "perhaps the owners had heard from their grandfathers how easy it is to steal land from a soft man if you are fierce and hungry and armed." But the Okies only want to feed their families. They plant secret gardens in fallow fields so their children can eat, but when the plants are discovered by deputies, they are destroyed.

Chapter 20

Ma and Pa Joad are forced to leave Granma's body at the coroner's office because they cannot afford to give her a proper burial. They set up camp at a "Hooverville" where they are treated rudely. Tom meets Floyd, who echoes what Tom has heard all along the way: There are no jobs. Floyd warns Tom that anyone who suggests organizing against the landowners will be arrested, labeled a "red," and placed on a blacklist, which ensures the agitator will never find a job. When a contractor arrives seeking workers, Floyd demands a guaranteed wage and a signed contract, an act of defiance that gets him arrested. When he runs off, the deputy shoots, and hits a woman's hand. Casy knocks the deputy unconscious and takes the blame for the scuffle when the police arrive. Casy is taken to jail and the sheriff tells everyone they have to clear out as the camp is scheduled to be burned that night. Connie leaves without telling the family, Uncle John gets drunk, and the family prepares to depart. Rose of Sharon is heartbroken that they have to leave without her husband.

Chapter 21

"The moving, questing people were migrants now." The hostility they face in this new land unites them. The Californians band together in an effort to keep the Okies in their place, but that only makes the migrants angrier.

Chapter 22

The remaining Joads find Weedpatch camp, a government facility where migrants live and govern themselves. Exhausted by the events of the day, they settle into their assigned spot in the dark of night. Tom wakes up first, has breakfast with his neighbors, and walks to their worksite where he is hired to dig a ditch with them. When the rest of the family wakes up, they find their new "home" boasts clean grounds and working toilets and showers, niceties the family has never before experienced. The camp manager visits Ma Joad after the men leave to find work. He is very kind to her, which lifts her spirits and makes her feel like a human being again. The Ladies Committee welcomes Ma and Rose of Sharon to the camp by showing them around and explaining the rules. Pa, Uncle John, and Al look for work all day, but return home unsuccessful.

Chapter 23

Migrant people, despite their many hardships, find little ways to amuse themselves and find some semblance of pleasure. They tell stories and jokes, play music, get drunk, and attend prayer meetings. "The migrant people looked humbly for pleasure on the roads."

Chapter 24

Weedpatch camp officials have been warned that the Farmers' Association plans to infiltrate the Saturday night dance, start a riot, and shut the camp down. The chairman of the camp committee hires a band of men to preempt the riot. Tom is one of those men. The night of the dance, the riot is successfully squelched before it has a chance to start and the guilty instigators are thrown out of the camp without incident. Pa says, "They's change a-comin'. I don' know what. Maybe we won't live to see her. But she's a-comin'." To that, one of the campers relates a story about how when five thousand mountain men in Akron, Ohio, joined a union, the city people threatened to run them out of town. The mountain men demonstrated by marching through town with their rifles on the way to a turkey shoot, and marching back through town when they were finished. "Well, sir, they ain't been no trouble sence then." The storyteller suggests they "git up a turkey shootin' club an' have meetin's ever' Sunday," but nobody responds.

Chapter 25

When large landowners monopolize farming, they ruin more than the lives of the migrants. Unable to compete, small local farmers watch their crops fail or go unpicked because they cannot afford to pay anyone to do it. Their debts mount as the crops decay on the ground. "In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage."

Chapter 26

The Joads have lived in the government camp for almost a month. Work and food are scarce, so Ma Joad decides the family should leave the next morning and look for work elsewhere. While preparing to leave, a man stops to tell them of peach-picking work up the road. When they arrive, they find mobs of angry people and are told they will be paid just five cents for each box of peaches picked. They are desperate, so they take the job. The entire family picks all day and earns a dollar, which must be spent on food for their dinner that evening. After a meager meal, Tom goes to see what the commotion along the roadside is all about. He finds Casy, who explains that workers are striking in opposition of the two-and-a-half cent per box wage they were being paid. The police come, recognize Casy as the leader of the workers, call him a communist, and kill him by smashing his head with a pick handle. Enraged, Tom picks up the weapon, hits Casy's murderer, then flees after being hit in the face. He makes it back to the family tent and relates the story of what happened when they wake up and discover his wounds the next morning. He is afraid he may have killed Casy's attacker. Ma Joad hides Tom in the back of the truck and they leave the peach farm. About twenty miles down the road, Al sees a sign that says, "Cotton Pickers Wanted." They park the truck in a ditch away from a row of railroad boxcars that cotton pickers live in. Tom leaves the family to hide out in a culvert down the way and tells Ma to leave food for him whenever she can.

