Novels, Deep-Read · John Steinbeck · No.80
John Steinbeck · 1939 · 30 chapters
An Oklahoma highway at noon, the concrete bleached white by the sun. A land turtle crawls out of the dry grass at the roadside and hauls its shell up the embankment, a wild oat seed caught in a seam of the shell.
A sedan comes along; the woman driving sees the turtle and swerves to miss it. Then a light truck comes along, and the driver sees it too — and twists the wheel toward it, to hit it on purpose. The front tyre clips the edge of the shell and the turtle spins off the shoulder like a flipped coin, landing on its back.
It paddles at the air for a long time, rights itself, and goes on toward the southwest. The oat seed drops out of the shell, and the turtle's hind legs scrape a little dirt over it.
In the Depression, the Joads, Oklahoma tenant farmers, are pushed off their land by a bank and a tractor, tie everything they own onto an old truck, and drive Route 66 to California to find work; along the way the old people die, a son walks off, a son-in-law runs out, and the land of milk and honey turns out to offer hunger, clubs and a flood — and in the course of being taken apart, the family slowly learns to say "we" and mean something bigger than "us".
John Steinbeck (1902–1968) grew up in California's Salinas Valley and won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1962. Before this book he had just made his name with Of Mice and Men (1937), and had written a series of newspaper pieces on California's migrant labour camps for the San Francisco News (1936). He wrote The Grapes of Wrath in a few months in the second half of 1938; it came out in 1939, was the best-selling novel in America that year, and took the Pulitzer Prize the next.
Its slot in literary history is the high-water mark of the American social-protest novel. Behind it stand Uncle Tom's Cabin and Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, but none of them does what this one does: tell one family's private story while, every other chapter, pulling the camera back to take in the whole country. The title comes from the Civil War's "Battle Hymn of the Republic", whose line about the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored reaches back to the winepress of God's wrath in Revelation. The grapes here are not fruit. They are anger, ripening.
First, dust. Hardly a real rain all spring; the corn leaves pale and curl day by day, and when the wind comes the topsoil lifts into the sky and the sun turns into a red disc. When the storm passes, the men go and squat at the edge of the fields and draw in the dirt with sticks, saying nothing. The women and children stand in the doorways and watch them — watch their faces, to see whether they will break. The men's faces do not break; the bewilderment hardens into something else, and the women, reassured, go back in to cook. That is chapter one. Nobody in it has a name.
Then the names arrive. Tom Joad has just been paroled from the state penitentiary at McAlester, in a prison-issue suit and stiff new shoes, and he thumbs a ride from a truck driver outside a roadside diner. He went in for homicide: years ago, at a country dance, a drunk named Herb Turnbull came at him with a knife and Tom killed him with a shovel. Seven years; out in four for good behaviour. The driver fishes around for the story and Tom simply lays it on the table, unbothered. Foreshadow ①Later he says it more bluntly still: if it happened again, he would do the same thing. He has settled on a way to live — don't look back, don't look far ahead, just put the next foot down.
A few miles from home, in the shade of a willow, he meets Jim Casy, who used to preach in these parts and baptise people in the river; he once ducked the boy Tom under the water himself. But Casy says he isn't a preacher any more. He used to take girls from the meetings into the grass after a sermon and then lie awake all night in shame; then he worked something out that sounds, said aloud, like blasphemy: Foreshadow ②maybe nobody has a soul of his own; maybe everybody shares one big soul, and each person is only a piece of it — and what people call the Holy Spirit might simply be whatever runs between them. He doesn't know what to do with that thought, so he has stopped preaching. On the road Tom has picked up the turtle to take to his little brother.
At the house, the building has been shoved askew, one corner knocked off its footing, and it is empty. Tom sets the turtle down and it heads off southwest without looking back. A neighbour, Muley Graves, emerges from the dusk and tells them what happened: the owners sent men to say the land belongs to the bank, the bank is taking it back, one man on a tractor can work a dozen families' acres in a day — and then the tractor came, and where a house was in the way it went straight through. Everybody has gone. The Joads are staying at Uncle John's place and getting ready for California; handbills are everywhere, saying there's fruit-picking work out there. Muley won't leave. He drifts between the empty houses at night like a ghost and hides from the deputy sheriff by day. That night the three of them lie low in a field and watch a deputy's headlights sweep the ground.
