John Steinbeck – Chapter 1 (The Grapes of Wrath) | Genius TO THE RED COUNTRY and part of the gray country of Oklahoma, the last rains came gently, and they did not cut the scarred earth. The plows crossed and recrossed the rivulet marks. The last rains lifted the corn quickly and scattered weed colonies and grass along the sides of the roads so that the gray country and the dark red country began to disappear under a green cover . In the last part of May the sky grew pale and the clouds that had hung in high puffs for so long in the spring were dissipated. The sun flared down on the growing corn day after day until a line of brown spread along the edge of each green bayonet. The clouds appeared, and went away, and in a while they did not try any more. The weeds grew darker green to protect themselves, and they did not spread any more. The surface of the earth crusted, a thin hard crust, and as the sky became pale, so the earth became pale, pink in the red country and white in the gray country . In the water-cut gullies the earth dusted down in dry little streams. Gophers and ant lions started small avalanches .

And as the sharp sun struck day after day, the leaves of the young corn became less stiff and erect; they bent in a curve at first, and then, as the central ribs of strength grew weak, each leaf tilted downward. Then it was June, and the sun shone more fiercely. The brown lines on the corn leaves widened and moved in on the central ribs. The weeds frayed and edged back toward their roots. The air was thin and the sky more pale; and every day the earth paled. In the roads where the teams moved, where the wheels milled the ground and the hooves of the horses beat the ground, the dirt crust broke and the dust formed. Every moving thing lifted the dust into the air: a walking man lifted a thin layer as high as his waist, and a wagon lifted the dust as high as the fence tops, and an automobile boiled a cloud behind it. The dust was long in settling back again. When June was half gone, the big clouds moved up out of Texas and the Gulf, high heavy clouds, rainheads. The men in the fields looked up at the clouds and sniffed at them and held wet fingers up to sense the wind. And the horses were nervous while the clouds were up.

The rainheads dropped a little spattering and hurried on to some other country . Behind them the sky was pale again and the sun flared. In the dust there were drop craters where the rain had fallen, and there were clean splashes on the corn, and that was all. A gentle wind followed the rain clouds, driving them on northward, a wind that softly clashed the drying corn. A day went by and the wind increased, steady, unbroken by gusts. The dust from the roads fluffed up and spread out and fell on the weeds beside the fields, and fell into the fields a little way. Now the wind grew strong and hard and it worked at the rain crust in the corn fields. Little by little the sky was darkened by the mixing dust, and the wind felt over the earth, loosened the dust, and carried it away. The wind grew stronger. The rain crust broke and the dust lifted up out of the fields and drove gray plumes into the air like sluggish smoke. The corn threshed the wind and made a dry, rushing sound. The finest dust did not settle back to earth now, but disappeared into the darkening sky.

Men and women huddled in their houses, and they tied handkerchiefs over their noses when they went out, and wore goggles to protect their eyes. When the night came again it was black night, for the stars could not pierce the dust to get down, and the window lights could not even spread beyond their own yards now the dust was evenly mixed with the air, an emulsion of dust and air. Houses were shut tight, and cloth wedged around doors and windows, but the dust came in so thinly that it could not be seen in the air, and it settled like pollen on the chairs and tables, on the dishes. The people brushed it from their shoulders. Little lines of dust lay at the door sills. In the middle of that night the wind passed on and left the land quiet. The dust-filled air muffled sound more completely than fog does. The people, lying in their beds heard the wind stop. They awakened when the rushing wind was gone. They lay quietly and listened deep into the stillness.

Then the roosters crowed, and their voices were muffled, and the people stirred restlessly in their beds and wanted the morning they knew it would take a long time for the dust to settle out of the air. In the morning the dust hung like fog, and the sun was as red as ripe new blood. All day the dust sifted down from the sky, and the next day it sifted down. An even blanket covered the earth it settled on the corn, piled up on the tops of the fence posts, piled up on the wires; it settled on roofs, blanketed the weeds and trees. The people came out of their houses and smelled the hot stinging air and covered their noses from it. And the children came out of the houses, but they did not run or shout as they would have done after a rain. Men stood by their fences and looked at the ruined corn, drying fast now, only a little green showing through the film of dust. The men were silent and they did not move often. And the women came out of the houses to stand beside their men—to feel whether this time the men would break. The women studied the men's faces secretly, for the corn could go, as long as something else remained.

The children stood near by, drawing figures in the dust with bare toes, and the children sent exploring senses out to see whether men and women would break the children peeked at the faces of the men and women, and then drew careful lines in the dust with their toes. Horses came to the watering troughs and nuzzled the water to clear the surface dust. After a while the faces of the watching men lost their bemused perplexity and became hard and angry and resistant. Then the women knew that they were safe and that there was no break. Then they asked, What'll we do? And the men replied, I don't know. But it was all right. The women knew it was all right, and the Watching children knew it was all right. Women and children knew deep in themselves That no misfortune was too great to bear if their men were whole. The women went into the houses to their work, and the children began to play , but cautiously at first. As the Day went forward the sun became less red. It flared down on the dust-blanketed land The men sat in the doorways of their houses; their hands were busy with sticks and Little rocks. The men sat still—thinking—figuring.

More on Genius About “Chapter 1 (The Grapes of Wrath)” The first chapter of Steinbeck’s beloved novel introduces the environment in which the story takes place—a formerly fertile land turned to dusty wasteland. Hidden This page is accessible to Verified artists on the song Locked This song has been locked and is considered "done." You need 600 IQ to add annotations to locked songs. "Chapter 1 (The Grapes of Wrath)" Track Info "The Grapes of Wrath" celebrated | Block Island Times "The Grapes of Wrath" celebrated At the Island Free Library By Lars Trodson Sat, 02/14/2015 - 8:45am John Steinbeck’s 1939 novel, “The Grapes of Wrath,” begins with a burst of desolate color: “TO THE RED COUNTRY and part of the gray country of Oklahoma, the last rains came gently, and they did not cut the scarred earth. The plows crossed and recrossed the rivulet marks. The last rains lifted the corn quickly and scattered weed colonies and grass along the sides of the roads so that the gray country and the dark red country began to disappear under a green cover.

In the last part of May the sky grew pale and the clouds that had hung in high puffs for so long in the spring were dissipated. The sun flared down on the growing corn day after day until a line of brown spread along the edge of each green bayonet. The clouds appeared, and went away, and in a while they did not try any more. The weeds grew darker green to protect themselves, and they did not spread any more. The surface of the earth crusted, a thin hard crust, and as the sky became pale, so the earth became pale, pink in the red country and white in the gray country.” The novel, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Steinbeck (and contributed to his winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962), is often cited as one of the greatest American novels ever written. It is also one of the most discussed. The novel was hugely successful when it was first published, in large part because of Steinbeck's unabashed support for working people, and his uncensored contempt for banks and other faceless institutions that he felt were culpable in the financial breakdown of the 1930s.