Chapter 27

Migrants hired to pick cotton must buy cotton-picking sacks for a dollar. Before they even pick one boll, they are already in debt. Sometimes there are so many pickers in one field, workers are unable to pick enough to pay for the sack. To counter the crooked owners who rig the scales, workers sometimes load their sack with rocks.

Chapter 28

The job picking cotton provides the Joads a boxcar to live in and more money than they have had in some time. They have enough to buy new clothes, a tin stove, and meat for supper every night. Ruthie accidentally reveals to another child that her brother killed a man and is hiding out in the woods. Afraid that word will get around, Ma Joad finds Tom and tells him that his secret has been exposed. Although it breaks her heart, she is afraid he will be caught and urges him to leave. He tells her he has decided to organize the people like Casy was doing when he was killed, and for her not to worry about him. The Wainwrights and the Joads celebrate the news that Al Joad and Agnes Wainwright plan to wed. The next morning, the two families arrive at a fresh, twenty-acre cotton field only to find a huge gathering of migrants ahead of them. The entire crop is picked before noon. It begins to rain.

Chapter 29

A gusty downpour soaks the land. Unable to work, people sit in wet clothes waiting for the deluge to end. The water gets into the cars, fouling the carburetors. Some are washed away. Sick, hungry, and cold, the people seek relief by huddling in barns, crouching under sheds, and lying under wet hay. Word comes that there will be no work until spring. The women watch their men's faces, looking to see if they will break. They are relieved to see anger there instead.

Chapter 30

The rains continue. Three days into the storm, Rose of Sharon goes into labor. Pa convinces the men to build a dam to keep the rising water from flooding the boxcar. After an uprooted tree destroys the dam, Pa Joad retreats into the boxcar to find that Rose of Sharon has delivered a stillborn child. After six days of rain, the boxcar begins to flood. The family abandons it and goes in search of dry land. They find a barn sheltering a dying man and a small boy. The man has not eaten in six days and is unable to digest solid food. Ma gives Rose of Sharon a look, and the girl immediately understands that only she can save the man. After asking everyone else to leave, the young girl waves off the starving man's protests, and lovingly suckles him.

THEMES

Protest

The Grapes of Wrath is, at its heart, a protest novel. Steinbeck wrote the book after witnessing firsthand the deplorable situation Dust Bowl migrant families faced in the 1930s. Fueled by outrage, he recorded what he saw. By honestly portraying the situation for what it was, he forced American readers of the late 1930s and early 1940s to see what they would rather turn away from. By framing the characters as archetypes and ordinary heroes, he transformed a particular event in a particular moment in time into a universally moral lesson, one that contemporary readers continue to be influenced by today.

Protest as a way of invoking social and political reform is an inherent American ideal. Examples of individual Americans rebelling against authoritarian forces for the sake of improving society can be traced all the way back to Thomas Paine, one of the first Americans to speak out against injustice. Had Paine and other American revolutionaries not stood up for the greater good, the American colonies would not have become the United States of America. Just as Paine argued for independence from Great Britain, Tom Joad pledges to serve the disenfranchised by standing up to the police and the landowners, just as Jim Casy did. In his famous farewell to his mother, Tom tries to explain what he plans to do now that he understands that "a fella ain't got a soul of his own, but only a piece of a big one." He tells her, "I'll be ever'where—wherever you look. Wherever they's a fight so hungry people can eat, I'll be there. Wherever they's a cop beatin' up a guy, I'll be there." She says she does not understand, and he cannot really explain it, but the reader knows that once Tom leaves his family, he will go on to become an activist, protesting against the indignities forced on desperate workers by forces so large they cannot be seen. Kurt Hochenauer writes in the Midwest Quarterly,

Tom's transition from the private to the public, from an inner, intuitive sense of morality to an outward expression of that morality, parallels the exemplary American man embedded in the rhetoric of one of America's first social rebels, Thomas Paine. As an augmentation of Paine's rhetoric, Tom further mythologizes rebellion and protest as the natural right of all Americans.