Next morning Tom walks into Uncle John's yard. Ma is at the stove frying pork; she looks up, sees him, and the fork stops in mid-air. Her first words are not "you're back" but a careful question: did you break out? What she fears is not that her son once killed a man, but that he might now have to spend his life hiding. She is the axle of the family — broad face, big hands, and nothing ever allowed onto that face for the others to read, because she understands that if she goes to pieces, they all will.
The family assembles one by one. Pa, a tenant farmer knocked flat by what has happened. Grampa, foul-mouthed, his buttons always done up wrong, crowing that when he gets to California he'll pull a great big bunch of grapes off the vine Foreshadow ③and squash it all over his face and let the juice run down his chin. Granma, as fierce as he is and loud in her religion. The eldest son, Noah, never quite right since birth, slow and quiet. Sixteen-year-old Al, all girls and engines. The pregnant daughter, Rose of Sharon (the name is from the Song of Songs), and her young husband Connie, who spend their days planning how in California he'll study radio by correspondence and they'll have a little house with a white fence. The youngest, Ruthie and Winfield. And Uncle John, a lonely man who goes into town now and then to get blind drunk.
On the road Tom has told Casy about Uncle John. Foreshadow ④Years ago John's young wife woke in the night with a pain in her belly; he said she'd eaten something bad, gave her a laxative and went back to sleep. She was dead the next day — her appendix had burst. Ever since, John has believed he carries a sin, and has spent his life paying it off in odd ways: candy pressed on the children, a drunk, work past exhaustion.
They sell what can't be carried — horses, plough, wagon — to dealers who beat them down to almost nothing. They kill two pigs and salt the meat into a barrel. Alone in the house, Ma goes through a little box of old letters, clippings and a few trinkets, and puts most of it in the fire. The vehicle Al picked is an old Hudson sedan with the back cut off to make a truck; from now on it is the family's house, kitchen and hearse. That evening they hold a family council standing round the truck — not in the house, by the truck, because the truck is home now. Casy asks if he can come; Ma counts the food and says yes.
At the last moment Grampa refuses to go: this is my country, I'll die here. Nobody argues. They pour half a bottle of soothing syrup meant for babies into his coffee, and when he's out cold they lift him onto the load. By leaving, Tom breaks his parole — he isn't allowed out of the state.
Route 66 — Steinbeck calls it "the mother road" — runs from the Mississippi to Bakersfield, and it is jammed with wrecks loaded like theirs with mattresses, pots and old people. At a filling station the family dog dashes into the highway and is run over.
The first night they camp beside the road and fall in with a couple from Kansas, Ivy and Sairy Wilson. Grampa has a stroke in the Wilsons' tent and doesn't last the night. A proper burial costs money they don't have, and they daren't bring in the authorities; so they dig the hole themselves, and Tom writes a few lines on a sheet of paper — who this is, what he died of, that he wasn't murdered, that his folks had no money to bury him — rolls it into a jar and buries it with him. Casy is asked to say a few words, and keeps it short: Grampa is dead; it's the living that matter. Later he puts it more sharply to Tom: Grampa didn't die tonight. He died the minute they took him off the place.
The two families travel as one. The Wilsons' car keeps breaking down, and Tom and Casy stay back to fix it. Once, stalled on the road, Pa proposes splitting up — the fast ones go ahead, the slow ones follow. Ma says nothing, picks a jack handle off the truck, and stands there: Foreshadow ⑤if they're going to split up, they'll have to knock her down first. People are all this family has left — the land is gone, the house is gone — and if the people come apart too, there's nothing. Pa looks at the iron bar in her hand and says no more. From that moment, the person who actually decides things in this family has changed.
At a camp one night, a ragged man on his way back from California hears them talk about the handbills and laughs. If the bill asks for eight hundred men, he says, twenty thousand will read it; the more men turn up, the lower the wages go. His wife and two children starved to death out there. The Joads don't believe him — they can't afford to; they have already sold everything.
At the Arizona line they are stopped and checked. At Needles, on the Colorado, the men lie in the river to rest, and an old man and his son heading back east tell them that Californians call people like them "Okies" — meaning scum. It is by this river that Noah leaves. He tells Tom the water is too good; he's staying, he'll walk downstream and catch fish and won't starve. He knows the family is kind to him, he says, but he also knows nobody really cares. He is the first to walk away on his own. Nobody goes after him.
