The Grapes of Wrath

by John Steinbeck

“My whole work drive has been aimed at making people understand each other. . . .” —Steinbeck in a 1938 letter

“Boileau said that Kings, Gods, and Heroes only were fit subjects for literature. The writer can only write about what he admires. Present day kings aren’t very inspiring, the gods are on a vacation, and about the only heroes left are the scientists and the poor. . . . And since our race admires gallantry, the writer will deal with it where he finds it. He finds it in the struggling poor now.” —Steinbeck in a 1939 radio interview

The Grapes of Wrath turned out to be not only a fine book, but the most renowned and celebrated of his seventeen novels. Steinbeck’s liberal mixture of native philosophy, common-sense leftist politics, blue-collar radicalism, working-class characters, homespun folk wisdom, and digressive narrative form—all set to a bold, rhythmic style and nervy, raw dialogue—qualified the novel as the “American book” he had set out to write. The novel’s title—from Julia Ward Howe’s “Battle Hymn of the Republic”—was clearly in the American grain—and Steinbeck, a loyal Rooseveltian New Deal Democrat, liked the song “because it is a march and this book is a kind of march—because it is in our own revolutionary tradition and because in reference to this book it has a large meaning,” he announced on September 10, 1938, to Elizabeth Otis, his New York literary agent.

The Grapes of Wrath be “keyed into the American scene from the beginning” by reproducing all the verses of “Battle Hymn,” was only partly met: Viking Press compromised by printing the first page of Howe’s sheet music on the book’s endpapers in an attempt (unsuccessfully, it turned out) to deflect accusations of communism against the novel and its author.

If a literary classic can be defined as a book that speaks directly to readers’ concerns in successive historical and cultural eras, no matter what their critical approaches, methods, or preoccupations are, then surely The Grapes of Wrath is such a work. Each generation of readers has found something new and relevant about it that speaks to its times.

Although Steinbeck could not have predicted its success (and was nearly ruined by its roller-coaster notoriety), the fact is that, in the past six-plus decades, The Grapes of Wrath has sold more than fifteen million copies and currently sells annually 150,000 copies.

It proved to be a “hard, straight picture . . . that looks and feels like a documentary film and . . . has a hard, truthful ring,” Steinbeck reported on December 15, 1939, after seeing its Hollywood preview. (Folksinger/songwriter Woody Guthrie said it was the “best cussed pitcher I ever seen,” and urged readers of his column in People’s World, “go to see it and don’t miss. You was the star in that picture. ”)

Every strong novel redefines our conception of fiction’s dimensions and reorders our awareness of its possibilities. The Grapes of Wrath has a populist, homegrown quality: part naturalistic epic, part labor testament, part family chronicle, part partisan journalism, part environmental jeremiad, part captivity narrative, part road novel, part transcendental gospel. Many American authors, upon finding that established fictional models don’t fully suit their sensibilities, forge their own genealogy by synthesizing personal vision and experience with a disparate variety of popular motifs, cultural forms, and literary styles.

To execute The Grapes of Wrath he drew directly and indirectly on the jump-cut technique of John Dos Passos’s U.S.A. trilogy (1938), the narrative tempo of Pare Lorentz’s radio drama Ecce Homo! and the sequential, rapid-fire quality of Lorentz’s documentary films The Plow That Broke the Plains (1936) and The River (1937), the stark visual effects of Dorothea Lange’s photographs of Dust Bowl Oklahoma and California migrant life, the timbre of the Greek epics, the rhythms of the King James Bible, the refrains of American folk music, the philosophical implications of Darwinism, the view of cooperative matriarchal society defined in Robert Briffault’s anthropological treatise The Mothers (1931), as well as Edward F. Ricketts’s all-important theories of natural ecology and phalanx (“group man”) organization (aided and abetted by interdisciplinary readings in ethnography, marine biology, political philosophy, and contemporary science). Steinbeck transformed these ancient, classical, and modern resources (especially biblical themes, parallels, analogies, and allusions) into his own kind of combinatory textual structure. As David Minter says, it is a mistake to read Steinbeck solely as “a realist, a naturalist, or a proletarian novelist.” The Grapes of Wrath is large; it contains multitudes.