In chapter 14, Steinbeck writes, "This is the beginning—from 'I' to 'we.'" This phrase expresses the foundation of organized protest, the transformation of individual anger into community action. When Tom, like Paine, recognizes that he is merely a part of a larger whole, and that the whole shares his frustrations, his pain and anger, he understands that he is no longer alone. Although the forces against him loom large and are, for the most part, invisible, he has dignity and justice on his side. In chapter 20, Tom becomes incensed after Casy is unfairly taken to jail:

"Ma," he said, "if it was the law they was workin' with, why, we could take it. But it ain't the law. They're a-workin' away at our spirits. They're a-tryin' to make us cringe an' crawl like a whipped bitch. They tryin' to break us. Why, Jesus Christ, Ma, they comes a time when the on'y way a fella can keep his decency is by takin' a sock at a cop."

Tom refers to the larger family of man when he refers to "us" in this passage. As the narrator points out in chapter 17, "twenty families become one family" on the road to California. Once they get there, the families seem to multiply to include the entire human race. By the end of the novel, Tom has become Paine's American man, a man that, according to Paine's The Crisis (1776), "can gather strength from distress and grow brave by reflection … but he whose heart is firm, and whose conscience approves his conduct will pursue his principles unto death." Thanks in large part to the examples set by the quietly rebellious Ma Joad and obviously moral Jim Casy, Tom's new identity is forged by his experiences as well as the influence of his activist mentors.

Human Dignity

Tom Joad's transformation is based on his newfound belief that every man, woman, and child deserves to live in dignity, no matter how rich or poor they may be. But Tom is not the only character bent on rising above the shame of his situation. The theme of human dignity is a constant thread running through The Grapes of Wrath, and indeed, through the American dream. The Joads and their cohorts do not ask for favors—in fact, many firmly resist favors—but they all stand firm in their belief in their basic human rights to decency, dignity, and pride.

America's Founding Fathers stated the American ideal plainly when they declared independence from Great Britain in 1776: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." They defined the ideal of human rights more clearly in 1789 with the Bill of Rights, including the Eighth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: "Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted." Together, the self-evident truth that all are created equal, the right to pursue happiness, and the protection from cruel punishment guarantee every American the right to stand tall and expect fair treatment; while the Okies get no such treatment, they refuse to bow.

Although they are bewildered and confused, they refuse to be beaten by the unseen forces that have stripped them of their homes and futures. Instead, the migrants infuse their every action with decency and pride, refusing to let their dignity be taken from them, too. When Grampa dies in a stranger's tent on the side of the road, Granma summons all the pride she can muster rather than let the situation defeat her:

Sairy took Granma by the arm and led her outside, and Granma moved with dignity and held her head high. She walked for the family and held her head straight for the family. Sairy took her to a mattress lying on the ground and sat her down on it. And Granma looked straight ahead, proudly, for she was on show now.

The frequent use of the words pride or proud signals its increased currency among folks with very little to offer. Without money, prospects, or food, pride is one of the few things the migrants possess. It may sound generic, the same as if a stranger says, "Pleased to meet you" or "It's my pleasure," when these characters say they are "proud." The difference is, when they say they are proud, it is a deep, genuine expression of pride at still being able to do something for another, even (or especially) when they can do so little for themselves. When the Wilsons provide some meager comfort to Grampa and Granma, the two families exchange thanks and pride:

Pa said, "We're thankful to you folks."

"We're proud to help," said Wilson.

"We're beholden to you," said Pa.

"There's no beholden in a time of dying," said Wilson, and Sairy echoed him, "Never no beholden."

Al said, "I'll fix your car—me an' Tom will." And Al looked proud that he could return the family's obligation."

Later, when Ma thanks Sairy for helping when Grampa died, Sairy says, "You shouldn't talk like that. We're proud to help. I ain't felt so—safe in a long time. People needs—to help." When Ma and Sairy talk about Granma's reaction to her husband's death, Ma says, "Maybe she won't really truly know for quite a while. Besides, us folks takes a pride holdin' in. My pa used to say, 'Anybody can break down. It takes a man not to.' We always try to hold in."

