Will I love The Grapes of Wrath?

Having read this book in my undergraduate days, I thought I'd give it a second reading over half a century later.

Part of my intention was to see how well Steinbeck's criticism of capitalism during the Great Depression aligned with the cultural and economic conditions of today. I was pleasantly surprised to find that Steinbeck's focus on the "monsters" of the banking institutions of the Depression are very much relevant to today’s hedge-fund and tech billionaire economy.

I was also struck by the power of his characters to, as Faulkner phrased it, endure. A book that, while seeming dated in… show more.

When I first read The Grapes of Wrath in high school, I was moved by the story of the Joad family’s poverty and desperation, and the lack of sympathy they encountered when they arrived in California. 

It is a very gritty description of their journey to California, and details how their dreams sour when they arrive, working as slaves for big orchard owners. This was the fate of thousands of farmers who fled the Dust Bowl. 

I now want to reread all of Steinbeck’s work. 

Breaking from tradition, I've decided to list three non-history books this year, and really, three classics that I either re-read for the first time as an adult, or read for the first time, having somehow missed them in high school or college English classes.

The first book on the list is Grapes of Wrath, which I have to admit I had never read before. I loved this book much more than Steinbeck's shorter novels that I've read. I thought the contrapuntal pace (where he intersperses one chapter about the Joads with another chapter, generically, about the Okie experience) was… show more.

Set within the greatest mass migration in American history, Steinbeck’s 1939 classic follows the Joad family as they join nearly three million others who escape the Dust Bowl of the American Midwest.

Usurious banks have foreclosed and crushed the bereft farmers. More than 200,000 refugees head for California, and the Joads join them in an ambling caravan of rattling jalopies. Young Rose of Sharon moves pregnant across the continent, emblematic of both the promise and the peril of the human condition. She’s surrounded by family and hangers-on who ford the wasted continent, only to face a glut of labor in… show more.

‘…and the comfortable people… felt pity at first, and then distaste, and finally hatred for the migrant people.’

Powerful and epic in its account of hardship and brutality, loneliness, segregation, exploitation and man’s inhumanity to man, The Grapes of Wrath somehow maintains a sense of hope in the determination and perseverance of the Joads and countless others, hungry and desperately poor, in their struggle to build a new life . I’m not sure why it’s only now that I’ve come to read this monumental work but one element that stands out, apart from the power of the prose and… show more.

Though set less than a century ago, the world of Steinbeck’s novel is so very different from our own. This masterpiece follows the Joad family as they head west to California, escaping the hardship and poverty of the Oklahoma Dust Bowl.

Depression-era America is described with such detail and emotion that the reader feels almost like a companion of the Joads, each of whom are rendered with precision and depth. In other hands, this might have been a grim, gloomy tale, but Steinback evokes themes of loyalty, kindness, and pride with peerless power and skill.  

My passion is reading novels. Generally speaking I like to read the novel before I see the screen or TV adaptation. This is partly because I do not want to know the plot, especially the ending before I read the book and partly because I want to see how it was adapted to the other medium.

But, over the years there have been several instances when it was the dramatic representation that led me to read a book I never read before. The first time this happened I was a teenager. I saw the 1940 John Ford movie version of … show more.

Steinbeck can see through his character’s eyes. I get chills when he captures private moments.

Faces on pickers being pushed off land in the dustbowl during the Depression. I tasted abject poverty when supper was passed out on pie tins—one tablespoon of beans in each. Dimes were gas money to follow a dream of picking work a brochure of orange orchards in California promised, not for bread.

The hardships mesmerized me—burying Grandpa along the highway; daughter Rosasharn rocking her swaddled stillborn to ward off the suspicion of border inspectors. In an abandoned railroad car as a night’s shelter a man… show more.

Again, it’s a missing piece from my childhood reading list.

Several of my books have covered the same era of the Great Depression, and Steinbeck helped me understand it through a ground-level lens and its human dimensions of devastation. He sets a scene like few can, with insights that sear and stay.

But don’t believe me, consider this passage: “In the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.”

Anger, indeed, and fruit for contemplation.

“It happens that every man in a bank hates what the bank does, and yet the bank does it. The bank is something more than men, I tell you. It’s the monster. Men made it, but they can’t control it.”

Steinbeck’s epic novel follows a family of sharecroppers from Great Depression Oklahoma, thrown off their land by economic forces beyond their control.

He beautifully demonstrates the process of economic transformation through the journey of its protagonists as they suffer heart-rending setbacks but also defend themselves from the exploitation they face proving “repression works only to strengthen and knit the repressed.”