The Grapes of Wrath Summary: Steinbeck's Dust Bowl Novel Explained
What The Grapes of Wrath is about
John Steinbeck published The Grapes of Wrath in 1939. It is an American realist novel set during the Great Depression, and it follows one family of poor tenant farmers, the Joads, as they are pushed off their Oklahoma land and head west.
The causes stack up against them. Drought, economic hardship, changes in agricultural industry and bank foreclosures all combine to make tenant farming impossible. The Joads are trapped in the Dust Bowl with crops destroyed and loans defaulted on. Their farm is repossessed. Handbills describe California as fruitful, with high pay for anyone willing to pick. So the family loads everything it owns into a Hudson sedan converted into a truck and joins thousands of other migrants, labelled "Okies", on Route 66, the road Steinbeck calls the mother road.
The book won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. It was cited prominently when Steinbeck received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1962. It is regularly listed among the greatest novels in the English language and put forward as a contender for the Great American Novel.
The journey
The story opens as Tom Joad is paroled from McAlester prison. He had been convicted of homicide, though he maintains he acted in self-defence. Hitchhiking home near Sallisaw, Oklahoma, he meets Jim Casy, a former preacher he remembers from childhood, and the two travel on together. They find the Joad farm deserted. A neighbour, Muley Graves, tells them the banks have evicted every farmer in the area and that Tom's family is at Uncle John's place. Muley himself refuses to leave.
Leaving the state breaks Tom's parole. He goes anyway, and brings Casy with him. On the road the family meets crowds of other migrants in makeshift camps, including people coming back from California with bad news. The family shrinks as it travels. Grampa dies of a stroke and is buried in a field. Granma dies of illness near the California state line. Noah, the eldest son, walks away. So does Connie Rivers, husband of the pregnant daughter Rose of Sharon.
What they find in California is a state oversupplied with labour. Wages are low. Workers are exploited to the point of starvation. Large corporate growers act in collusion, smaller farmers suffer under collapsing prices, and the police and state authorities side with the growers. At one Hooverville camp, Casy is arrested after knocking down a deputy who is about to shoot a worker. At Weedpatch Camp, a clean federal facility run by the New Deal Resettlement Administration, conditions are better and the deputies cannot harass them, but there is no work and no food, and not enough room for everyone in need.
The main characters
Tom Joad is the centre of the book, a man on parole who keeps being pulled into trouble that he did not start. Ma Joad holds the family together and takes over the leadership as the men falter. Jim Casy is the ex-preacher who has lost his old faith and finds a new one in people, eventually becoming a labour organiser. Rose of Sharon is pregnant through most of the journey and abandoned partway through it. Around them are Uncle John, Grampa and Granma, Noah, the young girl Ruthie and the rest of the family, plus the neighbour Muley Graves, who stands for everyone who stayed behind.
The themes
Survival is the surface subject. Underneath, the book is about what a family is for, and whether loyalty to your own blood is enough when everyone around you is starving too. Casy's argument, and the direction Ma moves in, is that the unit has to get bigger than the household.
Class and justice run through every chapter. Steinbeck shows a system in which the law protects property and the people who own it, and in which hunger is not an accident but the result of how work is priced. Between the Joad chapters sit short vignettes, the interchapters, that widen the lens to the whole migration. One famous example follows a land turtle crossing a dusty road, slow and battered and persistent. The novel's title appears in one of these interchapters.
How it ends
Skip this section if you want to read it fresh. Casy is killed with a pickaxe by deputies during a strike. Tom kills one of the attackers and goes into hiding. After Ruthie boasts about what her brother has done, Tom says goodbye to Ma and vows to work for the oppressed. Rose of Sharon's baby is stillborn. Winter rains flood the family's dwelling, and they shelter in a barn, where they find a man dying of starvation. Rose of Sharon feeds him with her breast milk. That is the final image of the book.
Why it still matters
It is one of the most taught novels in American schools and universities, partly for its history and partly for its argument about work, land and dignity. John Ford's film version, with Henry Fonda as Tom, arrived in 1940 and fixed the story in popular memory. Read it if you want the Great Depression at ground level, or a novel that puts an ordinary family against an economy and refuses to look away.
