Summary of The Grapes Of Wrath (1939)

Even as Steinbeck was making corrections on the Of Mice and Men script, he was planning his next novel, The Grapes of Wrath.  The idea for the book came to him on his first journalistic assignment in the fall of 1936.  The liberal San Francisco News sent Steinbeck to cover the migrant situation in California; he went to the Arvin Encampment in Bakersfield, California to talk to Tom Collins, manager of one of the first of the government camps set up in California to alleviate housing problems for the Southwest migrants pouring into the state from the Dust Bowl regions.  Steinbeck interviewed Collins and migrants, and studied the situation first hand, after which he wrote a series of articles on the migrants' plight, published as The Harvest Gypsies.  By December 1936 Steinbeck knew that his next "big book" would be the migrants' story.

The Grapes of Wrath is said by many to be Steinbeck's masterpiece.  Its power lies not only in its searing portrait of Dust Bowl poverty-if it were merely an historical tract about homelessness in the 1930s it would not sell over 150,000 copies a year.  It is also the story of the migration of a people.  It echoes Exodus.  And it is the story of a family disintegrating; of how power shifts from patriarchy to matriarchy; of what freedom means to a man just released from jail - as well as to all who must test the limits of their freedoms in a new state.  It is about two key relationships.  One is between Tom Joad and Jim Casy, the preacher who, leaving his Christian calling, looks for spiritual meaning outside the church.  Tom is his pupil, and Casy guides Tom in his own rebirth into social commitment. But equally important is the relationship between Ma Joad and her self-absorbed daughter, Rose of Sharon.  Like Tom, she must learn to look beyond herself and her needs to embrace the needs of others.  The novel is thus a plea for empathy and understanding, as well as an indictment of a system that left so many destitute in a land where excess oranges were dumped in rivers in order to keep prices inflated: "There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation."  The words have new relevance in this sadly altered world.