While they value their pride, they do not confuse it with their dignity or decency, which come from a deep sense of righteousness. Early in the novel, Tom explains to his mother how he stayed sane in jail, saying, "I ain't proud like some fellas. I let stuff run off'n me." Later, he tells her, "Ma, they comes a time when the on'y way a fella can keep his decency is by takin' a sock at a cop." More than once in the migrant camps, desperate women seem to prefer suffering in proud, stoic silence to admitting her children are hungry and accepting help. The others do their best to preserve those mothers' pride while doing the decent thing and feeding the hungry:

"Ain't you got no money, Mis' Joyce?"

She looked ashamedly down. "No, but we might get work any time."

"Now you hol' up your head," Jessie said. "That ain't no crime."

The most striking act of human dignity is illustrated in the final scene, when Rose of Sharon offers of her own body to feed a starving man. The man must relinquish his pride to be saved, but Rose of Sharon is transformed by the act, growing from a selfish child into a life-giving woman in a single, humble, show of kindness. By behaving decently and taking pride in helping others when they have and can do so little for themselves, the migrants maintain their dignity in the face of daily hardships, which gives them the strength to carry on.

HISTORICAL OVERVIEW

The Great Depression

On October 29, 1929, the New York Stock Exchange crashed. This event caused a worldwide economic collapse whose effects would be felt for the next decade. The crash left banks insolvent, caused a drastic downturn in consumer confidence, and left 25 to 30 percent of the workforce unemployed. Economists still speculate about the cause of the Great Depression, though there are obvious contributors. Herbert Hoover, American president at the time, blamed it on the aftereffects of World War I, the unstable American banking structure, rampant stock speculation, and the fact that Congress failed to back many of his economic proposals. Others blamed the crash on too many banks and a glut of production that eclipsed demand due to stagnant workers' wages.

After the crash, the economy was further hampered by a severe drought that laid waste to America's agricultural center. Unemployment continued to rise, foreign banks collapsed, destroying world trade, and American spending came to a screeching halt. The Great Depression and its attendant poverty and desperation provide the historical context for The Grapes of Wrath, which was written toward the end of the worst economic period in American history.

The Dust Bowl Years

Concurrent with the Great Depression were the Dust Bowl Years, the decade beginning in 1930 that saw profound agricultural devastation along the southern plains of the United States. Unsound farming practices and years of drought in Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, and Colorado removed groundcover that served to hold the soil in place. Plains winds whipped the soil into great, billowing dark clouds of dust that would sometimes hang in the air for days. The dust covered everything. It found its way through the doors and windows of homes and blanketed the furniture. Children wore masks on their way to school just so they could breathe. The dirt and dust got into farming equipment, trucks, and automobiles, rendering them useless. Nothing could grow, so farmers wound up losing their farms. Families began packing their belongings and heading west to California where they believed they could find employment as migrant farm workers. Most dreamed of earning enough money to buy a piece of land to replace the farms they were forced to abandon.

The mass migration of unemployed, desperate, poverty-stricken Midwesterners overwhelmed the infrastructure of California. Government relief in the form of housing, food, and medical care was limited and resources were strained. In 1933, in California's San Joaquin Valley, cotton workers joined with the Cannery and Agricultural Workers Industrial Union in the largest agricultural strike in American history. After three people died and hundreds were injured, workers were granted a 25 percent raise. On April 14, 1935, the worst "black blizzard" happened; the day is still remembered as Black Sunday. That year, Congress established the Soil Conservation Service, which began developing conservation programs to safeguard topsoil and prevent over-farming. By this point, an estimated 850 million tons of topsoil had blown off the southern plains. Farmers were offered incentives for practicing soil conservation farming techniques. By 1936, the migration of workers into California had become so overwhelming policemen began patrolling the borders of Arizona and Oregon in an effort to keep the "undesirables" from entering the state.

In 1939, the year The Grapes of Wrath was published, the country began to see its way out of the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl Years. In the fall it began to rain, which brought the lengthy drought to an end. World War II, just a few years away, boosted the American economy by providing jobs to the millions who had been out of work for almost a decade.

