It’s not often I finish a book and experience a welling of tears and realize I’ve just read a great work of American literature. But John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath just did it to me.
I think I read the novel in high school, although I remember nothing of it. I came into it this time fresh and without opinion. And the Joad family and their journey of survival blew me away.
Tenant farmers in Oklahoma displaced by the bank when the Dust Bowl leads to crop failure, with little money and some hope, the Joads pile into their undependable truck and head for California, where they’ve heard many jobs are available in the Golden State.
They bend under the weight of hunger and sickness, yet still press on. Neither Granma or Grampa survives the journey, the oldest son strikes out on his own, the pregnant daughter’s husband runs off. It’s Ma, Pa, Uncle John, son Tom, son Al, daughter Rose of Sharon, two little ones, and preacher friend Casy that make it to California.
But jobs are not plentiful. The promise is empty. There are so many migrants, so many “Okies” looking for work, that farm owners won’t even pay subsistence wages, because the desperate will work for anything.
It’s a harrowing and dangerous life, and the novel threads together economic and cultural themes about capital exploiting labor, the crushing of union organization, and the bigotry towards migrants.
Some things just don’t change from one century to the next. Today, Amazon, Tesla, Starbucks, and other corporate powerhouses conduct intense, and at times illegal, campaigns to keep out unions. And the persecution of the “other” in America is not only on full display today, it’s being celebrated by the current administration.
Thematic power aside, the book is so well written. Steinbeck is such a master. He can draw vivid characters with a few strokes, create tension in the simplest exchange of dialogue, and create a compelling plotline.
Here’s Steinbeck describing Noah, the oldest Joad son:
“Behind them, moving slowly and evenly, but keeping up, came Pa and Noah—Noah the first-born, tall and strange, walking always with a wondering look on his face, calm and puzzled. He had never been angry in his life. He looked in wonder at angry people, wonder and uneasiness, as normal people looked at the insane.”
Especially powerful are short, intercalary chapters, nestled between the main plot, that pull back and comment on the conditions, society, the country, the fear, the hopelessness, the hope:
“One man, one family driven from the land; this rusty car creaking along the highway to the west. I lost my land, a single tractor took my land. I am alone and I am bewildered. And in the night one family camps in a ditch and another family pulls in and the tents come out.”
“In the West there was panic when the migrants multiplied on the highways. Men of property were terrified for their property. Men who had never been hungry saw the eyes of the hungry. Men who had never wanted anything very much saw the flare of want in the eyes of the migrants . . . They said, These goddamn Okies are dirty and ignorant. They’re degenerate, sexual maniacs. These goddamn Okies are thieves.”
Sound familiar to anything you hear today?
And while men ruled the family, while the patriarchy remained entrenched, it’s Ma who is the heartbeat of the Joad clan, Ma who steps up and takes the mantle of leadership when the men are defeated. It was a wonderful and memorable twist that unfolded slowly throughout the novel.
You know a book has a powerful and essential message when it appears on the lists of banned books, as The Grapes of Wrath often does.
Conservatives labeled Steinbeck a communist for the book’s collectivist message and for calling out capitalism’s vicious, dehumanizing nature. Business owners feared its pro-union stance would influence workers at a time when organized labor was gaining momentum. Parents and educators objected to its profanity, violence, and sexual content—its unblinking depiction of human nature.
The Grapes of Wrath won the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize in 1939, the top two annual honors for fiction, and in 1962 Steinbeck won the Novel Prize for Literature for his body of work.
This novel has lasting power, and remains timeless and the perfect novel for our time, more than eighty years after its publication.