"[I]t is a mean, nasty book and if I could make it nastier I would … the book has a definite job to do … I want to put a tag of shame on the greedy [expletive] who are responsible for this," Steinbeck said at the time. The discussion, even if you have not read the book or read it recently, should prove to be interesting. The event is co-sponsored by Island Bound Bookstore. Tuesday, Feb. 17 at the Island Free Library 3 - 5 p.m.: Opening Reception and arts and writing response 5 - 7 p.m.: Discussion of the novel 7 p.m.: Viewing of the Oscar-winning 1940 John Ford film starring Henry Fonda Wednesday, Feb. 18 The Grapes of Wrath, 75 years later: John Steinbeck’s truth is marching on - The Globe and Mail Print Reading John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath as a teenager, I didn’t really understand the red earth. Where I grew up in rural, agricultural B.C., the earth was brown, heavy, rich from the occasional flooding of the Fraser River.

My main frame of reference for “red earth” was Mars, as depicted in comic books and science-fiction pulps. I knew, rationally, that such a thing existed, but it didn’t seem real to me. The Globe and Mail Video Lorrie Moore's Bark The Globe and Mail Video Video: Read This Now: Lorrie Moore’s incredibly human (but still very funny) new stories And in a novel so rich in imagery, I suspect I took the term at a metaphorical level: red earth, blood-stained, wounded, dying. It wasn’t until I visited Oklahoma City last month that I saw red earth for the first time, and everything about The Grapes of Wrath seemed to click into a different arrangement in my mind. And standing on the front porch of the Indian Trading Post, a stone’s throw from Route 66 – “the path of a people in flight, refugees from dust and shrinking land,” – the wind playing through the brown scrub grass, turning the hydro windmills in the distance, it was easy – too easy – to see all of it happening, to recognize, finally, the world behind the words.

“To the red country and part of the grey country of Oklahoma, the last rains came gently, and they did not cut the scarred earth.” Following a series of articles chronicling life in the migrant camps and fields of central California during the Great Depression and an aborted attempt at a satirical novel concerned with the same material (L’Affaire Lettuceberg, which it remains unclear whether Steinbeck abandoned or destroyed), Steinbeck wrote what would become The Grapes of Wrath in a deliberately scheduled hundred-day burst in mid-1938; the novel was first published 75 years ago this month, and has just been reissued in a new Penguin edition. It is one of those rarest of books: still contemporary, still vital after all of those years, still important. Nay, critical. It was an immediate sensation, adored and reviled by turns. It sold over 400,000 copies in its first year, and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1940 (the novel was also singled out for recognition when Steinbeck was awarded the Nobel in 1962). A cornerstone of 20th-century American literature, it remains widely studied and read, a perennial seller.

It is also perennially challenged, with conservative forces seeking to have it removed from libraries and curricula owing, largely, to what is referred to, perhaps over-coyly, as its “obscenity.” This continued opposition is a pale shadow of the rancour and violence which greeted the novel’s original publication, with Steinbeck being threatened, and referred to as a communist. Damning stuff in 1939. Rereading the novel today, one is forced to consider the contradictions – not unlike those of its original reception – which characterize The Grapes of Wrath itself, and to recognize that it succeeds not in spite of these issues, but precisely because of them. The Grapes of Wrath is never simply one thing; this is its greatest weakness, and its greatest strength. It is at once polemical and realistic, intimate and detached, naturalistic and self-consciously literary, mired in its time and utterly timeless. It shouldn’t, by rights, work, at all. And yet it does. Seventy-five years on, there’s no need to summarize the movement of the novel.

Forced off their share of Oklahoma land, the journey of the Joad family to California, drawn by the promise of jobs and a life, is firmly ingrained in the popular consciousness. The tragedy of what they find in what they hoped would be their promised land is as American a tale as the opening of the West decades earlier. Interweaving third-person chapters with the narrative of the Joads’ journey, Steinbeck creates a counterpoint, page by page: intimate modernist realism juxtaposed against detached vignettes (car salesmen cheating the migrant families, a waitress in a roadside restaurant watching the Okies pass, etc.) and raging, detached overviews (Chapter 25, which ends with “In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage” is rage-inducing and chilling simultaneously). The tension between these chapters and the Joads’ story is the fuel that drives the narrative, building the tension, raising the stakes. The reader knows the bitterness which awaits the family before the Joads do, and the non-narrative chapters take on the tone of prophecy, an Old Testament fury coiled and building.

But “Old Testament” isn’t quite the right term for a novel that eschews traditional Christianity. Often seen as a Christ-figure, lapsed-preacher Jim Casy makes the case – often – that religious faith offers little more than hypocrisy and conflict. The Grapes of Wrath, despite its deep morality and its righteous fervour, is far from a religious text. It is, however, a deeply spiritual book, and it is from this root that the power and longevity of The Grapes of Wrath grow. Grounded in a ferocious sense of right, the polemical material takes on that prophetic tone, and in so doing, resets the boundaries of the novel itself. Steinbeck’s deep immersion in the reality of the migrants’ life opens the novel up to the universal. Steinbeck strives, as William Blake wrote in Auguries of Innocence, “To see a World in a Grain of Sand...And Eternity in an hour.” The novel, rooted in the red earth of the topical, takes on the stature of myth, especially in its closing page, with its flood and that transcendent gesture of Rose of Sharon, whose child was stillborn, offering her breast to a dying stranger.

It is in moments like these that The Grapes of Wrath becomes a holy book, touched with grace. Nowhere is this more clear, however, than in what is likely the novel’s most familiar moment: Tom Joad’s speech. Having already served a prison sentence for homicide, the eldest Joad son spends the novel actively avoiding trouble, keeping his temper in check even when provoked. When he witnesses the murder of Jim Casy, though, Joad lashes out, and is forced to flee, to leave the family. Upon his departure, he tells his mother, “I’ll be all around in the dark – I’ll be ever’where – wherever you look. Wherever they’s a fight so hungry people can eat, I’ll be there. Wherever they’s a cop beatin’ up a guy, I’ll be there… I’ll be in the way guys yell when they’re mad an’ – I’ll be in the way kids laugh when they’re hungry and they know supper’s ready. An’ when our folk eat the stuff they raise an’ live in the houses they build – why, I’ll be there.” It’s Tom Joad that draws the novel into the wider world.

While I feel echoes of the Joad family’s struggles in the novels of Rohinton Mistry and Rawi Hage, and in the grace and power of David Adams Richards’s Mercy Among the Children, it is Tom Joad that haunts me. It’s not just a matter of the influence of the character. Yes, Woody Guthrie and Bruce Springsteen both wrote songs around the character, but it goes beyond any work of art. As he promised, Tom Joad is there. He’s there when Wal- Mart employees in the United States aren’t paid enough to eat, and have to turn to public assistance. He’s there when millionaire politicians and prosperous corporations oppose the raising of the minimum wage to something someone could actually live on. He’s there when the banks force people off their land, whether from agricultural consolidation or subprime mortgages. He’s there as desperate migrants brave the Rio Grande in search of their promised land, and as politicians threaten to build a border fence, and people – in fear for their own jobs – take up arms against the “other.” And I saw him, on a breezy late winter morning, in the placid reflecting pond on the site of the Alfred P.

Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, where 168 people died in what was the largest domestic terror attack in the United States. The citizens of Oklahoma chose to respond to that act of unspeakable violence with an offering of, in the words of the memorial’s dedication, “comfort, strength, peace, hope and serenity.” As Joad said, quoting Jim Casy, “For if they fall, the one will lif’ up his fellow.” For 75 years, Tom Joad has walked the roadways of America, a ghostly presence, a shadow. A conscience. Over the 450 pages of The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck stripped away the legends of America, the lie of a promised land, and gave, in return, a mythic rebirth, a sense of the holy, and a conscience to guide, and to haunt. Not bad, for one hundred days. Robert J. Wiersema’s new novel, Black Feathers, will be published next year. The Grapes of Wrath Summary - eNotes.com The Grapes of Wrath Summary Trivia The Grapes of Wrath Summary Tom Joad is released from prison at the beginning of Steinbeck's classic novel of the Great Depression.

Tom meets a former preacher named Jim, who joins the Joads on their journey to California. The Grapes of Wrath begins when Tom Joad is released from prison. He then joins his family on their journey to California, where they hope to find a better life. This journey to California is a perilous one, and the Joads face death, heat, and poverty while traveling West. Upon reaching California, they're disappointed to find that life is no better there. After a flood, the Joads seek refuge in a barn where they find a starving man and his son. Rose of Sharon, who has recently lost her baby, feeds the starving man from her breast. link Link Summary of the Novel Tom Joad, a prison parolee, meets Jim Casy, a preacher who has given up his calling. They go to Tom’s home looking for his family, but the Joad farm and all those around it are deserted. They are told the Joads are living with Tom’s Uncle John. Arriving at Uncle John’s house, they learn the family has lost their farm and are making preparations to sell their belongings and move to California in search of promised work.

With Casy accompanying them, the Joads encounter many hardships on the road west, and the family crumbles. Grampa dies the first night he is separated from his beloved land. Granma dies while they are crossing the Arizona desert. Noah and Connie give up and leave the family. The further west they go, the more resistant and unfriendly the people are. In California the family goes from camp to camp in a futile search for work and their living conditions worsen. Jim Casy organizes a strike against the unfair low wages being paid and is killed. Tom kills Jim’s murderer and goes into hiding. He leaves the family to continue Casy’s work. The Joads move to a cottonfield where the pay is better. Rose of Sharon delivers a stillborn baby during a fearful storm. The family has to abandon their boxcar home to escape the resultant flood. Taking refuge in a hillside barn, they discover a young boy and his near-dead, starving father who is saved when Rose feeds him from her milk-filled breasts. Estimated Reading Time The average person should be able to read the entire novel in a total of approximately 12 to 18 hours.

It is suggested that the reading of the novel be divided into the three blocks indicated. These three blocks divide the story into what happens in Oklahoma, on the journey west, and after the migrants arrive in California. If desired, the reading can be further broken down into the six sub-units listed. In this study guide, study questions and suggested essay topics follow the summary and discussion of each of the six sub-units. BLOCK ONE: LEAVING OKLAHOMA Reading Time: 4–6 hrs. Unit I Chapters 1–6: 2–3 hrs. Unit II Chapters 7–11: 2–3 hrs. BLOCK TWO: THE JOURNEY WEST Reading Time: 4–6 hrs. Unit III Chapters 12–16: 2–3 hrs. Unit IV Chapters 17–21: 2–3 hrs. BLOCK THREE: LIFE IN CALIFORNIA Reading Time: 4–6 hrs. Unit V Chapters 22–26: 3–4 hrs. Unit VI Chapters 27–30: 1–2 hrs.

More Content: Summary (hide) link Link In The Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck vents his anger against a capitalistic society that was capable of plunging the world into an economic depression, but he does not exonerate the farmers who have been driven from the Dust Bowl of the midwestern and southwestern United States. He deplores their neglect of the land that resulted in the Dust Bowl and which helped to exacerbate the Great Depression. The book is interestingly structured. Interspersed among its chapters are frequent interchapters, vignettes that have little direct bearing on the novel’s main narrative. These interchapters contain the philosophical material of the book, the allegories such as that of the turtle crossing the road. As the animal makes its tedious way across the dusty thoroughfare, drivers swerve to avoid hitting it. One vicious driver, however, aims directly for it, clearly intending to squash it. Because this driver’s aim is not accurate, he succeeds only in nicking the corner of the turtle’s carapace, catapulting it to the side of the road it was trying to reach.

Once the dust settles and the shock wears off, the turtle emerges and continues on its way, dropping as it does a grain of wheat from the folds of its skin. When the rains come, this grain will germinate; this is Steinbeck’s intimation of hope. As the narrative opens, Tom Joad has been released from a prison term he served for having killed someone in self-defense. On his way home, he falls in with Jim Casy, a former preacher down on his luck. Jim’s initials can be interpreted religiously, as can much of the book. When Jim and Tom get to the farm where the Joads were tenant farmers, they find the place deserted, as are the farms around it, now dusty remnants of what they had been. Tom learns that his family has sold what little it owned, probably for five cents on the dollar, and headed to the promised land: California. En route, the family has paused to rest at a relative’s place and to work on the antique truck they had bought secondhand for the trip. Tom and Jim catch up with them there, and they all leave—an even dozen of them—for the land in which they have placed their future hope.

The chronicle of the slow trip west, reminiscent of the turtle’s arduous creep across the parched road, is recorded in such realistic detail that the reader is transported into a world peopled by hobos, stumblebums, the dispossessed, the disenchanted, and the dislocated—all of them pushing ahead to the jobs they believe exist for agricultural workers in California. Death haunts the motley band, threatening the elderly and those who are weak. The grandfather dies of a stroke the first night out; his wife dies as the family crosses the Mojave Desert. Noah, the retarded son, wanders off and is not heard from again. Ahead, however, lies hope, so the Joads bury their dead and keep going. The land of their hearts desire, however, proves to be no Garden of Eden. The dream of a future that will offer hope and security quickly develops into a nightmare. Tom’s sister, Rose of Sharon, lacks the funds for a funeral when her baby dies. She prays over it and sets it adrift in the rushes beside a river. Tom gets into trouble with the police, but Jim surrenders in his place and is taken away.

By the time Tom and Jim meet again, Jim is a labor agitator. In an encounter with the police, Jim is killed and Tom is injured. The Joads hide Tom in their shack, then sneak him into a farm. There he takes up Jim’s work as a labor organizer. As the rains come, the Joads, who are encamped beside a river, endure floods that ruin their old truck. Having no place to live, they go into a decrepit barn, where a boy and his starving father have sought shelter. Rose of Sharon, having lost her baby, nourishes the starving man with the milk from her breasts, thereby saving his life. One is reminded again of the turtle and of the grain of wheat it deposits in the desiccated soil. The Grapes of Wrath is a bitter tale of humans against nature and against a brutally exploitive society, but it is also a tale of nobility, of self-sacrifice, and ultimately of hope. It often offends the sensibilities, but life frequently offends one’s sensibilities. The novel is a polemic, but one more detached and objective than first thought by many a critic.

link Link The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck’s masterpiece, is a starkly realistic rendition of the Depression-era struggle of an Oklahoma farm family forced to move to California in order to find employment. The family’s dilemma represents that of all rural, working-class households in the Midwest and West during an age of increasing mechanization for upper-class, capitalistic profit. In addition, Steinbeck’s female characters, especially, convey his message of working-class unity. The Joads are typical 1930’s tenant farmers, forced from home because “one man on a tractor can take the place of twelve or fourteen families.” Reading advertisements of work available in California, the Joads buy an old truck for the journey. The trip quickly kills lifelong Oklahoman Grandpa Joad, and Grandma Joad dies in the Nevada desert. Throughout, the impoverished Joads are victimized repeatedly, microcosmically representative of the entire capital exploitation system underlying the Great Depression. Ma Joad’s determination, however, helps the Joads reach California. They then learn of their further victimization by machines. The work advertisements were mass-produced and deliberately overdisseminated to entice excess workers, thereby depressing wages even further and creating widespread unemployment in California.