Historically, in nearly every regard, these two spheres appear to be separate and antagonistic, as aesthetically and thematically oppositional as Melville’s Moby-Dick and Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Alcott’s Little Women, but Steinbeck, borrowing from both spheres and adding grimly realistic contemporary twists of his own, has woven them together in The Grapes of Wrath.

Nothing less than the full spectrum of emotional coloration, from outright rage and inarticulate anger to honest sentiment and unabashed tenderness, is adequate to portray lives under pressure. Steinbeck, whose characters symbolize the “over-essence of people,” according to a July 6, 1938, entry in Working Days, was borrowing from and signifying on—and, in a sense, reinventing—both precursor cultural traditions. In renegotiating binaries of public/private, action/feeling, male/female, isolation/community, etc., The Grapes of Wrath is Steinbeck’s updated hybridized conjoining of nineteenth-century “literary” and “national” narratives characterized by Jonathan Arac in the second volume of Sacvan Bercovitch’s The Cambridge History of American Literature (1995).

His “particular” chapters are the slow-paced and lengthy narrative episodes that embody traditional characterization and advance the dramatic plot, while his jazzy, rapid-fire “interchapters” work at another level of cognition by expressing an atemporal, universal, synoptic view of the migrant condition. In one way or another, Steinbeck’s combinatory method has allegiances to the stereopticon, mentioned explicitly in chapter 10. The novel demonstrates how form itself is a kind of magic lantern, a shifting lens for magnifying and viewing multiple perspectives of reality.

Throughout his career, Steinbeck was always a relational thinker, and in Grapes, the intercalary chapters provide a kind of anthropological “thick description” of the American migrant plight. Moreover, Steinbeck historicizes the Joad narrative by embedding his fiction in its contemporary milieu; conversely, he demonstrates the fluidity of history by re-creating it in fiction.

The Grapes of Wrath is an unapologetically engaged novel with a partisan posture, many complex voices, and passionate prose styles. Except for its unflinching treatment of the Depression’s climatic, social, and economic conditions, there is nothing cynically distanced about it, nothing coolly modernist in the way we have come to understand the elite literary implications of that term in the past ninety years. It is not narrated from the first person point of view, yet the language has a salty, catchy eyewitness quality about it, and its vivid biblical, empirical, poetical, cinematic, and folk styles demonstrate the tonal and visual acuity of Steinbeck’s ear and eye, the melding of experience and rhetoric, oral and literary forms.

Steinbeck’s direct involvement with the plight of America’s Dust Bowl migrants in the latter half of the 1930s created his obsessive urge to tell their story honestly but also movingly. “This must be a good book,” he wrote in Working Days on June 10, 1938. “It simply must. I haven’t any choice. It must be far and away the best thing I have ever attempted—slow but sure, piling detail on detail until a picture and an experience emerge. Until the whole throbbing thing emerges.” Like Stowe in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, making the audience see and feel that living picture was paramount. “I am not writing a satisfying story,” he claimed to Pascal Covici on January 16, 1939: I’ve done my damndest to rip a reader’s nerves to rags, I don’t want him satisfied. . . . I tried to write this book the way lives are being lived not the way books are written. . . . Throughout I’ve tried to make the reader participate in the actuality, what he takes from it will be scaled entirely on his own depth or hollowness. There are five layers in this book, a reader will find as many as he can and he won’t find more than he has in himself. [Emphasis added.]

On one level it is the story of a family’s struggle for survival in the Promised Land. On another level it is the story of a people’s struggle, the migrants. On a third level it is the story of a nation, America. On still another level, through the allusions to Christ and those to the Israelites and Exodus, it becomes the story of mankind’s quest for profound comprehension of his commitment to his fellow man and to the earth he inhabits.

The last point opens the door to viewing The Grapes of Wrath as one of the most significant environmental novels of the century.