Sairy Wilson is sick — she has been ill a long time, and probably won't survive the trip. The Wilsons stay by the river. The Joads cross the Mojave by night. Granma has been rambling for days; Ma has her lie on the mattress on the truck and lies down beside her. At the California agricultural inspection station, the officers want the load taken off; Ma pushes herself up off the mattress and her voice comes out high and frantic — the old lady is terribly sick, she needs a doctor, please. They are waved through. At dawn the truck tops the Tehachapi pass and the whole San Joaquin Valley spreads out below — orchards in rows, irrigation ditches flashing — and everyone stands by the truck unable to speak. Only then does Ma climb slowly down and say: Granma's dead. She was dead before the inspection station. She had lain all night on one mattress with a corpse, because the family had to get across the desert, and if they stopped they wouldn't.
Granma's body is handed to the county and buried as a pauper. They settle in a Hooverville — a shanty camp on the edge of town, named in mockery of the former president. The people there tell them how it works: there's work, it lasts a few days, then it's gone; wages drop every year; and any day the deputies may come and burn the shacks.
Ma cooks a pot of stew in the camp, and a ring of starving children gathers around the pot and watches without a sound. Ma says to the pot that she doesn't know what to do: she has to feed her own, but she can't eat with these children looking at her. Her family dish up first, and the rest — the bottom of the pot — goes to the children, who scrape it clean with sticks and bits of tin.
A labour contractor drives in looking for pickers, and a young man in the camp named Floyd asks him: how much does it pay? Have you got a licence? The contractor calls over the deputy in his car to arrest a "red". Floyd punches the deputy in the face and runs; the deputy fires into the crowd and blows the knuckles off a woman's hand. Tom trips the deputy and Casy kicks him unconscious. When the police car arrives, Casy sends Tom into the willows and steps forward to take the whole thing on himself — Tom is on parole and would go straight back to prison; Casy has nothing, so he may as well go instead. As they drive him off, he sits in the back seat with a look on his face, for the first time, of calm and something close to pride.
That night Connie is gone. He had told Rose of Sharon he should have stayed home and learned to drive a tractor, three dollars a day — he would rather have driven the machine that drove them out. He leaves without a word. From then on Rose of Sharon is afraid: that the baby isn't eating right, that she's had a fright, that it will be born damaged. Uncle John takes money and drinks himself senseless, saying his sin has infected the whole family. The camp is going to be burned, and they leave in the night. On the road Ma says it to Pa: rich people come along and they die, and their kids are no good and they die out; but we keep coming. We're the people that live — nobody can wipe us out, because we're the people.
Then their luck turns: a camp run by the federal government at Weedpatch. Hot water, flush toilets, a laundry — and above all, no deputies. The campers elect committees and govern themselves, and the police can't come in without a warrant. Here Ma says: I feel like people again. Ruthie and Winfield meet a flush toilet for the first time and think they've broken it. Tom finds a few days' work digging a pipe trench for a farmer named Mr Thomas, who has to cut their pay and tells them privately why: the Farmers' Association and the Bank of the West make him, or he won't get his loan next year. And one more thing — the Association plans to send men into the camp's Saturday dance to start a fight, so the deputies have an excuse to raid. On Saturday night the campers quietly surround the three men sent in, see them out without throwing a punch, and the dance goes on. It is the one stretch of the book that reads like hope, and it lasts a month: there is no work in the camp.
Driving out to look, they are escorted by motorcycle police to the gate of a peach ranch, where a line of people outside is shouting something. Five cents a box. The family works all day and earns just enough for that night's supper; the ranch store charges more than stores outside. A clerk, seeing Ma come up short, puts in a dime of his own so she can have her sugar. On the way out Ma tells the family: if you're in trouble, go to poor people. They're the only ones that'll help.
That night Tom slips out to find out who the shouting people are. In a tent by a creek he finds Casy, out of jail. In jail Casy learned something: when the guards served the prisoners sour beans, everyone hollered and banged their cups together, and the next day the food got better — one man shouting is nothing; everybody shouting works. Now he is leading the strike here: the ranch had promised five cents a box, then cut it to two and a half; the pickers walked out, and the owner brought in desperate people like the Joads. Tom says: then tomorrow our rate probably gets cut back. Casy says: yes — the moment the strike breaks, that's the price.
