The Grapes of Wrath is an American realist novel written by John Steinbeck and published in 1939. The book won the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize for fiction, and it was cited prominently when Steinbeck was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1962.
The Grapes of Wrath Summary
The narrative, which traces the migration of an Oklahoma Dust Bowl family to California and their subsequent hardships, is interspersed with prose-poem interludes that explain the wider circumstances of the world with which the protagonists contend.
Tom Joad, newly released from prison after serving a sentence for manslaughter, makes his way home, and along the way he is joined by Jim Casy, a former preacher.
Tom learns that his family has been evicted from the farm and has moved in with Uncle John. When the two men reach Uncle John’s home, they find the family, enticed by handbills advertising farm-labour jobs, preparing to drive to California.
The Joads and Casy head out along Route 66, joining an exodus of poor tenant farmers heading west. They encounter many obstacles on the journey, as well as warnings that the jobs they expect in California are illusory. Grampa and Granma Joad die along the route, and Tom’s elder brother, Noah, decides to abandon the enterprise. The Grapes of the Wrath !!
Upon arrival in California, they find that their trials are far from over. They stop in a migrant encampment, where they speak with a man named Floyd Knowles, who informs them that jobs are scarce, available pay is poor, and families are literally starving to death in the makeshift migrant camps.
Connie, the husband of Tom’s pregnant sister, Rose of Sharon (called Rosasharn by her family), abandons her. When a man arrives seeking workers to pick fruit, Floyd asks for the proposed wages in writing. A policeman accuses him of communism and tries to arrest him.
A fight breaks out, and, when the policeman shoots at the fleeing Floyd, Casy knocks him out. Casy is arrested, and the Joad family heads to another town, where they are met by a hostile crowd gathered to keep “Okies”—migrants from Oklahoma and nearby states— away. However, they later find the government-run camp Weedpatch, which is kept clean and organized by committees of residents, and Tom finds work.
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About the Author
John Ernst Steinbeck Jr. was an American writer and the 1962 Nobel Prize in Literature winner “for his realistic and imaginative writings, combining as they do sympathetic humor and keen social perception.” He has been called “a giant of American letters.”