Fortunately, the family finds shelter in a government-operated, socialist-style cooperative camp, where a central committee makes management decisions and tenants work and share equally. The Joads begin to realize that only by working-class unity can they hope to combat the crop owners and their police. As Ma Joad states, “If you’re in trouble or hurt or need—go to poor people. They’re the only ones that’ll help—the only ones.” The Joads then show they can reciprocate as class-conscious members of the struggle for economic survival in an America dominated by the capitalist “monster.” After Rose of Sharon’s baby is predict-ably stillborn, given the family’s deprivation, the Joads are forced from home by a flood. Struggling to higher ground, they take refuge in an old barn, where they discover a starving man and his son. Proving their newfound dedication to their class and ability to adjust, endure, and eventually conquer, Ma and Rose of Sharon look at each other, Rose of Sharon saying “Yes.” Ma responds, “I knowed you would. I knowed!” as Rose of Sharon kneels beside the starving man to feed him from her breast.

The Joad women thus demonstrate that all of the suffering poor are their family, to be nurtured and sustained in the unending struggle for economic justice in an economically unjust America. link Link Tom Joad, Jr., is released from the Oklahoma state penitentiary where he served a sentence for killing a man in self-defense. He travels homeward through a region made barren by drought and dust storms. On the way, he meets Jim Casy, a former preacher; the pair go together to the home of Tom’s family. They find the Joad place deserted. While Tom and Casy are wondering what happened, Muley Graves, a die-hard tenant farmer, ccomes by and discloses that all the families in the neighborhood have gone to California or are going. Tom’s folks, Muley says, went to a relative’s place to prepare for going west. Muley is the only sharecropper to stay behind. All over the southern Midwest states, farmers, no longer able to make a living because of land banks, weather, and machine farming, sold or were forced out of the farms they tenanted. Junk dealers and used-car salesmen profiteer on them.

Thousands of families take to the roads leading to the promised land: California. Tom and Casy find the Joads at Uncle John’s place, all busy with preparations for their trip to California. Assembled for the trip are Pa and Ma Joad; Noah, their developmentally disabled son; Al, the adolescent younger brother of Tom and Noah; Rose of Sharon, Tom’s sister, and her husband, Connie; the Joad children, Ruthie and Winfield; and Granma and Grampa Joad. Al has bought an ancient truck to take them West. The family asks Casy to go with them. The night before they start, they kill the pigs they have left and salt down the meat so that they will have food on the way. Spurred by handbills that state that agricultural workers are badly needed in California, the Joads, along with thousands of others, make their tortuous way, in a worn-out vehicle, across the plains toward the mountains. Grampa dies of a stroke during their first overnight stop. Later, there is a long delay when the truck breaks down.

Small businesspeople along the way treat the migrants as enemies, and, to add to their misery, returning migrants tell the Joads that there is no work to be had in California, that conditions are even worse than they are in Oklahoma. The dream of a bountiful West Coast, however, urges the Joads onward. Close to the California line, where the group stops to bathe in a river, Noah, feeling he is a hindrance to the others, wanders away. It is there that the Joads first hear themselves addressed as Okies, another word for tramps. Granma dies during the night trip across the desert. After burying her, the group goes into a Hooverville, as the migrants’ camps are called. There they learn that work is all but impossible to find. A contractor comes to the camp to sign up men to pick fruit in another county. When the Okies ask to see his license, the contractor turns the leaders over to a police deputy who accompanied him to camp. Tom is involved in the fight that follows. He escapes, and Casy surrenders himself in Tom’s place. Connie, husband of the pregnant Rose of Sharon, suddenly disappears from the group.

The family is breaking up in the face of its hardships. Ma Joad does everything in her power to keep the group together. Fearing recrimination after the fight, the Joads leave Hooverville and go to a government camp maintained for transient agricultural workers. The camp has sanitary facilities, a local government made up of the transients themselves, and simple organized entertainment. During the Joads’ stay at the camp, the Okies successfully defeat an attempt of the local citizens to give the camp a bad name and thus to have it closed to the migrants. For the first time since they arrived in California, the Joads find themselves treated as human beings. Circumstances eventually force them to leave the camp, however, for there is no work in the district. They drive to a large farm where work is being offered. There they find agitators attempting to keep the migrants from taking the work because of the unfair wages offered. The Joads, however, thinking only of food, are escorted by motorcycle police to the farm. The entire family picks peaches for five cents a box and earns in a day just enough money to buy food for one meal.

Tom, remembering the pickets outside the camp, goes out at night to investigate. He finds Casy, who is the leader of the agitators. While Tom and Casy are talking, deputies, who have been searching for Casy, close in on them. The pair flee but are caught. Casy is killed. Tom receives a cut on his head, but not before he fells a deputy with an ax handle. The family conceals Tom in their shack. The rate for a box of peaches drops, meanwhile, to two-and-a-half cents. Tom’s danger and the futility of picking peaches drive the Joads on their way. They hide the injured Tom under the mattresses in the back of the truck, and then they tell the suspicious guard at the entrance to the farm that the extra man they had with them when they came was a hitchhiker who stayed behind to pick. The family finds at last a migrant crowd encamped in abandoned boxcars along a stream. They join the camp and soon find temporary jobs picking cotton. Tom, meanwhile, hides in a culvert near the camp. Ruthie innocently discloses Tom’s presence to another little girl.

Ma, realizing that Tom is no longer safe, sends him away. Tom promises to carry on Casy’s work in trying to improve the lot of the downtrodden everywhere. The autumn rains begin. Soon the stream that runs beside the camp overflows and water enters the boxcars. Under these all but impossible conditions, Rose of Sharon gives birth to a dead baby. When the rising water makes their position no longer bearable, the family moves from the camp on foot. The rains had made their old truck useless. They come to a barn, which they share with a boy and his starving father. Rose of Sharon, bereft of her baby, nourishes the famished man with the milk from her breasts. The poor keep each other alive in the years of the Great Depression. Chapters 1–11: Leaving Oklahoma The Grapes of Wrath follows the trials and tribulations of the Joad family as... (The entire section is 1305 words.) Get Free Access Start your free trial with eNotes for complete access to this resource and thousands more. 30,000+ Study Guides Save time with thousands of teacher-approved book and topic summaries.