Flashlights come across the creek; men with pick handles creep up, and one of them recognises Casy: that's him, that's the one. Casy stands in the light and tells them: you don't know what you're doing — you're helping to starve kids. A pick handle comes down and crushes his skull.
Payoff ① ↑Tom wrenches the handle away and beats the man who swung it to death. He takes a blow to the face himself; his nose and cheekbone are smashed. At the start of the book he said that if it happened again he'd do the same thing, and now it has happened again: the same man, the same unthinking blow. But its weight is entirely different. The first time it was a drunken brawl at a dance; the second time he strikes for Casy, and for what Casy had just been saying. When we first read that offhand "I'd do it again", it sounds like a tough guy's line. Steinbeck lets it come true two hundred-odd pages later as a real killing — and makes it the thing that forces the man who only ever looked one step ahead to think much further.
The next day the rate for peaches drops to two and a half cents. The family hides Tom among the mattresses on the truck and leaves the ranch by night. They find an abandoned boxcar beside the cotton fields and share it with another family, the Wainwrights. Tom hides in a hollow in the creek bank among the willows, and Ma brings him food in secret every day. Until Ruthie, losing a squabble with another child over a box of Cracker Jack, blurts out: my brother's killed two men, he's hiding, he'll get you.
That night Ma goes to the hollow, presses seven dollars on Tom, and tells him to go. It is too dark to see him; she reaches out and touches his face so as to remember it. Tom tells her he has been thinking about what Casy used to say:
Payoff ② ↑a man hasn't got a soul of his own, only a piece of the big one; and if that's so, it doesn't matter where he goes — he'll be all around in the dark. Wherever hungry people fight so they can eat, he'll be there. Wherever a cop is beating a man, he'll be there. When the kids come home hungry and find supper ready, he'll be there too.
"I'll be ever'where—wherever you look."— Tom's farewell to Ma (chapter 28)
The half-formed heresy Casy couldn't quite say under the willow in act one is finished here by someone else. Then it was the bewilderment of a preacher who'd lost his faith; now it is a fugitive's reason for living. Casy is dead, but the sentence isn't — it goes on living in another man's mouth, which is exactly what the sentence meant. Ma asks: then how will I know what's happened to you? Tom says: you won't. He walks off into the dark.
The rain comes. For days, then for weeks. The cotton is picked; there's no work. Ma says a very ordinary thing to Mrs Wainwright:
Payoff ⑤ ↑it used to be the family came first; it isn't so now — now it's anybody. The worse off we get, the more we've got to do. This is the same woman who, in act three, picked up a jack handle and would not let the family split. She fought to hold "the family" together, and Noah, Connie and Tom left anyway, one after another; along the road, the circle called family wasn't held — it was slowly drawn wider, by her. The jack handle read at the time as a mother's stubbornness. Only here do you see it was the first point on a line.
Rose of Sharon, feverish from picking in the rain, goes into labour. The creek rises toward the boxcar; Pa leads the men out into the downpour to throw up an earth bank, and just as it's nearly done, a big cottonwood upstream tears loose and smashes through it. In the boxcar, the baby is born dead.
Payoff ④ ↑Pa tells Uncle John to bury it. John carries the little thing in its apple box to the swollen creek and does not bury it. He sets the box in the water, watches it float off toward town, and tells it: go on down, rot in the street, show them. The man from act two who carried a lifelong sin because he once said "it's just a bellyache" finally pushes the guilt outward — all his life he has believed his wife's death was his fault; now, for the first time, he says: this child's death is not our fault. It's yours. Private guilt turns into a public accusation. When Tom told the story of the appendix, we took it as an odd man's backstory; only here do we see that Steinbeck has saved the book's last refusal to keep quiet for the family member who suffers most.
Water pours into the boxcar. Al is going to marry the Wainwright girl, Aggie, and stays behind. The rest — Ma, Pa, Uncle John, Rose of Sharon, Ruthie, Winfield — wade waist-deep to higher ground and find a barn. Two people are already inside: a small boy, and his father lying in the hay. The boy says his father hasn't eaten in six days; whatever food there was he gave to the boy, and now he can't keep anything down. He needs soup. He needs milk.
