"In the eyes of the people there is the failure; and 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."
I just saw that this timeless classic made the Colorado Sun's list of Fifty Novels of the West, so hopefully it will experience a renewed readership, although it's a prominent staple of many high school and college curricula. I've read it in parts over the years, but wanted to complete it from start to finish. First published in 1939, it hits close to home for me for a number of reasons. Some of my own distant relatives experienced this mass exodus, from Arkansas, specifically. My paternal great-grandmother, married at thirteen to an eighteen-year-old, had ten children, starting in 1919, frequently moving from place to place. Another wave of family members, including my grandparents, came to California in the 1950s, after the War, spurred by unprecedented economic growth, particularly in the aerospace industry. Suffice to say, their experiences were exceedingly different from those of the generation before. I also remember my grandmother talking about this period of history. She herself was a child in rural Arkansas, but she had vivid memories of it, as did my great-grandmother, with whom we lived for a time.
Set during the crushing Great Depression, one of the most profound catastrophes ever faced by the United States, the novel accurately and breathtakingly chronicles this utterly man-made disaster through the eyes of the Joad family, who experience almost biblical catastrophe in the form of hunger, cold, exploitation, exhaustion, separation, and multiple deaths. Their experiences mirror those of countless other real-life counterparts: the exodus of tenant farmers from the South, in particular, fueled the crisis of the Depression when small farmers were driven from their homes, where many had been situated for generations on land not their own, by economic hardship, drought, and, especially, the mechanization of agriculture, when, by necessity, land was being put into production and exploited to the greatest extent possible to supply an exploding population. The ushering in of industrialized agriculture, where machines were increasingly used to perform the labor of dozens of men, is something with which we still contend, to the degree that now, only about one percent of the US population is a full-time "farmer," either a rancher or grower, which is a sobering thought to someone like me, who has a degree in agriculture from a College of Agriculture.
The book is certainly a critique of American policy at the time, and views the contemporary crisis through the lens of this multi-generational family. Throughout, the book describes in admirable detail the birth pangs of the modern world and corporate capitalism as the dominant economic paradigm. Much of the hardship is exacerbated by industrialists, who print handbills promising plentiful work and bountiful wages in California's paradisaical Central Valley to induce masses of people, most of whom were barely literate, to pick up and head for the West Coast. Desperate migrants, forced from their ancestral land, as the Joad family, liquidate their entire estates to finance the journey, with many not surviving the 1500-mile trip over mountains and through burning deserts- only to find upon arrival that the claims were a sham: what little work is available pays but a pittance, not even enough to survive on, because of the glut of men desperately searching for work, resulting in standards- and wage-lowering competition. Laborers work twelve-hour days only to face starvation on the wages they are paid. Corporate farmers all collude to keep labor prices low, which also results in the collapse of smaller, family farms, affording the industrialists the opportunity to accumulate ever-greater tracts of land.
There are many ways in which critics have interpreted the novel. Some have postulated that the use of Christian imagery throughout is significant, as is the title. Several figures, including Tom Joad and the preacher Jim Casy, are portrayed almost as Christ-like figures, especially in the wake of the latter's death. To me, the book is more an overt criticism of the US government and its failure to adequately address the causes of the unprecedented crisis, particularly in the wake of nascent labor unions, which simply sought to protect workers from the type of rampant exploitation portrayed in the book. The narrative portrays the corruption from top to bottom: rampant apathy and the incompetence of the federal government to deal with the crisis, the failure to protect people even at its own organized camps from locals who just want to get the migrants out of their backyard, crooked law enforcement in collusion with the large farmers to suppress workers' rights organizers, labeling them "reds" and agitators, who were brutally suppressed (probably a reason why Steinbeck chose to write a novel of this type rather than one of his non-fiction works) all illustrate clearly why the economic crisis of the 1930s grew to the extent it did.
There was certainly plenty of material for Steinbeck to draw from. He was reported to have utilized field notes from a 1938 Farm Security Administration official who collected personalized accounts of displaced individuals who experienced this mass migration firsthand. One of the most famous photographs in US history, entitled "Migrant Mother," taken by Dorothea Lange, a photographer from the Resettlement Administration, in 1936, is a pictorial representation of what the Joads would have faced. Lange was reportedly driving by a pea-pickers' camp in Nipomo, CA, when she captured the image of a desperate mother who had sold her car tires to buy food for her and the children, who supplemented their meager diet with birds they had killed. Out of the approximately 160,000 images captured by photographers from the Resettlement Administration, this one is by far the most widely recognized.
I don't want to rehash the plot, as many reviewers have already done. In short, this is a book everyone should read. A word of warning, though: it's a heartbreaking tale, especially if one has had or known relatives who endured this unbearable hardship, but it's one that should not be overlooked. That said, it should definitely be re-read, if the only experience with it was when someone was essentially required to read it in their youth. As I'm finding in re-reading many books of this kind as an adult, perspectives completely change, and I discover that I get so much more out of books I didn't think all that much of when I was younger. Sometimes we just need a lifetime of experiences, and hardship, to empathize with others, even fictional characters. It's still valuable reading for youth, however: it spurred many conversations with my grandmother, as I noted above, about her experiences during the Great Depression that I may not have been aware of otherwise. In the wake of reading Vonnegut novels, I'm finding that I'm having many of the same conversations with my father about his experiences in the Vietnam War. Those memories are fading, and it's up to those who remain to keep them alive.
We often forget the hardship experienced by our predecessors, especially if we've never met them, and the tragedies they endured which resulted in the world we now inhabit, but reading classics such as this serve as a stark reminder not to take the things we now enjoy for granted. Ultimately, perhaps that's the book's greatest contribution.