Get Homework Help Ask real teachers questions on any subject or search 300,000+ answers. On the Go Access Tom Joad: the protagonist, an Oklahoma tenant farmer’s son Jim Casy: a former preacher who now questions traditional beliefs as he observes human behavior Muley Graves: a farmer reduced to homeless poverty when he loses his family’s land through foreclosure Summary Chapter 1 When the last of light rains ended in early May, the land began to dry up. Weeds changed their color to protect themselves from the harsh sun and the corn faded and dried up. The few drops of rain that fell in June gave no help. Animal hooves and vehicle wheels broke the dry dirt crust and formed dust. Winds drove the dust until it mixed with... (The entire section is 1946 words.) Get Free Access The Land As Character (Chapter 1) There are two main character sets in Steinbeck’s novel. The first, of course, is the Joads, the beleaguered Oklahoma family of squatters forced to leave their home. The other central character is the land. Pay attention to the minute detail in which Steinbeck describes the land.

It is of such great importance, in fact, that the land emerges as a character first. It is described before any person comes onto the scene: To the red country and part of the gray country of Oklahoma, the last rains came gently. They did not cut the scarred earth. The plows crossed and recrossed the rivulet marks. The last rains lifted the corn quickly and scattered weed colonies and grass along the sides of the roads so that the gray country and the dark red country began to disappear under a green cover. In the last part of May the sky grew pale and the clouds that had hung in high puffs for so long in the spring were dissipated. The sun flared down on the growing corn day after day until a line of brown spread along the edge of each green bayonet. The clouds appeared, and went away, and in a while they did not try any more. The surface of the earth crusted, a thin hard crust, and as the sky became pale, so the earth became pale, pink in the red country and white in the gray country. In the water-cut gullies the earth dusted down in dry little streams. Gophers and ant lions started small avalanches.

And as the sharp sun struck day after day, the leaves of the young corn became less stiff and erect, they bent in a curve at first, and then, as the central ribs of strength grew weak, each leaf tilted downward. Then it was June, and the sun shone more fiercely. The brown lines of corn leaves widened and moved in on the central ribs. The weeds frayed and edged back on their roots. The air was thin and the sky more pale, and every day the earth paled. If the land is a character, it is one who is down-and-out. This is not a picture of prosperity and growth, but of barrenness and abandonment, that something is coming to an end. For example, “The last rains” is repeated twice, followed by the “last part of May.” The sense of defeat is evident in the personification of the clouds, which “did not try anymore.” (Personification is giving human qualities to non-living objects). Additionally, the repetitions of “gray country” serve to impress upon the depression of the land, both literally and metaphorically.

Finally, in this initial chapter which shapes the character of Oklahoma’s land, Steinbeck uses alliteration (a literary device that repeats first letters or letter combinations of words). For example, “the clouds that had hung in high puffs”and “As the sharp sun struck day after day” both lend a feeling of oppression and immobility though sound to the landscape. The Family Structure (Chapter 1) The novel begins with a typical patriarchal family structure; that is, man as head of the family, women in secondary roles, and children, of course, at the bottom, with male children being of higher status than females (although age in female children does outrank those of younger male children, if only temporarily). The men are the first to asses the dire situation. And even though they are the titular heads of household, there is a force greater than themselves: the weather. Men first: The Trucker and Tom Joad (Chapter 2) One of the aspects of John Steinbeck’s writing that makes him so memorable and appealing is the way he is able to capture voice and movement of characters in vivid settings. This is apparent in Chapter 2, which takes place in a truck stop.

Here is an excerpt in which the protagonist, Tom Joad, is introduced, although he is not initially named. In the 1930s, the description of Tom’s clothes would have tipped a lot of people off that Tom is an “ex-con,” as convicts, just released from prison, were issued a new but typically ill-fitting suit as well as a pair of (usually) poorly fitted shoes. The man’s clothes were new -- all of them, cheap and new. His gray cap was so new that the visor was still stiff and the button still on, not shapeless and bulged as it would when it had served for a while all the various purposes of a cap -- carrying sack, towel, handkerchief. His suit was of a cheap gray hardcloth and so new that there were creases in the trousers. His blue chambray shirt was stiff and smooth with filler. The coat was too big, the trousers too short, for he was a tall man. The coat shoulder peaks hung down on his arms, and even then the sleeves were too short and the front of the coat flapped loosely over his stomach.

He wore a pair of new tan shoes of the kind called “army last,” hob-nailed and with half-circles like horseshoes to protect the edges of the heels from wear. As Tom continues towards his family home in his uncomfortable garb, he meets a trucker Although the rig’s owner displays a sign proclaiming, “NO RIDERS,” quick-thinking Tom overcomes the company mandate: The hitch-hiker stood up and looked across through the windows. “Could ya give me a lift, mister,” The driver looked quickly back at the restaurant for a second. “Did you see the No Riders sticker on the win’shield?” “Sure -- I seen it. But sometimes a guy’ll be a good guy even if some rich bastard makes him carry a sticker.” The trucker is in a bind. He surely knows Tom is an ex-con by the look of his clothing. But he also knows that he and Tom are both working-class people caught in a system in which they have almost no power. If he denies Tom the ride, he denies his own autonomy.

The Aggressive Land, the Steadfast Turtle, and the Okies (Chapter 3) The land is a character in this novel and an active one, although its means of pursuit might not appear to be aggressive on the surface. However, a closer look will reveal an incredibly mobile, even aggressive, landscape. Consider the opening paragraph of Chapter 3: The concrete highway was edged with a mat of tangled, broken, dry grass, and the grass heads were heavy with oat beards to catch on a dog’s coat, and foxtails to tangle in a horse’s fetlocks, and clover burrs to fasten in sheep’s wool; sleeping life waiting to be spread and dispersed, every seed armed with an appliance of dispersal, twisting darts and parachutes for the wind, little spears and balls of tiny thorns, and all waiting for animals and for the wind, for a man’s trouser cuff or the hem of a woman’s skirt, all passive but armed with appliances of activity, still, but each possessed by the anlage of movement.

ACTIVE VERBS: catch, tangle,spread, dispersed, twisting, armed STRONG NOUNS: darts, parachutes, spears, balls, thorns STRONG ADJECTIVES: concrete, broken, dry, heavy, armed, twisting There is a parallel to the Joads and the other “Okies” here as well. Although these impoverished families seem passive, at the mercy of the winds that blow them off their farms and the machinery which shoves them aggressively from one side of the country to the other, they too are armed with “appliances of activity” which will allow the people to replant and live again. A land turtle crawls through this near war-zone-like environment. And over the grass at the roadside a land turtle crawled, turning aside for nothing, dragging his high-domed shell over the grass: His hard legs and yellow-nailed feet threshed slowly through the grass… It should be noted that there are parallels between the turtle and his “high domed” shell and the jalopies that traveled along Route 66 to California. These trucks were often piled so high with all of a family’s worldly possessions that the vehicles bore an uncanny resemblance to land turtles.

Their movement, like the turtles, was necessarily slow due to the extreme weight the axles had to bear and the precarious arrangement of the items salvaged from homes. There are further parallels to the turtle and the Okies. As the turtle crawls along, the head of a wild oat becomes trapped in his shell. A laborious climb up a steep hill does not dislodge the oat and finally the turtle plods across the highway as it had originally intended. At this point, two cars come speeding down the highway. The first car is driven by a woman: A sedan driven by a forty-year-old woman approached. She saw the turtle and swung to the right, off the highway, the wheels screamed and a cloud of dust boiled up. Two wheels lifted for a moment then settled. The car skidded back onto the road, and went on, but more slowly. The turtle had jerked into its shell, but now it hurried on, for the highway was burning hot. The second driver is male. [T]he driver saw the turtle and swerved to hit it. His front wheel struck the edge of the shell, flipped the turtle like a tiddly-wink, spun it like a coin, and rolled it off the highway.