CRITICAL OVERVIEW

The Grapes of Wrath became an overnight literary sensation during a particularly troubling and turbulent moment in U.S. history. The country was still reeling from the effects of the Great Depression, yet nearly ten thousand copies a week, at $2.75 each, flew off bookstore shelves for the first year of its publication. The consensus among critics, even those who had problems with the book, was that The Grapes of Wrath was a great American epic and a triumphant effort. Some readers, though, found the graphic descriptions of the struggles of migrant farm workers difficult to take. These people accused Steinbeck of fabricating the circumstances he described, so horrified were they by the thought that Americans could be made to suffer so completely at the hands of their own people.

The book, which placed Steinbeck squarely in the middle of the national debate over migrant workers, was also considered to be filthy and profane. In the introduction to the 2006 edition, Robert DeMott quotes Oklahoma Congressman Lyle Boren saying in 1940, "Take the vulgarity out of this book and it would be blank from cover to cover." Steinbeck was committed to representing the migrants authentically, including their rough language and manner of speaking. Having them talk any other way would have drained the book of much of its power, he argued. His portrayal of Californians angered still others. His authentic renderings of the locals and the migrants caused many to ban The Grapes of Wrath in libraries and schools across the country. One of the first libraries to call for its censorship was the Kern County Free Library in Kern County, California. According to the resolution drawn up by its board of supervisors,

John Steinbeck's work of fiction … has offended our citizenry by falsely implying that many of our fine people are a low, ignortant [sic], profane and blasphemous type living in a vicious and filthy manner,… Steinbeck presents our public officials, law enforcement office and civil administrators, business men, farmers, and ordinary citizens as inhumane vigilantes, breathing class hatred and divested of sympathy or human decency or understanding toward a great, and to us unwelcome, economic problem brought on by an astounding influx of refugees,… The Grapes of Wrath is filled with profanity, lewd, foul, and obscene language unfit for use in American homes, therefore, be it resolved, that we … request that … The Grapes of Wrath … be banned from our library and schools.

The points made in the Kern County resolution were echoed by other civic leaders, and the book was banned in several states. The next year, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt came forward, praised the book, and defended it against such bitter criticism, telling an interviewer, "I have never believed that The Grapes of Wrath was exaggerated." In 1940, The Grapes of Wrath won the Pulitzer Prize for literature. It later served as the cornerstone for the decision to award Steinbeck with the Nobel Prize in 1962. According to Robert DeMott's introduction of the Penguin Classics 2006 edition,

In spite of flaws, gaffes, and infelicities its critics have enumerated—or perhaps because of them (general readers tend to embrace the book's mythic soul and are less troubled by its imperfect body)—The Grapes of Wrath has resolutely entered both the American consciousness and its conscience. Few novels can make that claim.

The flaws DeMott refer to include the book's "alleged sentimentalism, stereotyped characterizations, heavy-handed symbolism, unconvincing dialogue, episodic, melodramatic plot, misplaced Oklahoma geography, and inaccurate rendering of historical facts." He includes a sampling of the negative reviews, including Philip Rahv in the Spring 1939 Partisan Review who concludes, "the novel is far too didactic and long-winded," and cultural critic Leslie Fiedler, on the occasion of its fiftieth anniversary, who calls it "maudlin, sentimental, and overblown."

Whatever the objections to structure, language and topic, critics then and now note the importance of the work as a champion for Americans in need. In 1939, Charles Lee lauds the book:

In The Grapes of Wrath, [Steinbeck] has written as memorable an American novel as I have ever read. Long, superbly angry, lashing with sus tained indignation, his story towers above the work of others who have essayed to translate the desperations and dreams of the sharecrop per into words … had he been a novelist Whitman might have told such a story as this.

Another early critic, Fritz Raley Simmons, fears that the now-classic's legacy would collapse under its own weight:

The Grapes of Wrath … is not the kind of book that usually makes a best seller. It is terrific writing, but it is the kind of writing that makes one think and think hard. And it is especially disturbing to the kind of people who can afford to buy books.