I just saw that this timeless classic made the Colorado Sun's list of Fifty Novels of the West, so hopefully it will experience a renewed readership, although it's a prominent staple of many high school and college curricula. I've read it in parts over the years, but wanted to complete it from start to finish. First published in 1939, it hits close to home for me for a number of reasons. Some of my own distant relatives experienced this mass exodus, from Arkansas, specifically. My paternal great-grandmother, married at thirteen to an eighteen-year-old, had ten children, starting in 1919, frequently moving from place to place. Another wave of family members, including my grandparents, came to California in the 1950s, after the War, spurred by unprecedented economic growth, particularly in the aerospace industry. Suffice to say, their experiences were exceedingly different from those of the generation before. I also remember my grandmother talking about this period of history. She herself was a child in rural Arkansas, but she had vivid memories of it, as did my great-grandmother, with whom we lived for a time.
Set during the crushing Great Depression, one of the most profound catastrophes ever faced by the United States, the novel accurately and breathtakingly chronicles this utterly man-made disaster through the eyes of the Joad family, who experience almost biblical catastrophe in the form of hunger, cold, exploitation, exhaustion, separation, and multiple deaths. Their experiences mirror those of countless other real-life counterparts: the exodus of tenant farmers from the South, in particular, fueled the crisis of the Depression when small farmers were driven from their homes, where many had been situated for generations on land not their own, by economic hardship, drought, and, especially, the mechanization of agriculture, when, by necessity, land was being put into production and exploited to the greatest extent possible to supply an exploding population. The ushering in of industrialized agriculture, where machines were increasingly used to perform the labor of dozens of men, is something with which we still contend, to the degree that now, only about one percent of the US population is a full-time "farmer," either a rancher or grower, which is a sobering thought to someone like me, who has a degree in agriculture from a College of Agriculture.
The book is certainly a critique of American policy at the time, and views the contemporary crisis through the lens of this multi-generational family. Throughout, the book describes in admirable detail the birth pangs of the modern world and corporate capitalism as the dominant economic paradigm. Much of the hardship is exacerbated by industrialists, who print handbills promising plentiful work and bountiful wages in California's paradisaical Central Valley to induce masses of people, most of whom were barely literate, to pick up and head for the West Coast. Desperate migrants, forced from their ancestral land, as the Joad family, liquidate their entire estates to finance the journey, with many not surviving the 1500-mile trip over mountains and through burning deserts- only to find upon arrival that the claims were a sham: what little work is available pays but a pittance, not even enough to survive on, because of the glut of men desperately searching for work, resulting in standards- and wage-lowering competition. Laborers work twelve-hour days only to face starvation on the wages they are paid. Corporate farmers all collude to keep labor prices low, which also results in the collapse of smaller, family farms, affording the industrialists the opportunity to accumulate ever-greater tracts of land.
There are many ways in which critics have interpreted the novel. Some have postulated that the use of Christian imagery throughout is significant, as is the title. Several figures, including Tom Joad and the preacher Jim Casy, are portrayed almost as Christ-like figures, especially in the wake of the latter's death. To me, the book is more an overt criticism of the US government and its failure to adequately address the causes of the unprecedented crisis, particularly in the wake of nascent labor unions, which simply sought to protect workers from the type of rampant exploitation portrayed in the book. The narrative portrays the corruption from top to bottom: rampant apathy and the incompetence of the federal government to deal with the crisis, the failure to protect people even at its own organized camps from locals who just want to get the migrants out of their backyard, crooked law enforcement in collusion with the large farmers to suppress workers' rights organizers, labeling them "reds" and agitators, who were brutally suppressed (probably a reason why Steinbeck chose to write a novel of this type rather than one of his non-fiction works) all illustrate clearly why the economic crisis of the 1930s grew to the extent it did.
There was certainly plenty of material for Steinbeck to draw from. He was reported to have utilized field notes from a 1938 Farm Security Administration official who collected personalized accounts of displaced individuals who experienced this mass migration firsthand. One of the most famous photographs in US history, entitled "Migrant Mother," taken by Dorothea Lange, a photographer from the Resettlement Administration, in 1936, is a pictorial representation of what the Joads would have faced. Lange was reportedly driving by a pea-pickers' camp in Nipomo, CA, when she captured the image of a desperate mother who had sold her car tires to buy food for her and the children, who supplemented their meager diet with birds they had killed. Out of the approximately 160,000 images captured by photographers from the Resettlement Administration, this one is by far the most widely recognized.
I don't want to rehash the plot, as many reviewers have already done. In short, this is a book everyone should read. A word of warning, though: it's a heartbreaking tale, especially if one has had or known relatives who endured this unbearable hardship, but it's one that should not be overlooked. That said, it should definitely be re-read, if the only experience with it was when someone was essentially required to read it in their youth. As I'm finding in re-reading many books of this kind as an adult, perspectives completely change, and I discover that I get so much more out of books I didn't think all that much of when I was younger. Sometimes we just need a lifetime of experiences, and hardship, to empathize with others, even fictional characters. It's still valuable reading for youth, however: it spurred many conversations with my grandmother, as I noted above, about her experiences during the Great Depression that I may not have been aware of otherwise. In the wake of reading Vonnegut novels, I'm finding that I'm having many of the same conversations with my father about his experiences in the Vietnam War. Those memories are fading, and it's up to those who remain to keep them alive.
We often forget the hardship experienced by our predecessors, especially if we've never met them, and the tragedies they endured which resulted in the world we now inhabit, but reading classics such as this serve as a stark reminder not to take the things we now enjoy for granted. Ultimately, perhaps that's the book's greatest contribution.
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