The truck went back to its course along the right side. The differences between female protective action and male aggressive destruction are readily apparent. As for the turtle, he, like the many other aspects of the natural landscape, carries on: Lying on its back, the turtle was tight in its shell for a long time. But at last its legs waved in the air, reaching for something to pull it over. Its front foot caught a piece of quartz and little by little the shell pulled over and flopped upright. The wild oat head fell out and three of the spearhead seeds stuck in the ground. The turtle, like the Joads and many of the other travelers, eventually makes it to the other side of the road. It plants the seed where life will be renewed. The migrants must create new life in a new place, much like the turtle has done. Human Sexuality (Chapter 4) One of the themes of Chapter 4 is the human need for sexual release. It is a basic human function and resists repression. Consider the attitudes Steinbeck takes toward the corporeal in all its forms. He strongly believes in APPETITES: for food, for sex, for enjoyment. These appetites are most apparent when they are released from oppressions.

In Chapter 4, Casy reflects on his days as a preacher and how women would become especially lustful during revivals: "I got to thinkin' like this—'Here's me preachin' grace. An' here's them people gettin' grace so hard they're jumpin' an' shoutin'. Now they say layin' up with a girl comes from the devil. But the more grace a girl got in her, the quicker she wants to go out in the grass.' An' I got to thinkin' how in hell, s'cuse me, how can the devil get in when a girl is so full of the Holy Sperit that it's spoutin' out of her nose an' ears. You'd think that'd be one time when the devil didn't stand a snowball's chance in hell. But there it was." His eyes were shining with excitement. He worked his cheeks for a moment and then spat into the dust, and the gob of spit rolled over and over, picking up dust until it looked like a round dry little pellet. The preacher spread out his hand and looked at his palm as though he were reading a book. "An' there's me," he went on softly.

"There's me with all them people's souls in my han'—responsible an' feelin' my responsibility—an' ever time, I lay with one of them girls." He looked over at Joad and his face looked helpless. His expression asked for help. Sex is a natural part of life. It will find a way to happen. Tom listens to his friend, full of wonder and confusion, and as he attends, Joad carefully drew the torso of a woman in the dirt, breasts, hips, pelvis. This outline of a woman has the primitive feel of a cave drawing, yet it timeless. Men will always seek women, dream about them, desire them. And as the freedom-from-repression that Gramma exhibits, as well as the countless women Casy beds, women, too, desire sexual activity. All living creatures experience this primal drive and this, among the other appetites of the body are what will help the Joads and other migrants adapt and survive in the new land.

Of Cars and Cons (Chapter 6) One of the purposes of the intercalary chapters is to show that not only the Joads are suffering the injustices of much of the capitalist system; thousands of people who must also abandon their homes and ways of life are similarly suffering the slings and arrows of misfortune. Perhaps the most obvious way that the lowest of the classes are being taken advantage of is in the used car lots that have sprung up all over the sides of highways like intransigent summer weeds. Like weeds, these “dealerships” suck everything they can out of their sources, in this case, the poor, who have no other option but to take what their meager funds can get them. In a stratified society, those who are just a little bit better off than those below seem to feel a need to mentally place themselves far above the very low. The men who run these impromptu car lots, although no where near even middle class status, nonetheless treat their customers as almost subhuman. Even though each of their customers has very little to spend and must make the best decision for their families, the salesmen care nothing about their circumstances; they care only about how much graft can be gleaned from a particular mark.

They watch the potential customers with a mixture of greed and loathing: Those sons-of-bitches over there ain't buying. Every yard gets 'em. They're lookers. Spend all their time looking. Don't want to buy no cars; take up your time. Don't give a damn for your time. Over there, them two people—no, with the kids. Get 'em in a car. Start 'em at two hundred and work down. They look good for one and a quarter. Get 'em rolling. Get 'em out in a jalopy. Sock it to 'em! They took our time. Owners with rolled-up sleeves. Salesmen, neat, deadly, small intent eyes watching for weaknesses. Watch the woman's face. If the woman likes it we can screw the old man. Start 'em on that Cad'. Then you can work 'em down to that '26 Buick. 'F you start on the Buick, they'll go for a Ford. Roll up your sleeves an' get to work. This ain't gonna last forever. Show 'em that Nash while I get the slow leak pumped up on that '25 Dodge. I'll give you a Hymie when I'm ready.

Weaknesses, like a husband’s love for his wife, are easy to exploit, as are the man’s concern for his family in general. Further complicating matters is the fact that the majority of these immigrants have never had to deal with people who are aiming to con them. They are confronted with terms they do not know and scare tactics regarding their family’s safety, the veracity of the threats impossible to gauge. The salesmen also prey on their customer’s social and moral codes. Not far removed from the lower class themselves, they understand how to exploit the desperate travelers’ senses of fairness. One dealer tells another: Get 'em under obligation. Make 'em take up your time. Don't let 'em forget they're takin' your time. People are nice, mostly. They hate to put you out. Make 'em put you out, an' then sock it to 'em. If that doesn’t work, the salesmen change tactics and move to insults. One of the most egregious insults was to be called a “piker,” someone who is stingy and will only place very small bets: “Joe, did you know you was talkin' to pikers?” “I ain't a piker.

I got to get a car. We're goin' to California. I got to get a car.” Time and again, Steinbeck shows that community and justice has been replaced by the importance of the individual and injustice. These charlatans will do whatever they have to do to sell a car, and care nothing of the consequences for the customer once the car has been driven off their lot. Underhanded tactics to do whatever it took were not isolated in the time of the Dust Bowl, but commonplace. One trick was to put sawdust in the engine; doing so would briefly quiet any banging noises and also temporarily block any leaks. The “fix,” however, was very temporary and the car salesmen knew it: Listen, Jim, I heard that Chevvy's rear end. Sounds like bustin' bottles. Squirt in a couple quarts of sawdust. Put some in the gears, too. We got to move that lemon for thirty-five dollars. Bastard cheated me on that one. I offer ten an' he jerks me to fifteen, an' then the son-of-a-bitch took the tools out. God Almighty! I wisht I had five hundred jalopies. This ain't gonna last.

He don't like the tires? Tell 'im they got ten thousand in 'em, knock off a buck an' a half. For the displaced families, the choice was take it or leave it. Tom Joad, the Dust Bowl, and McAlester Prison (Chapter 7) His family is gone. His home is destroyed. His friends are nowhere to be found. Even though there is nothing tangible to keep Tom Joad in his old neighborhood, he has one primary reason for his reluctance to leave Oklahoma: parole. "Ever'body's goin' west," he said. "I got me a parole to keep. Can't leave the state." "Parole?" Muley asked. "I heard about them. How do they work?" "Well, I got out early, three years early. They's stuff I gotta do, or they send me back in. Got to report ever' so often." Curious, Muley asks: "How they treat ya there in McAlester? My woman's cousin was in McAlester an' they give him hell." Tom replies: "It ain't so bad," said Joad. "Like ever'place else. They give ya hell if ya raise hell.

