The Pulitzer Prize-winning epic of the Great Depression, a book that galvanized-and sometimes outraged-millions of readers

The Grapes of Wrath summed up its era in the way that Uncle Tom's Cabin had summed up the years of slavery before the Civil War. At once naturalistic epic, captivity narrative, road novel, and transcendental gospel, Steinbeck's fictional chronicle of the Dust Bowl migration of the 1930s is perhaps the most American of American classics.

Although it follows the movement of thousands of men and women and the transformation of an entire nation, The Grapes of Wrath is also the story of one Oklahoma farm family, the Joads, who are driven off their homestead and forced to travel west to the promised land of California. Out of their trials and their repeated collisions against the hard realities of an America divided into Haves and Have-Nots, Steinbeck created a drama that is intensely human yet majestic in its scale and moral vision, elemental yet plainspoken, tragic but ultimately stirring in its insistence on human dignity.

After reading Of Mice and Men, I was somewhat hesitant to read this book, but I kept running into quotes from it in other books, so I decided to give it a try. I’m glad I did.

The writing is in a style that took some getting used to, but once I did, it became easy to follow the travails of the Joad family. Losing their farm, they’re set adrift, joining the Great Migration to California. But getting to California isn’t the end of their journey.

Interspersed within their story are snapshots of the shared journey of the people as a whole, the “we” as Steinbeck calls them, because their journey is truly a shared one. They are those without, though they will give what they can to those they see as having even less.

If you can separate causes from results, if you could know that Paine, Marx, Jefferson, Lenin, were results, not causes, you might survive. But that you cannot know. For the quality of owning freezes you into “I,” and cuts you off forever from the “we.”

We don’t know what ultimately happens to the Joads, but we do know that their story transformed the nation.





Mount TBR 2020 Book Links

Links are to more information regarding each book or author, not to the review.

1. A Wicked War
2. The Grapes of Wrath