Ma looks at Rose of Sharon; Rose of Sharon looks at Ma. No one speaks. Then Rose of Sharon says: yes. Ma takes everyone outside. Rose of Sharon lies down beside the stranger, loosens her clothes, and gives him the milk that was meant for her baby. She looks up across the barn, her lips close together, and she smiles a smile no one can account for.
The book ends there. There is no next sentence.
If you want the one fuse in this book, it is not the dust storm, and it is not the bank. It is the tractor in chapter five: a local boy, for three dollars a day, driving it through his neighbours' house. That push tears the Joads up by the roots; everything after — Grampa dying the moment he's off the land, the family turning into a truck, twenty thousand mouths after eight hundred jobs, Casy's skull, Tom's leaving, the apple box in the creek — is its aftershock. And every aftershock drives at the same thing: a family without land is only people, and people who mean to live have to turn "I" into "we".
Replay: the storm has just stopped and fine dust still hangs in the air. The men walk out to the edge of the fields, look at the ruined corn, then squat and scratch in the dirt with sticks. No one speaks. The women come out and stand beside the men — not looking at the crop, looking at the men's faces. The children stand beside the women, looking at the men, and at the women.
The force is in the hierarchy of looking. There is no hero in this chapter and no dialogue — only one group watching another: children watch adults, women watch men, men watch the land. With those three tiers of gaze Steinbeck lays down a family's structure of power: the men are the load-bearing wall, and the women are inspecting whether the wall will hold. And what the rest of the book does is take that wall down, inch by inch. Late in the novel Pa mutters that a woman is running the family now, and he finds he doesn't even mind; Ma tells him that a man lives in jerks — one bump and he's down — while a woman is all one flow, like a river that bends and keeps going. The women watching from the doorways in chapter one end up as the ones who decide. The opening shot isn't only about a dust storm; it quietly plays the ending to you backwards: whoever is watching is whoever ends up carrying it.
Replay: the truck crosses the desert in the dark, headlights showing only a short stretch of road. Some on board sleep, some don't. At the inspection station Ma's voice is unnaturally sharp, urging them to let the truck through; the men put it down to nerves. Dawn, the pass, the green valley; everyone is looking at the view. Ma gets down last, holds on to the side of the truck, and says Granma is dead.
The technical move is to lock the information inside one person and leave the reader in the dark along with the rest of the family. Steinbeck doesn't cut to Ma's point of view to show her feeling Granma's hand go cold in the dark — had he done so, it would be a weeping scene. He refuses, and lets us hear only that off-key voice at the checkpoint from outside. So when the truth comes out at daybreak, we rewind with Tom: so that's where that voice came from. More ruthless still is the timing: the reveal comes at the exact moment the family first sees the promised land. In front of them is more abundance than they have ever seen; in Ma's keeping is a body. Hope and death are put in the same frame on the same morning, and the author adds not one adjective.
Replay: rain on the roof, hay, half-dark. When the boy has said his father needs milk, the barn goes quiet. The two women's eyes meet. The younger says one word. The older takes everyone out of the door.
Its force comes from three omissions. First, there is no negotiation between mother and daughter; the whole exchange — do you understand what I'm asking? I do, and I will — is pressed into a single look. Second, Rose of Sharon has been the most self-absorbed person in the family the whole way: forever fretting about her belly, her husband, her future, frightened by a fanatical churchwoman in the camp into believing her sins would kill the baby. The most selfish person does the least selfish thing in the book, and does it straight after losing her child. Third, the author refuses to tell us what comes next — whether the man lives, whether the rain stops, where the family goes. The novel stops on a smile, in the middle of an act not yet finished. Steinbeck's editor worried the ending was too abrupt and wanted it prepared for at more length; Steinbeck reportedly refused, saying in effect that it had to happen fast, that the man had to be a complete stranger, and that it was a symbol not of love but of survival. A symbol of survival has to end on an action, not on a meaning.
Of the book's thirty chapters, nearly half are intercalary chapters: no Joads in them, no fixed characters, the camera pulled back to the whole country — the turtle crossing the road, the owners' men talking to the tenants, the tractors, the traffic on Route 66, how used-car dealers cheat, a waitress in a roadside diner selling a migrant's children candy far below its price, how California's land was taken from the Mexicans, how orchard owners soak oranges in kerosene and let them rot. These chapters are short and fast, often built from scraps of dialogue and lists, something like a newsreel's voice-over.