Grapes is a sustained indictment about a natural world despoiled by a grievous range of causes—natural disaster, poor land-use practices, rapacious acquisitiveness, and technological arrogance. Failure of genetic engineering and industrialized nature “hangs over the State like a great sorrow,” Steinbeck laments in chapter 25, and the “failure . . . that topples all our successes” stems from misconceived values— manipulating nature and misunderstanding man’s delicate place as a species in the biotic community. (Steinbeck’s ideas, indebted to Ed Ricketts’s ecological training, paralleled those of pioneering conservationist Aldo Leopold who proposed a viable land ethic in A Sand County Almanac.)

“ ‘I ain’t sayin’ I’m like Jesus.’ ” Whatever other considerable ends it achieves, Casy’s sojourn brings him to an understanding of “deep ecology,” an egalitarian, biocentric, nonsectarian view in which all living things are related and equally valued: “ ‘There was the hills, an’ there was me, an’ we wasn’t separate no more. We was one thing. An’ that one thing was holy,’ ” he tells Tom Joad

(William Conlogue notes that part of Grapes’ bestseller status came from Steinbeck portraying “whites being treated as if they were nonwhite.”)

As Charles Shindo explains, in Steinbeck’s desire to instill a sense of justice in his audience, The Grapes of Wrath provokes not only individual thought but collective action.

His achievement is especially noteworthy because he never thought of himself as a naturally gifted artistic genius and rarely believed he had ever “arrived” as a writer. If it is no longer possible to believe naively in the romantic myth of artistic genius, with its heightened capabilities of transcendence and sovereignty, neither is it possible to accept unhesitatingly the contemporary poststructuralist posture—that a writer is a bloodless cipher, utterly determined by unconscious forces of language, race, gender, and class. Better to think of Steinbeck as walking the line between those positions.

“I, as a novelist,” he declared in a letter, “am a product not only of my own time but of all the flags and tatters, the myth and prejudice, the faith and the filth that preceded me. . . . A novelist is a kind of flypaper to which everything adheres. His job then is to try to reassemble life into some kind of order.”

“Work is the only good thing,” he claimed on July 6, 1938, in Working Days. For Steinbeck, who had a pronounced nesting desire, writing was a kind of textual habitation, a way of building a home in the architectural spaces of his imagination. (This creative and interior level of engagement is the elusive, unacknowledged fifth layer of Steinbeck’s novel.) There was something positively totemic about his daily work routine and the ritual protocols he performed at the scene of his writing. Steinbeck often sequestered himself in the eight-by-eight-foot workroom of Arroya del Ajo (Garlic Gulch), the house he and Carol built in 1936 on Greenwood Lane in Los Gatos: “Just big enough for a bed and a desk and a gun rack and a little book case. I like to sleep in the room I work in,” he told George Albee.

Carol also served as his cultural envoy and stand-in. In January 1938, on a trip to New York City, she met with documentary filmmaker Pare Lorentz (1905-1992), arranging between them his first visit to Los Gatos to discuss a joint Steinbeck-Lorentz movie version of In Dubious Battle (which was never made) and a private showing of The River and The Plow That Broke the Plains. These pioneering documentary films, which Lorentz made for President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal-inspired Resettlement Administration (forerunner of the Farm Security Administration) , dealt with human displacement and natural erosion caused by the Dust Bowl and Mississippi Valley floods. After their initial meeting, Lorentz became an increasingly important figure in the novelist’s life, providing everything from practical advice on politics to spirited artistic cheerleading. Carol left her stamp on The Grapes of Wrath in many ways. She typed the manuscript, editing the text as she went, and she served in the early stages as a rigorous critical commentator (after typing three hundred pages, she confessed to Elizabeth Otis that she had lost “all sense of proportion” and felt unfit “to judge it at all”).

Steinbeck was impressed with “the looks of it—marvelous title. The book has being at last”; he considered it “Carol’s best title so far.” (“Tell Carol she is a whiz at picking titles and she has done it again with the new one,” his drama agent, Annie Laurie Williams, exulted.) Her role as facilitator is recorded permanently in one half of the novel’s dedication: “To CAROL who willed it.” On February 23, 1939, Steinbeck told Pascal Covici that he had given Carol the holograph manuscript of The Grapes of Wrath: “You see I feel that this is Carol’s book.”