Despite critical objections and worries for the novel's future, Steinbeck's masterpiece has maintained an unthreatened place among the classics of American literature since it first appeared. Linda Pelzer celebrates its power and relevance in 2000:

Fifty years after its first publication on 14 April 1939, The Grapes of Wrath still gives voice to America's dispossessed. They may no longer be Okies set adrift by dust and Depression, but whether Hispanic migrants working the California fields or Midwestern farmers battling bankruptcy, their plight is no different from the Joads', and no less poignant…. [Tom Joad's] words resonate to the deep heart's core of our common humanity, moving us not only to feel the numbing poverty, the torturous suffering, the callous anonymity that constitute life for a vast American underclass but to recognize as well the quiet dignity with which they endure such indignities. Fifty, indeed sixty, years after its first publication, The Grapes of Wrath remains a powerful testament to human resilience and solidarity.

CRITICISM

John J. Conder

In the following excerpt, Conder argues that in The Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck endorses the philosophy that economic, legal, religious, and societal forces largely control individual destiny, but lays out a philosophy to rise above those forces and achieve personal freedom.

The interchapters of Steinbeck's novel create a network of interlocking determinisms through their emphasis on the operations of abstract, impersonal forces in the lives of the Oklahomans. Chapter 5 is especially effective both in capturing the poignancy of the human situation created by such forces and in pointing to the kind of deterministic force underlying the others in the novel. In one fleeting episode a nameless Oklahoman who threatens the driver of a bulldozer leveling his house is told that armed resistance is futile, for the driver acts in the service of the bank, and "the bank gets orders from the East." The Oklahoman cries, "But where does it stop? Who can we shoot?" "I don't know," the driver replies. "Maybe there's nobody to shoot. Maybe the thing isn't men at all. Maybe … the property's doing it." Or at least the Bank, the monster requiring "profits all the time" in order to live and dwarfing in size and power even the owner men, who feel "caught in something larger than themselves."

The vision that appears here has a name: economic determinism. This view does not say that man has no free will. One might indeed find among a group of bank presidents a corporate Thoreau who prefers jail (or unemployment) to following the demands of the system. It merely asserts that most men charged with the operation of an economic structure will act according to rules requiring the bank's dispossession of its debtors when a disaster renders them incapable of meeting payments on their mortgaged property. Far from denying free will, such determinism fully expects and provides for the willed resistance of the Oklahomans. The police take care of that. Nor is this vision without its moral component, though neither the police nor the owner men can be held individually responsible. "Some of the owner men were kind," Steinbeck writes, "because they hated what they had to do, and some of them were angry because they hated to be cruel, and some of them were cold because they had long ago found that one could not be an owner unless one were cold." These anonymous men are not devil figures but individuals performing functions within a system, so the work indicts the system rather than individuals who act in its service. In the case of the Oklahomans, the indictment is founded on a fundamental irony: societies, designed to protect men from nature's destructive features—here a drought—complete nature's destructive work, expelling men from the dust bowl into which nature's drought has temporarily transformed their farms.

MEDIA ADAPTATIONS

The Grapes of Wrath was adapted as a film by Nunnally Johnson in 1940. Legendary director John Ford won an Academy Award for Best Director. The movie stars Jane Darwell, who won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her role as Ma Joad, Henry Fonda, John Carradine, and Charley Grapewin. It is available on DVD from Twentieth Century Fox.

The Grapes of Wrath was released as an unabridged audiobook in 1998; Dylan Baker narrates the story and voices the characters in this twenty-one-hour recording. It is available on audio cassette from Penguin Audio.

By virtue of the instinct for self-preservation, in the camps twenty families become one large family, sharing a single instinct. The animal can come to life on this instinctual level because the animal's anlage is in the separate family, the basic unit through which man fulfills his needs, and the instinctual sense of unity is strengthened by a common set of threatening circumstances issuing in shared emotions: first fear, then anger. In this condition, the "school intelligence" directing its drives is instinctual alone, and hence the human group is more like the school of fish to which Steinbeck refers. Guided solely by instinct, the human group-animal achieves a measure of protection from a hostile social environment, but with instinct alone, it can no more transcend the social determinism of the body politic than the turtle (which in the novel symbolizes it in this condition) can transcend the machinations of the drivers eager to squash it. Chance alone can save the group or the turtle as both walk, like Tom, one step ahead of the other, living from day to day.