The device's rule is this: the intercalary chapters speak about everyone, the narrative chapters about this one family, and they alternate, each serving as the other's witness. An interchapter shows a nameless man selling his mules and being cheated; in the next chapter the Joads sell their mules. An interchapter shows how the rules of a roadside camp form overnight; in the next the Joads learn to keep them. So the family's ordeal is never just a case — it is one point on a statistical curve. And the curve, in turn, gets a face.
The argument is stated outright in chapter fourteen: two men who have never met squat by the road, and each one's "I lost my land" merges into "we lost our land" —
"This is the beginning—from 'I' to 'we.'"— Chapter 14 (intercalary)
So the structure enacts the theme. The telling switches back and forth between "I" (the Joads) and "we" (everyone), and at the very end the two lines run together in the barn — the person Rose of Sharon nurses is not family; he is "anybody". Behind this lies a half-biological, half-philosophical notion Steinbeck worked out with his friend the marine biologist Ed Ricketts: that a crowd, like a school of fish or a colony of coral, can grow into a larger organism with a will of its own. It is a novelist's thought experiment, not a finding of sociology — it gives the interchapters their almost liturgical voice, and it is the main reason the book gets called preachy.
The coldest piece of reasoning in the book is the returning migrant's: advertise for eight hundred, twenty thousand come, and the bigger the surplus of labour, the lower the wage. That mechanism is real; California growers did print and circulate handbills by the thousands in the Depression. Chapter twenty-five shows owners pouring kerosene on oranges, killing pigs and burying them, dumping potatoes in rivers to hold up prices, while a few miles away children are dying of pellagra (a deficiency disease caused by lack of niacin). Destroying crops to protect prices really happened in the Depression; the novel's portrayal of it as everyday practice among California growers is compression and intensification. And it is in this chapter that the title appears:
"In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage."— Chapter 25 (intercalary)
Payoff ③ ↑Back in act two Grampa crowed that he'd crush a bunch of grapes over his face — the first grapes in the book, an old man's most innocent and most fleshly picture of California. He died without tasting one. When the word comes back in chapter twenty-five, Steinbeck has given it a second skin: not grapes hanging on a vine waiting to be eaten, but grapes stored up in hungry people, waiting to be trodden. The same word, carried from one old man's appetite to a whole generation's anger. The beauty of it is how little it shows: you laugh at Grampa when you first read him, and only at chapter twenty-five do you realise the author slipped the title into an old man's mouth long ago.
One thing should be flagged honestly. The Joads come from near Sallisaw in eastern Oklahoma, which was not at the core of the Dust Bowl — the land truly blown bare was the Oklahoma panhandle and the neighbouring parts of Kansas and Texas. But the novel itself supplies the real cause: what drives the Joads out is not dust but the bank and the tractor — mechanisation, which let one man on one machine replace a dozen tenant families. The dust is the backdrop; the tractor is the plot.
One · Is the boy on the tractor responsible for flattening your house?
In chapter five, the man who comes on the tractor to push the house down is a local, Joe Davis's boy. The tenant comes out with a rifle, and the boy says: I get three dollars a day and I've got kids to feed; if I don't do it, tomorrow somebody else will. The tenant asks: then who do I shoot? The boy says: shoot me and the bank sends another man; go to the bank and the bank says the order came from the East; the East says it's the money that decides. In the end the tenant stands in his yard holding the rifle, with nobody to shoot.
First, the strongest case that he bears no responsibility. He decided nothing: not the price of land, not the interest rate, not how efficient a tractor is. Refuse the job and the house still comes down — just under someone else's wheels — and his own children go hungry. To demand that a man on three dollars a day trade his children's supper for a moral gesture that changes nothing is itself a luxurious kind of cruelty. The system is built so that every link can be replaced, and being replaceable is the very definition of powerlessness. Load the moral bill onto the man at the bottom, and the people at the top will be delighted.
The other side is just as hard. "If I don't, someone else will" is the very sentence that keeps the machine running. The bank can do this not because of some great power of its own, but because it can always find somebody who will say those words. If everyone says them, no one is ever responsible — and what this boy knocks down is not an abstract "tenant" but the house of people he knows. Steinbeck makes him a local and a neighbour, not a hired thug from outside, precisely to close the exit marked "I didn't know". Being replaceable is not the same as being forgiven.