You get along O.K. les' some guard gets it in for ya. Then you catch plenty hell. I got along O.K. Minded my own business, like any guy would.” McAlester prison opened in 1908 and was a relatively young facility when Tom Joad was admitted. Tom had been there four years, and was released three years early (“Sure I been in McAlester. Been there four years.” - Chapter 2; ). Based on these dates, it is likely that Tom Joad was incarcerated in McAlester from 1933-1937. The doors locked behind Tom just as the storms were increasing in intensity. According to PBS’s “Timeline: Surviving the Dustbowl. 1931-1934, “Great dust storms spread from the Dust Bowl area. The drought is the worst ever in U.S. history, covering more than 75 percent of the country and affecting 27 states severely.” Before Tom went away, however, he was aware that some weather anomalies were occurring in Oklahoma. In 1932, PBS reports, fourteen significant dust storms had occurred. By 1933, that number had doubled.

The dust storms continued to occur, becoming even more frequent and powerful. On April 14, 1933, an horrific event known as the “Black Dustbowl” occurred, displacing some 300,000 tons of top soil and most greatly affecting the areas of Oklahoma and the Texas Panhandle. Then, in 1934, just one year after Tom went away, the “Yearbook of Agriculture” announced that “[a]pproximately 35 million acres of formerly cultivated land have essentially been destroyed for crop production…. 100 million acres now in crops have lost all or most of the topsoil; 125 million acres of land now in crops are rapidly losing topsoil….”. When Tom is dropped off by the trucker, in 1937, what had been some abnormalities at home had become unmitigated disasters, and not all of them, of course, were weather-related. Banks were seizing farms by the hundreds, forcing their residents to go elsewhere. As the land was unusable, these displaced families had to go elsewhere.

The novel does not reveal how much, if any, of this was known to Tom prior to his release but his dismay indicates that he was ignorant of most of the events of the prior four years. Tom’s world from 1933 to 1937 was necessarily interior although because of his assignment to a work crew, he could not have been completely in the dark about the dust storms. Tom, like thousands of others, was a participant in prison labor. Prisons had been in existence in America for about 100 years by the late 1930s and had remained largely unchanged: most were terrible and inmates were given only the bare necessities to survive. Privacy was not an option. What did change was the numbers of people, mostly men, who found themselves behind bars in by the late 1930s; incarceration rates climbed from 79 to 137 per 100,000 residents between 1925-1929. Prison labor had long been a part of life for the incarcerated, who, unlike free citizens, could be compelled to work.

While there were large numbers of black men and other minorities assigned to chain gangs and other work, the numbers of white men forced to work was relatively low in comparison. However, by 1934, many more white men were conscripted into service. The reason for this can be found in the growing numbers of inmates crammed in too-small housing. Riots were flaring more and more frequently and prison officials lobbied Congress to create a work program and in 1934, the 73rd Congress approved the Federal Prison Industries. It was into this mix of circumstances that Tom Joad was thrown. It is likely that Tom worked on a road crew, as evidenced by the location of the callouses on his hands, which the trucker who lets Tom ride with him observes: “I seen your hands. Been swingin' a pick or an ax or a sledge.” Road crew workers often worked from sunup to sundown. Given the location of the work, sometimes cots were set up and the prisoners guarded while they slept so that they could be back on the job as soon as there was enough sunlight to do so. No one would want to return to prison.

But in 1937, for Tom Joad, violating his parole meant a return to subhuman conditions and a life of brutal work. Sources: Pa Joad and Thrust: The Changing Roles for Men (Chapter 8) Steinbeck, a careful linguist, repeats one word in connection with the character of Pa Joad a total of five times in Chapter Eight. This is no accident, but seemingly a deliberate association with the "power" men often exercise in the world: His face, squared by a bristling pepper and salt beard, was all drawn down to the forceful chin, a chin thrust out and built out by the stubble beard which was not so grayed on the chin, and gave weight and force to its thrust. His eyes were brown, black-coffee brown, and he thrust his head forward when he looked at a thing, for his bright dark eyes were failing. Pa's chin thrust out, and he looked back down the road for a moment. The old man thrust out his bristly chin, and he regarded Ma with his shrewd, mean, merry eyes.

The word “thrust” is often used to describe males who are having sex; being able to participate in sexual activity is frequently seen as the mark of a man. Sexual relations, of course, often lead to procreation. Before Pa must leave his home, he feels in control of his life: virile, able-bodied, and the head of his household. However, just as the tractors churn up the land they claim, social roles are being overturned and upended as well. The more Pa becomes disassociated with the roles he had previously embraced, the more impotent, helpless, and dependent he will become. Ma Joad and Changing Gender Roles (Chapter 8) The description of Ma Joad in Chapter Eight reveals a complex character, one who operates both below and above the surface of her family to assure that everything is running as smoothly as possible. Pa may think himself the head-of-household, but this is a role that Ma allows him to assume. Ma Joad is like a secretary who secretly does all the work for which the boss takes the credit. Make no mistake, however: the center of this family is Ma. As the wheels of patriarchy start to come off, Ma takes her behind-the-scenes role to the stage.

She is equipped to do so even if the push into the light is not one she would ever have independently pursued. Consider all the descriptive words in this passage that belie Ma’s strength but also her softness: Ma was heavy, but not fat; thick with child-bearing and work. She wore a loose Mother Hubbard of gray cloth in which there had once been colored flowers, but the color was washed out now, so that the small flowered pattern was only a little lighter gray than the background. The dress came down to her ankles, and her strong, broad, bare feet moved quickly and deftly over the floor. Her thin, steel-gray hair was gathered in a sparse wispy knot at the back of her head. Strong, freckled arms were bare to the elbow, and her hands were chubby and delicate, like those of a plump little girl. She looked out into the sunshine. Her full face was not soft; it was controlled, kindly. Her hazel eyes seemed to have experienced all possible tragedy and to have mounted pain and suffering like steps into a high calm and a superhuman understanding. She seemed to know, to accept, to welcome her position, the citadel of the family, the strong place that could not be taken.

And since old Tom and the children could not know hurt or fear unless she acknowledged hurt and fear, she had practiced denying them in herself. And since, when a joyful thing happened, they looked to see whether joy was on her, it was her habit to build up laughter out of inadequate materials. But better than joy was calm. Imperturbability could be depended upon. And from her great and humble position in the family she had taken dignity and a clean calm beauty. From her position as healer, her hands had grown sure and cool and quiet; from her position as arbiter she had become as remote and faultless in judgment as a goddess. She seemed to know that if she swayed the family shook, and if she ever really deeply wavered or despaired the family would fall, the family will to function would be gone.

Words of strength: heavy, thick, strong , quickly, deftly, steel-gray, controlled, experienced all possible tragedy, mounted pain and suffering like steps, citadel, strong place that could not be taken, imperturbability, great dignity, healer, arbiter, sure, cool, faultless in judgment as a goddess Words of softness: wore a loose Mother Hubbard...small flowered pattern; deftly, wispy, delicate, plump little girl, full face, kindly, high calm, superhuman understanding, welcome, joy, laughter, calm, humble, quiet Ma, throughout the novel, will be both of these things: strong and soft. But like Pa, who must eventually acknowledge his diminished role, Ma, too, must endure yet another painful experience: the shifting of gender roles. She can no longer allow Pa to be the titular head of the family. For the citadel to stay safe, she must embrace the power she has for so long wielded in the shadows.