But the group changes, and in this respect the plot goes one step further than the interchapters, which halt with the fermenting of the grapes of wrath. For the plot shows the emergence of a rational group consciousness, first in Casy, then in Tom, whose final talk with his mother, representing the principle of family, discloses that his own consciousness has transcended such limitations. In fact it is mainly in Tom that the group develops a head for its body; for he survives the murdered Casy, and he was from the beginning more clearly a member of the de facto group than Casy, who owned no land. And by stressing how the animal that is the group achieves rational consciousness and (hence) freedom, Steinbeck harmonizes freedom and determinism in his most important way. The group determined by instinct and circumstance in the interchapters achieves both rational self-awareness and freedom in the person of a member who substitutes the consciousness of a group for a private consciousness and thus gives the group access to the faculty of human will. Tom thus enables it to move from instinct to reason and to that freedom which reasoned acts of the will provide. By having the group consciousness mature in the plot section of his novel, Steinbeck thus unites it to the interchapters structurally and harmonizes his novel philosophically.

And he provides a triumph for the group within the context of determinism, for their attainment of rational group consciousness is itself a determined event because such potential is inherent in the species. Their achieved freedom of will as a group thus is the final term of a socially determined sequence of events that leads to the group's creation, and the group's exercise of it to attain its ends fulfills the historical determinism of the novel. Yet this is not the only hope in these pages, for the prospective triumph of the group provides hope for the triumph of the individual as a whole person.

The Grapes of Wrath is the story of the exploitation of a dispossessed group, and it is difficult not to feel that it will always engender sympathies for the dispossessed of the earth wherever and whenever they might appear. But the novel's indictment of society for what it does to individuals should have an equally enduring appeal; for here its message goes beyond the conditions of oppressed groups and addresses individuals in all strata of complex societies. The condition of individual Oklahomans in fact is an extreme representation of the condition of social man, and in the capacity of individual Oklahomans to change lies the hope for social man.

The migrants' achievement of rational freedom speaks for more than freedom for the group. It tells readers of a vital difference in kinds of freedom. Steinbeck has written, "I believe that man is a double thing—a group animal and at the same time an individual. And it occurs to me that he cannot successfully be the second until he has fulfilled the first." Only the fulfilled group self can create a successful personal self; only freedom exercised by a personal self in harmony with a group self can be significant.

This aspect of the novel's vision depends upon Steinbeck's fuller conception of an individual's two selves. One is his social self, definable by the role he plays in society and by the attitudes he has imbibed from its major institutions. The other is what is best called his species self. It contains all the biological mechanisms—his need for sexual expression, for example—that link him to other creatures in nature. And by virtue of the fact that he is thus linked to the natural world, he can feel a sense of unity with it in its inanimate as well as its animate forms. But the biological element in this self also connects him to the world of man, for it gives him an instinctive sense of identification with other members of his species, just as the members of other species have an instinctive sense of oneness with their own kind.

The species self thus has connections to non-human and human nature, and Steinbeck refers to the latter connection when he speaks of man as a "group animal." He views a healthy personal identity as one in which the species self in both its aspects can express itself through the social self of the individual. But society thwarts, or seeks to thwart, the expression of that self. It seeks not only to cut man off from his awareness of his connections to nonhuman nature, it seeks also to sever him from the group sense of oneness with the human species that the individual's species self possesses. Ironically, therefore, purely social man loses a sense of that unity with others which society presumably exists to promote.

The novel's social criticism rests on this view, and its emphasis on grotesques, purely social beings cut off from their connections to nature, both human and nonhuman, portrays an all-too-familiar image of modern man. In too many instances, by imposing mechanical rhythms on human nature, society creates half-men. Its repeated attempts to distort the individual's identity is emphasized by numerous dichotomies between social demands and instinct. Tom tries to comprehend the meaning of his imprisonment for killing in self-defense. Casy tries to understand the meaning of his preaching sexual abstinence when he cannot remain chaste himself. And the point is made by the basic events that set the story moving. A mechanical monster, indifferent to the maternal instincts of the Ma Joads who exercise their species selves in the interest of family solidarity, expels families from their land. The social mechanism thus tries to thwart the demands of the group aspect of the self to remain together. And the same mechanism is responsible for sowing what has become a dust bowl with cotton, rendering it permanently useless for agriculture, thus showing its indifference—nay, hostility—to the connections with nature that the species self feels.