The second part of the novel’s dedication—“To TOM who lived it”— refers to Thomas Collins (1897?-1961), the novelist’s chief source, guide, discussant, and chronicler of accurate migrant information. Collins not only put Steinbeck in touch with the real-life prototypes of the Joads and Jim Casy, but he himself served as Steinbeck’s real-life prototype for Jim Rawley, the fictional manager of the Weedpatch government camp. That camp, an accurate rendering of Collins’s Arvin camp, became an oasis of relief for the harried Joads and is featured in chapters 22 to 26 of The Grapes of Wrath. Steinbeck portrayed Collins with photographic accuracy in chapter 22: “A little man dressed all in white stood behind [Ma Joad]—a man with a thin, brown, lined face and merry eyes. He was as lean as a picket. His white clean clothes were frayed at the seams.” Steinbeck also caught Collins’s effective interpersonal technique in having Jim Rawley wear frayed clothes and win over Ma Joad by the simple request of asking for a cup of her coffee.

Steinbeck lived to write. He believed it was redemptive work, a transformative act. Each morning, after warming up with letters to Otis or Covici and an entry in Working Days, he often listened to Tchaikovsky’s ballet Swan Lake, Stravinsky’s “very fine” Symphony of Psalms, and Beethoven’s symphonies and sonatas, which put him in a conducive mood to create a disciplined working rhythm and maintain what he called a “unity feeling”—a sense of continuity and habitation with his material.

He produced a seven-part series of newspaper articles, “The Harvest Gypsies,” an unfinished novel, “The Oklahomans,” a completed but destroyed satire, “L’Affaire Lettuceberg,” and The Grapes of Wrath.

The immersion experience was invaluable, and the importance of journalism in Steinbeck’s development cannot be underestimated, as William Howarth claims in Wyatt’s New Essays. Written mostly in a measured style to promote understanding and intelligent solutions, Steinbeck’s articles are full of case studies, chilling factual statistics, and an unsettling catalogue of human woes (illness, incapacitation, persecution, death) observed from close contact with field workers he had met. In the spirit of advocacy journalism, Steinbeck concluded with prophetic recommendations for alleviating the conflict with federal aid and local support; this in turn would create subsistence farms, establish a migratory labor board, encourage unionization, and punish terrorism. When they were published in 1936 (and again when they were reprinted verbatim in 1938 as Their Blood Is Strong, a pamphlet by the nonprofit Simon J. Lubin Society that sold ten thousand copies at twenty-five cents each), Steinbeck’s articles solidified his credibility—both in and out of migrant camps—as a serious commentator in a league with Dorothea Lange’s husband, Paul Taylor, and Carey McWilliams, two other influential and respected investigators.

After hitting several “snags,” he was working on a “rather long novel” called “The Oklahomans,” which was “still a long way from finished.” Steinbeck, generally guarded with interviewers, revealed enough to Walther to indicate that his novel’s focus was the salutary, irrepressible character of the “southern dust bowl migrants” who, he believed, would profoundly alter the tenor of life in California. “Their coming here now is going to change things almost as much as did the coming of the first American settlers.” Furthermore, “the Californian doesn’t know what he does want. The Oklahoman knows just exactly what he wants. He wants a piece of land. And he goes after it and gets it.”

Earlier, in September 1936, Steinbeck had encountered (whether directly or through newspaper and hearsay accounts is uncertain) the vicious clash between workers and growers in a lettuce strike: “There are riots in Salinas and killings in the street of that dear little town where I was born,” he told novelist George Albee. The strike was smashed with “fascist” terrorism, and recollections of the workers’ defeat festered in Steinbeck for more than a year. “I am treasonable enough not to believe in the liberty of a man or a group to exploit, torment, or slaughter other men or groups. I believe in the despotism of human life and happiness against the liberty of money and possessions,” he said in a 1937 statement for the League of American Writers booklet Writers Take Sides (1938).

This success will ruin me as sure as hell,” he confided in Working Days. Four days later, on August 20, Lorentz arrived for the weekend. His visit broke Steinbeck’s depression and log jam. Though their film project would fall through, Steinbeck was encouraged by Lorentz’s prescience that his novel would be one of “the greatest novels of the age.” Steinbeck kept up his daily stint (he aimed for two thousand words at each sitting, some days managing as few as eight hundred, some days, when the juices were flowing, as many as twenty-two hundred) through what Carol agreed were the “interminable details and minor crises” of August and September. In early October, rebuked often by his wife (Ma Joad’s indomitableness owes as much to Carol’s spirit as it does to Briffault’s The Mothers), Steinbeck roused himself from another bout of “self indulgence” and “laziness” to mount the final drive.