Bring it home: are you carrying out a rule you don't believe in — a name on a layoff list, an algorithm that auto-declines loan applications, a rejection letter sent from a template? If you say "it wasn't my decision", then whose was it? And if everyone you ask up the line gives you the same answer, isn't that answer the answer?
Two · Your children need supper tonight. Do you walk into the struck peach ranch?
When the police lead the Joads into the peach ranch, the line outside the gate is shouting "scabs". The Joads don't know there's a strike; next day Tom does, and Casy asks him to go back and tell the family: you get five cents today because we're holding out here; the moment we break, you get two and a half. Tom tells them. Pa's answer is simple: we've got to eat today.
First, the strongest case for walking in. The Joads have no reserves; their "tomorrow" is tonight's meal. The strike's promise is that if everyone holds, everyone will be better off later — but that is a bet on the future, and the stake is children who are hungry now. By what right do you ask people who already have nothing to pay for a "later" that may never come? And the strikers themselves can't say how long they can last; the owner's whole calculation is that for every striker outside the gate, he can bring in someone hungrier. If the Joads don't go in, the next truck will.
The other side: every loss this family has taken on the road came from someone else walking in. Eight hundred wanted, twenty thousand came, and wages fell year after year, precisely because every hungry person could see only tonight's supper. Casy dies just outside this gate. If everyone does the sum as "I eat this one meal first", then the sum called "we" never gets done — and every concrete disaster in the book is that arithmetic, accumulated. Don't go in and you're hungry tonight; go in and you'll be hungry next year too, and there'll be nobody left outside the gate holding out for you.
Where the author stands is visible: he has the peach rate drop to two and a half the day after the strike is broken, so the Joads see with their own eyes how their "tonight" became someone else's "tomorrow". But he doesn't condemn Pa either — Pa's sentence goes unanswered in the book. Bring it home: have you taken an offer below the going rate? Signed a contract everyone else was complaining about? When you signed, did you think about that price becoming the next person's starting point?
Three · Should Tom go? Family, and "everybody"
For the first half of the book, Ma fights with everything she has for one thing: the family must not break up. She told Pa, iron bar in hand, that people were all they had left. In the second half she presses seven dollars into Tom's hand and sends him away — not only to escape the police, but because Tom says he's going to do what Casy did: go to everybody.
First, the strongest case that he should stay. Look at the family now: Grampa and Granma dead, Noah gone, Connie run off, Al about to marry into another family, Pa no longer able to hold things up, Uncle John living on drink, Rose of Sharon about to give birth, Ruthie and Winfield still small. Tom is the one grown man left who can carry anything. "Fighting for everybody" sounds grand, but its actual price is that this particular family, people with names, loses its last support — exactly when they need it most. Abandoning a concrete "we" for an abstract one has happened many times in history, and the usual result is that the abstract one isn't saved and the concrete one collapses first.
The other side: staying wouldn't protect them either. He is a wanted killer; if he stays, it is only a matter of time before he's caught and the family is dragged in with him. More fundamentally, the whole road has shown that a family, however close, is a grain of sand against this machine. The one thing that ever worked for the Joads — in the Hooverville, the government camp, the peach ranch — was people standing together; that is how the camp dance was saved. Tom leaving is not deserting his family for a big word; it is going to do the one thing that might mean the next family like the Joads won't have to travel this road. Ma drew the circle wider; Tom just walked to its edge.
Steinbeck has Ma give him the money and send him off, and later has her say "now it's anybody" — it is clear where the author stands. But he also drops the family, the moment Tom is gone, into its worst passage yet: flood, a dead baby, nowhere to live. He doesn't pretend the choice is free. Bring it home: have you ever chosen between looking after the people close to you and doing something that matters to many more? The job in another city, the volunteer work that takes every weekend, the public stand that carries a risk — which did you choose, and what did the people around you pay for it?