Tom finds no meaning, at the novel's outset, in a system that imprisons him for killing in self-defense, and he discovers the true meaning of the system only after he kills the deuty who murders Casy—a nice bit of symmetry that illustrates his growth in awareness as he perceives, like Casy, that his second killing is also an instinctual response, one of self-defense against the true assaulter, the system, which so thwarts man's instinctual life that it leaves him no choice other than to strike back. This line of meaning is echoed by others: by Ma, who says of Purty Boy Floyd, "He wan't a bad boy. Jus' got drove in a corner"; by the nameless owner men who tell the tenants early in the novel, "You'll be stealing if you try to stay, you'll be murderers if you kill to stay." And it is implicit in Tom's own position at the beginning of the plot: to leave the state violates the conditions of his parole, yet to stay means to break up the family and to face unemployment and possible starvation.

Under such circumstances, it is not surprising to discover that the true prison in The Grapes of Wrath is the world outside the prison walls, the real point of Tom's story of a man who deliberately violated parole to return to jail so that he could enjoy the "conveniences" (among them good food) so conspicuously absent in his home. "Here's me, been a-goin' into the wilderness like Jesus to try to find out somepin," Casy says. "Almost got her sometimes, too. But it's in the jail house I really got her." He discovers his proper relationship to men there because it is the place of the free: of men who exercised the natural rights of nature's self only to be imprisoned by the society that resents their exercise. And in fact he can see how the law violates self because he has already seen how religion does. Without the revelations of the wilderness, he would not have had the revelation of the jailhouse; the first is indispensable to the second. Together, they make him the touchstone for understanding the novel's philosophy of self and for measuring the selves of the novel's other characters.

Just as the species self is the ultimate source of freedom for a group, it is the same for an individual. If man can recognize that he is a part of nature by virtue of that self's existence—if he can affirm for this aspect of a naturalistic vision—he can liberate himself from the condition of being a grotesque and, in recognizing his oneness with others, escape the tentacles of economic determinism as well.

Source: John J. Conder, "Steinbeck and Nature's Self: The Grapes of Wrath," in Naturalism in American Fiction: The Clasic Phase, University Press of Kentucky, 1984, pp.142-59.

SOURCES

The Charters of Freedom," U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, www.archives.gov/national-archives-experience/charters/charters.html (October 29, 2006).

DeMott, Robert, "Introduction," in The Grapes of Wrath, Penguin Books, 2006, pp. ix-xlv.

"First Lady's Week," in Time Magazine, April 15, 1940, www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,789721,00.html (October 31, 2006).

Haslam, Gerald, "Grapes of Wrath: A Book That Stretched My Soul," CaliforniaAuthors.com, www.californiaauthors.com/essay_haslam.shtml (October 31, 2006).

Hochenauer, Kurt, "The Rhetoric of American Protest: Thomas Paine and the Education of Tom Joad," in the Midwest Quarterly, Summer 1994, pp. 392-404.

Kern County Board of Supervisors, Resolution 21 August 1939,; quoted in Lingo, Marci, "Forbidden Fruit: The Banning of the Grapes of Wrath in the Kern County Free Library," in Libraries & Culture, Fall 2003, September 29, 2006.

Lee, Charles, "The Grapes of Wrath: The Tragedy of the American Sharecropper," in the Boston Herald, April 22, 1939; reprinted in The Critical Response to John Steinbeck's the Grapes of Wrath, edited by Barbara A. Heavilin, Greenwood Press, 2000, p. 47.

Paine, Thomas, "December 26, 1776," The Crisis, www.ushistory.org/Paine/crisis/c-01.htm (November 2, 2006).

Pelzer, Linda C., "Honoring an American Classic: Viking's 1989 Edition of John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (Review)," in The Critical Response to John Steinbeck's the Grapes of Wrath, edited by Barbara A. Heavilin, Greenwood Press, 2000, p. 309.

Simmons, Fritz Raley, "Farm Tenancy Central Theme of Steinbeck," in the Greensboro Daily News, July 1939; reprinted in The Critical Response to John Steinbeck's the Grapes of Wrath, edited by Barbara A. Heavilin, Greenwood Press, 2000, p. 55.

Steinbeck, John, The Grapes of Wrath, Viking Press, 1939; reprint, Penguin Classics, 2006.