“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. If Casy knowed, why, 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 an’ they know supper’s ready. An’ when our folks eat the stuff they raise an’ live in the houses they build—why, I’ll be there. See? God, I’m talkin’ like Casy. Comes of thinkin’ about him so much. Seems like I can see him sometimes.”

“To build this stranger into the structure of the book would be to warp the whole meaning of the book.” This final tableau scene—subversively erotic, mysteriously prophetic, tantalizingly indeterminate—refuses to fade from view; before the apocalypse occurs, before everything is lost in nothingness, Steinbeck suggests, all gestures must pass from self to world, from communication to communion.

But The Grapes of Wrath has also been attacked by academic scholars and cultural critics for its alleged sentimentalism, stereotyped characterizations, heavy-handed symbolism, unconvincing dialogue, episodic, melodramatic plot, misplaced Oklahoma geography, and inaccurate rendering of historical facts, and has been banned repeatedly by school boards and libraries for its rebellious theme and frank language, and denounced by right-wing ministers, corporate farmers, and politicians as communist propaganda, immoral, degrading, warped, and untruthful. Oklahoma congressman Lyle Boren, typical of the book’s early detractors, called it a “a lie, a black, infernal creation of a twisted, distorted mind.” A Jesuit priest, Arthur D. Spearman, branded it “an embodiment of the Marxist Soviet propaganda,” and an editorial in the Oklahoma City Times claimed “it has Tobacco Road looking as pure as Charlotte Brontë.”

Indeed, according to the master critical narrative about John Steinbeck (established in part by critics such as Edmund Wilson, Arthur Mizener, and Harold Bloom), The Grapes of Wrath is a deeply problematical novel. It is so flawed, so perplexing, so undisciplinable, that perhaps schizophrenic is a handier term with which to describe its reception during the past seven decades. Depending on which critic we read, a very different version of (and attitude toward) the novel surfaces. In fact, it seems hard to believe that critics have read the same book. Philip Rahv’s complaint in the Partisan Review (Spring 1939) that “the novel is far too didactic and long-winded,” and “fails on the test of craftsmanship” should be judged against Charles Angoff’s assessment in the North American Review (Summer 1939) that it is “momentous, monumental, and memorable,” and an example of “the highest art.”

Harold Bloom, who had qualifiedly praised the novel’s “compassionate narative” in 1988, completely reversed his position during the centenary. In his Chelsea House BioCritique, John Steinbeck (2003), Bloom lambasts the novel, preferring instead Ford’s cinematic version, which he considers “superior.” The lesson here seems to be that readers pay their money and take their pick. In this regard, John Seelye’s claim that “Steinbeck is a gravely misunderstood writer,” is especially accurate and relevant.

As a result, whether Grapes is viewed through a social, historical, linguistic, formal, political, ecological, regional, mythic, psychological, metaphysical, gender, religious, or materialist lens (all examples of recently applied theoretical and critical methods), the book’s textual richness, its many layers of action, language, imagery, theme, and character, continues to repay dividends. As John Ditsky observed, “The Joads are still in motion, and their vehicle with them.” Intellectual theories to the contrary, criticism remains a subjective act, a kind of fiction passing for objective discourse, and perhaps the only sure thing about The Grapes of Wrath is its capacity to elicit powerful responses from its audience. This may have been Steinbeck’s intention from the first. “I don’t think The Grapes of Wrath is obscure in what it tries to say,” he claimed in 1955. “Its structure is very carefully worked out. . . . Just read it, don’t count it!”

The Grapes of Wrath possessed a certain timeliness as one of several indelible texts that arose from the same historical era—U.S.A., An American Exodus, and Factories in the Field, as well as Erskine Caldwell and Margeret Bourke-White’s You Have Seen Their Faces, James Agee and Walker Evans’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, and novels such as Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust, and Richard Wright’s Native Son. In concert with these and other counter-narratives that pull no punches in attempting to document, represent, or interpret “America” as a contested place, The Grapes of Wrath’s appearance helped alter the literary and cultural geography of the United States.

