The Grapes Of Wrath

by John Steinbeck

Women and children knew deep in themselves that no misfortune was too great to bear if their men were whole.

And when that crop grew, and was harvested, no man had crumbled a hot clod in his fingers and let the earth sift past his fingertips. No man had touched the seed, or lusted for the growth. Men ate what they had not raised, had no connection with the bread. The land bore under iron, and under iron gradually died; for it was not loved or hated, it had no prayers or curses.

“But where does it stop? Who can we shoot? I don’t aim to starve to death before I kill the man that’s starving me.”

We could have saved you, but you cut us down, and soon you will be cut down and there’ll be none of us to save you.

This land, this red land, is us; and the flood years and the dust years and the drought years are us. We can’t start again.

But the machine man, driving a dead tractor on land he does not know and love, understands only chemistry; and he is contemptuous of the land and of himself. When the corrugated iron doors are shut, he goes home, and his home is not the land.

That’s why folks always move. Movin’ ’cause they want somepin better’n what they got. An’ that’s the on’y way they’ll ever git it.

Ma said. “What we got lef’ in the worl’? Nothin’ but us. Nothin’ but the folks.

for how can a man without property know the ache of ownership?

The men who graft the young trees, the little vines, are the cleverest of all, for theirs is a surgeon’s job, as tender and delicate; and these men must have surgeons’ hands and surgeons’ hearts to slit the bark, to place the grafts, to bind the wounds and cover them from the air. These are great men.

There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificates—died of malnutrition—because the food must rot, must be forced to rot.

In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.