Novel
The Grapes of Wrath
John Steinbeck · 1939
Synopsis
Oklahoma. Tom Joad leaves the penitentiary on parole, after four years in prison for homicide, and on the way meets Jim Casy, the former preacher of his childhood. The family farm is deserted: the banks have evicted the sharecroppers, and the land is worked by tractor. He finds his family at an uncle's. Leaflets promise well-paid work picking crops in California: the family sells its belongings, loads the rest onto an old truck and takes the road west, with Casy, while Tom breaks his parole by leaving the state.
Context
The reports commissioned by the San Francisco News had taken Steinbeck into the camps; he then wrote the book in about five months, from May to October 1938. The title was suggested to him by his wife, Carol, after a Civil War song. Publication set off violent reactions in California: farmers burned copies, Kern County removed it from its schools and libraries, and the author, branded a communist, received threats and began to carry a gun. Eleanor Roosevelt publicly defended him and said she had never found the book exaggerated.
Who it is for
A long novel in two registers that alternate from one chapter to the next, in which the characters speak the language of rural Oklahoma.
Prizes and reception
Pulitzer Prize in 1940, the best-selling novel of 1939 in the United States, adapted for the screen by John Ford the following year.