The 100 best novels: No 65 – The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck (1939) | Books | The Guardian The 100 best novels The 100 best novels: No 65 – The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck (1939) One of the greatest of great American novels, this study of a family torn apart by poverty and desperation in the Great Depression shocked US society June 1938: A family in Pittsburg County, Oklahoma is forced to leave their home during the Great Depression, due to a serious drought in the region.

Photograph: Dorothea Lange/Keystone/Getty Images The 100 best novels The 100 best novels: No 65 – The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck (1939) One of the greatest of great American novels, this study of a family torn apart by poverty and desperation in the Great Depression shocked US society Share on Messenger Close I began this series with the suggestion that the enduring classics of English and American fiction were novels written either from a burning need for self-expression, often in extremis (Pilgrim’s Progress), or from a passionate desire to entertain an audience with bravura storytelling (Tom Jones). Of course, over time, as the idea of the novel matured, and its readership developed, these comparatively raw instincts would become more sophisticated, getting softened, deepened and tamed. More subtle considerations would come to dominate the genre. Yet this domesticated bourgeois pet would never, as it were, lose a capacity to bare its teeth and drag the reader back into the wild. The Grapes of Wrath, no 65 in this series, is a novel with blood on its teeth.

This is the “American book” Steinbeck always longed to write, a realist tour de force which exemplifies the quite primitive instincts that originally governed the Anglo-American novel, a cry of rage – mixing blue-collar bitterness, prairie folk wisdom and regular left-wing politics – from a best-selling writer inspired to pick up his pen by a deep sense of social injustice, in this case the dreadful conditions of immigrant farmhands in the American south-west. Steinbeck’s exposé of the social and economic horrors of farming life in the American dust bowl was a campaigning document by a writer with a conscience who had, as it happened, been born on a farm. The starkness of his narrative, and his sense of injustice, echoed the haunting photos of Dorothea Lange . Like her, he was not afraid to devote his art to the scandal of the Okies (Oklahoma migrants) who trekked to the fruit fields of the Golden State (California) in search of a better life, and suffered horribly in their search for a promised land. Pinterest John Steinbeck at home in Sag Harbour in 1962, shortly after the announcement that he had won the Nobel prize award for literature.

Photograph: Bettmann/CORBIS “To the red country and part of the gray country of Oklahoma, the last rains came gently, and they did not cut the scarred earth....” In quasi-Biblical cadences, Steinbeck introduces to reader to the wretched of the earth, the Joad family, dispossessed farmers fleeing dust bowl conditions. Tom Joad has just been paroled from prison. Simultaneously, his family have lost their farm to the bank. The Joads are about to set out west in search of work, down Route 66 to California, the promised land. Nothing goes right. The Joads are exploited, bullied and torn apart. Their grandparents die en route, and have to be buried by the roadside. As the family begins to disintegrate, it is the women who are strong, like the pioneers of the 19th century. Old Ma Joad takes over. “Women can change better than a man,” she says. Tom gets implicated in another killing, and must flee into a landscape bereft of hope and opportunity.

In the controversial conclusion to a bleak and pitiless narrative, Tom’s sister, Rose of Sharon Joad, loses her daughter and offers her breast to a fellow Okie who is dying of starvation. “She squirmed closer,” writes Steinbeck, “and pulled his head close. ‘There!’ she said. ‘There.’” The novel ends with Rose of Sharon’s mysterious smile at this shocking gesture of self-sacrifice. A note on the text The Grapes of Wrath grew out of a series of newspaper articles on the California migrant workers entitled The Harvest Gypsies that Steinbeck published in the San Francisco News (illustrated with photographs by Dorothea Lange) from 5 to 12 October, 1936. Writing at the height of the Depression, Steinbeck was on fire with his subject. Like some of the greatest novels in this series, the book was written in a white heat.

He said, “I want to put a tag of shame on the greedy bastards who are responsible [for the Great Depression].” The novel – 200,000 words on 165 cramped, handwritten pages in a 12in x 18in lined ledger book – was completed in five months at the rate of 2,000 words a day. “Never worked so hard in my life nor so long before,” he told a friend. It was, said Steinbeck, his ambition to “rip a reader’s nerves to rags” from page to page. To achieve added drama and tempo, he borrowed the jump-cut technique of Dos Passos’ USA trilogy ( No 58 in this series ).

At his wife Carol’s suggestion, he took his title from The Battle Hymn of the Republic by Julia Ward Howe: “Mine Eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the lord/ He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored…” Steinbeck told his literary agent that he liked the title “because it is a march, and this book is a kind of march – because it is in our own revolutionary tradition.” On 26 October, 1938, Steinbeck reported he was “so dizzy” he could “hardly see the page.” He scrawled “END” in large letters on the manuscript, and then wrote in his journal “Finished this day, and I hope to God it’s good.” The first reactions of Steinbeck’s agent and editor were excited. The Grapes of Wrath was rushed into print, going from typescript to page proof in four months, and published on 14 April 1939 by the Viking Press in New York.

The novel at once became a national sensation, possibly the most reviewed and publicised, and even the most controversial, American novel of the 20th century – discussed on the radio, denounced by angry readers, and even banned in some libraries. The Associated Farmers of California were particularly incensed, complaining about “a pack of lies” and “Jewish propaganda”, though Steinbeck was not Jewish. A certain Ruth Comfort Mitchell attempted to refute the novel in a vindication of California’s treatment of its immigrant workers, in a now-forgotten book entitled Of Human Kindness . Joining battle from the other side, both Pearl Buck, author of The Good Earth, and the First Lady, Eleanor Roosevelt, who said she never thought the novel was exaggerated, supported Steinbeck. As did the US Senate, which judged that, if anything, the novelist had underestimated the violation of human rights on the west coast. Pinterest Despite, or perhaps because of, this furore The Grapes of Wrath became the best-selling book of 1939, selling almost half a million copies (at $2.75 a copy) in the first year of publication alone.

In 1940, the novel also won the Pulitzer prize for fiction, and would subsequently be taught in schools and colleges across the United States. In that year, John Ford directed a hastily put-together movie of the same name starring Henry Fonda, a rare case of an opportunistic movie equalling its fictional source. When Steinbeck was awarded the Nobel prize for literature in 1962, the prize committee identified this “great work” as a principal reason for awarding the prize. Not everyone was a Steinbeck fan. For example, F Scott Fitzgerald ( no 51 in this series ), writing to his friend the critic Edmund Wilson, described Steinbeck as “a rather cagey cribber”. Posterity has taken a different view. The Grapes of Wrath features on many “100 best” lists, including TIME , the Modern Library , Le Monde , and the BBC’s Big Read of 2003. Informal estimates suggest that it has sold about 15 million copies in the 75 years since its publication. There’s an American classic for you.

Three more from John Steinbeck Tortilla Flat (1935); Of Mice and Men (1937); East of Eden (1952).

Question: """To the red country and part of the grey country of Oklahoma, the last rains came gently, and they did not cut the scarred earth ""is the first line of which novel?"
Answer: 'THE GRAPES OF WRATH'