The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck: a review

In Depression-era America in the 1930s, an Oklahoma family of tenant farmers is unable to make a living out of the land. If nightmarish dust storms are not bad enough, making it impossible to farm, they are unable to pay off their debt. They go westwards in search of food and work and join other migratory workers living in desperate conditions in California.

Of John Steinbeck’s 17 novels, The Grapes of Wrath and the story of the Joad family pitted against the tyrannical agricultural system is undoubtedly his most well-known, winning him the Pulitzer Prize (1940) and eventually the Nobel Prize (1962), inspiring filmmakers and songwriters, from John Ford to Bruce Springsteen. The title, from Julia Ward Howe’s ‘Battle Hymn of the Republic’, was chosen for a reason.

Red country

As Steinbeck told his literary agent Elizabeth Otis: “I like it because it is a march and this book is a kind of march...” He wanted to write about the plight of migrant labour in California, and despite the novel’s flaws — critics listed ‘flat characterisations’ and ‘unconvincing dialogue’ among other things — it climbed to the top of the bestseller lists soon after it was published on April 14, 1939.

The opening scene is set in Oklahoma and the writer immediately makes it clear that something is not quite right. “To the red country and part of the gray country of Oklahoma, the last rains came gently, and they did not cut the scarred earth.” Soon, ‘man’ won’t be able to perform “the last clear definition of man” — to build a wall, a house, a dam, and “in the wall and house and dam” put something of himself in it. The Joad family’s long journey to California is told in stories within the story.

The novel’s communal vision, says Robert DeMott in the introduction to the Penguin Classics series, began in the fire of Steinbeck’s own labour, but the flames were fanned by various people, especially Carol Steinbeck and Tom Collins. He dedicates it to them: “To Carol, who willed it; To Tom, who lived it.” Carol Steinbeck, his first wife, was more radical than the writer and supported the California migrant movement before he did.

But it’s from Collins that Steinbeck got his material. He was the “chief source... and chronicler of accurate migrant information”. Being the manager of a farm security administration of a camp, Collins put Steinbeck in touch with the real-life Joads and other characters. The story goes that they went on many field trips together for research, listening to a “thousand miseries, and a thousand jokes,” and helped Steinbeck do his “damnedest to rip a reader’s nerves to rags.”

The writer looks back at one classic each fortnight.