One: a piece of land of one's own, and never getting it. In Of Mice and Men (1937), two migrant hands, George and Lennie, tell each other the same dream again and again: save up, buy a little place, keep some rabbits, live off the land — a dream that ends with George shooting Lennie himself. The Grapes of Wrath is that dream at scale: a whole generation of tenants dreaming the same thing, the California orchards as the little place, and the little place long since fenced and deeded to someone else. The difference: Of Mice and Men lets the dream break on one man; The Grapes of Wrath lets it break and then has people start looking for something other than the dream — not land of their own, but each other.
Two: the group as a creature with a will of its own. Steinbeck's In Dubious Battle (1936) follows a strike in a California apple orchard through two professional organisers, and it watches coldly: once people gather, they become something unlike any one of them — capable of heroism, capable of violence. That book is unsparing about how organisers use the crowd. Casy and Tom walk the same road in The Grapes of Wrath, but this time the tone is close to a sermon: the group is no longer a beast to be tamed but the place where a person finds a soul. In East of Eden (1952), late in his career, he retreats from the group to the individual, retelling Cain and Abel in the Salinas Valley and putting all the weight on one Hebrew word, timshel — "thou mayest": a person can choose. Set the three side by side and you have a writer who swung all his life between "I" and "we".
It was burned the year it came out. In August 1939 the board of supervisors of Kern County, California — where the Joads end up — voted to remove the book from the county's public libraries and schools, and copies were publicly burned there; an Oklahoma congressman rose in Congress to call its picture of Oklahomans a slander. Others disagreed — among them the First Lady, Eleanor Roosevelt, who had visited the California camps and said publicly that she did not think the book exaggerated. The fight over it at the time was mostly not literary but factual: was it true? Historians today broadly support its picture of the migrants' conditions, while noting that its portrait of California growers is one-sided: hardly a named grower appears to speak for himself (Mr Thomas is the exception, and he is acting under duress).
Preachiness and flatness. This is the most common criticism, and the most durable. In the interchapters the author often steps forward to make his case, and the voice slides from newsreel narration into sermon; the characters are often called types rather than people — Ma as earth mother, Casy as a Christ figure (initials J.C., last words close to "they know not what they do", as critics have long pointed out), Rose of Sharon turned into a symbol at the end. You can say this is deliberate allegory, but the price of allegory is that the characters lose part of their right to surprise you. Beside Faulkner and Hemingway, his contemporaries, Steinbeck was long regarded in literary circles as a well-meaning but not very deep writer; when he won the Nobel in 1962, there was open criticism of the choice in the American press.
That ending. From publication to today, the last page has been the flashpoint: some find it the most exalted moment in the book, others a contrived, even embarrassing symbol; his editor wanted it changed at the time. Worth noting: John Ford's 1940 film, starring Henry Fonda, doesn't film the ending at all, and reorders the story — peach ranch first, government camp after — closing on Ma's "we're the people" speech. The film is far more hopeful than the novel. The ending many people remember is the film's, not the book's.
Who counts as "we". A more recent line of criticism: the sufferers at the centre of the novel are native-born white Protestant tenants, while before they arrived, the main labour in California's orchards was Mexican, Filipino and Japanese — chapter nineteen mentions them, but in passing. Critics point out that part of the reason the book moved America in 1939 is that its sufferers looked like "Americans". It drew the circle of "we" wider, but where it drew the edge is itself worth asking. That doesn't cancel the book; it means that a novel whose theme is "from I to we" has edges to its own "we".
① The fuse is a tractor: a local boy, for three dollars a day, flattens his neighbours' house.
② Grampa doesn't die on the road; he dies the moment he is lifted off the land. While a man is joined to the ground, the ground is his life.
③ An old sedan with its back sawn off holds a whole family, and from then on the family meets not in the house but by the truck.
④ Eight hundred wanted, twenty thousand came: that one sum is colder than a whole chapter of protest.
⑤ Ma lies a whole night beside a corpse, and buys with it the morning her family first sees the promised land.
⑥ Tom said "I'd do it again", and he did — and this time it was for something bigger than himself.
⑦ Casy dies; his "maybe we all share one soul" doesn't. It goes on living in Tom's mouth.
⑧ The grapes Grampa wanted to crush on his face become, by chapter twenty-five, a generation's stored-up anger.
⑨ Uncle John sends a dead baby floating into town — a man who carried a private sin all his life hands it over at last.
⑩ From "my family" to "anybody": the book ends at a stranger's mouth, and on a smile no one can account for.