Have been evicted from their land-“tractored off” is the With a stick in the dust a half-starved cat watchingįrom the doorstep and around them the silence of a milelongĬottonfield. The men sitting hack on their haunches, drawing figures

Muley Graves, a neighbor, comes past in the dusk and Well filled in and even the dooryard planted with cotton.

The house to find that it is empty, the windows broken, the Little farm in the bottom lands near Sallisaw. Sentence for homicide, he sets out for his father’s Penitentiary, where he has served four years of a seven-year The Grapes of Wrath begins with Tom Joad’s homecoming.Īfter being released from the Oklahoma State Steinbeck’s longest and angriest and most impressive work. The novel, which has just appeared, is John Year with terrifying photographs by the Resettlement Administration. “Land of the Free,” by Archibald MacLeish, published last Their migrations have heenĭescribed only in a long poem and a novel. Of California, in a setting too commonplace for a color The Yangtze Valley, but among the vineyards and orchards Of a few days’ work at miserable wages-not in Spain or Rights than medieval serfs, they have wandered in search A hundred thousand rural households have heen uprootedįrom the soil, robbed of their possessions-though by strictly legal methods-and turned out on the highways.įriendless, homeless and therefore voteless, with fewer This primary source set include photographs, oral history, and documents that provide context for and different perspectives on the events described in the novel.While keeping our eyes on the cataclysms in EuropeĪnd Asia, we have lost sight of a tragedy nearer The Grapes of Wrath won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and is considered an American classic. As part of his research, Steinbeck relied heavily on records from Tom Collins, director of Arvin Camp in California, photographs taken by Dorothea Lange, and interviews conducted by Sanora Babb, as well as his own journalistic writings on the migration. Published in 1939, it provided social commentary on the experience of real migrants struggling to survive in the historical moment in which it was written.

The novel explores themes of poverty, discrimination, social justice, and sacrifice. Along with thousands of other 'Okies,' they migrate along Route 66 to California in search of jobs and opportunities. Set during the Great Depression of the 1930s, John Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath tells the story of the Joads, a family of tenant farmers driven from their Oklahoma home by the Dust Bowl and related financial hardship.

John steinbeck the grapes of wrath 1939