The effects of writing 260,000 words in a single year “finished” him, he told Lawrence Clark Powell on January 24, 1939. After his long siege with the “Matter of the Migrants” (“I don’t know whether there is anything left of me,” he confided in October 1939), his “will to death” was so “strengthened” that by the end of the decade he was sick of writing fiction. It was a decision many critics and reviewers held against him for the rest of his life; they wanted him to write The Grapes of Wrath over and over again, which he refused to do. “The process of writing a book is the process of outgrowing it,” he told Herbert Sturz. “Disciplinary criticism comes too late. You aren’t going to write that one again anyway. When you start another—the horizons have receded and you are just as cold and frightened as you were with the first one.”

“I’m finishing off a complete revolution. . . . The point of all this is that I must make a new start. I’ve worked the novel as I know it as far as I can take it. I never did think much of it— a clumsy vehicle at best. And I don’t know the form of the new but I know there is a new which will be adequate and shaped by the new thinking.”

The Grapes of Wrath is arguably among the most significant indictments ever made of the privileged myths of American exceptionalism, westering, and of California as a Promised Land/Garden of Eden.

Once Steinbeck’s name became inseparably linked with the title of his most famous work, he could never escape the influence of his earlier life, but thankfully neither can we, because in the broadest sense, his novel continues to perform meaningful cultural work in shaping perceptions toward social justice, compassion, and understanding, perhaps more important than ever in the unstable global climate of this new century.

Oklahoma migrant families believed the novel demeaned their image, as James Gregory notes in American Exodus, nevertheless as a fabular tale of dashed illusions, thwarted desires, inhuman suffering, and betrayed promises—all strung on the slenderest thread of hope—The Grapes of Wrath summed up the Depression era’s socially conscious art. “Steinbeck shaped a geography of conscience” in The Grapes of Wrath, novelist Don DeLillo claims in his centennial reflection, “for it is a novel in which there is something at stake in every sentence. ” And beyond that—for emotional urgency, evocative power, sensational design, sustained impact, prophetic reach, and continued controversy—The Grapes of Wrath still has few peers in American fiction.

Note: For a valuable documentary archive of Dust Bowl culture, consult the Library of Congress’s Voices from the Dust Bowl: The Charles L. Todd and Robert Sonkin Migrant Worker Collection, available at <lcweb2 .loc.gov/ammem/afctshtml/tshome.html>. For a useful Web site on the background and history of Weedpatch, the Arvin Federal Farm Security Administration camp (now called Sunset Labor Camp) consult <www. weedpatchcamp.com>. Surviving the Dust Bowl, a documentary film in PBS’s American Experience series, is also highly recommended.

A Note on the Text The Penguin Classics edition of The Grapes of Wrath is based on the special fiftieth-anniversary edition of the novel, which reproduced the original text published in 1939 by The Viking Press.

Chapter 1 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.

“Ever know a guy that said big words like that?’’ “Preacher,’’ said Joad. “Well, it makes you mad to hear a guy use big words. ’Course with a preacher it’s all right because nobody would fool around with a preacher anyway. But this guy was funny. You didn’t give a damn when he said a big word ’cause he just done it for ducks. He wasn’t puttin’ on no dog.’’ The driver was reassured. He knew at least that Joad was listening. He swung the great truck viciously around a bend and the tires shrilled. “Like I was sayin’,’’ he continued, “guy that drives a truck does screwy things. He got to. He’d go nuts just settin’ here an’ the road sneakin’ under the wheels. Fella says once that truck skinners eats all the time—all the time in hamburger joints along the road.’’

Thoughtfully he took the pint from his pocket, unscrewed the metal cap, and sipped the whisky delicately, running his tongue inside the bottle neck, and then around his lips, to gather in any flavor that might have escaped him. He said experimentally, “There we spied a nigger—’’ and that was all he could remember. At last he turned about and faced the dusty side road that cut off at right angles through the fields.