The Grapes of Wrath

Summary

The Grapes of Wrath, published in 1939, is John Steinbeck's novel of a family of Oklahoma tenant farmers driven west during the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression. It won the Pulitzer Prize and stirred national debate about the treatment of migrant workers. Tom Joad, paroled from prison after serving four years for killing a man in a fight, walks home and meets Jim Casy, a former preacher who has lost his old faith. They find the Joad farm deserted: the banks and landowners, using tractors, have evicted the tenants. The family is gathering at an uncle's house to leave for California, where handbills promise plentiful work picking fruit. Tom, Casy and three generations of Joads, led by the strong and steady Ma Joad, load their possessions onto an old truck and set out along Route 66. Grampa dies on the first night, and Granma dies during the desert crossing. Tom's brother Noah wanders away along a river, and Connie, the young husband of Tom's pregnant sister Rose of Sharon, deserts the family. In California they find too many workers and too little work, low wages, hostile police and squalid roadside camps called Hoovervilles. A clean, self-governing government camp offers a short time of dignity, but there is no work nearby. At a peach ranch the family takes jobs that pay strikebreakers, while Casy, now an organiser, leads a strike outside; guards kill Casy, and Tom kills the man who struck him, then hides. Tom finally leaves to carry on Casy's work, telling Ma that he will be present wherever people are fighting for justice. Rains flood the cotton camp; Rose of Sharon's baby is stillborn. In the final scene, sheltering in a barn, she gives the milk meant for her child to a starving stranger. Short general chapters between the Joad chapters describe the dust, the car dealers, the highway and the migrants as a people, joining one family's story to a national tragedy.

Top Lessons

• Family and community

  Ma Joad's idea of family widens to include all people in need.

• Economic injustice

  Steinbeck shows banks, landowners and growers exploiting displaced workers.

• Conversion

  Casy and Tom move from personal concerns to concern for all.

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