The Grapes Of Wrath By John Steinbeck (1902 - 1968) Essays

The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck (1902 - 1968) The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck (1902 - 1968) Type of Work: Social / political criticism Setting Oklahoma and California; 1930s Principal Characters Tod Joad, a recent parolee in his mid-twenties Ma and Pa Joad, a strong, middle-aged Oklahoma couple Noah Joad, their strange eldest son Al, their wild sixteen-year-old Rose of Sharon, eldest Joad daughter, married and pregnant Gramma and Grampa Joad, an earthy old couple Jim Casy, a preacher and, later, a labor agitator Other Joad children Story Overveiw As Tom Joad hitchhiked his way home after a four-year stay in prison for killing a man in a fight, he met up with Jim Casy, a former preacher who was returning from a sojourn in the "wilderness," where he had been soul-searching. Tom invited Jim to walk with him on the dusty road to the Joad family farm, and to stay for dinner. Arriving there, he saw that "the small unpainted house was mashed at one corner, and it had been pushed off its foundations so that it slumped at an angle." The farm was deserted. Muley Graves, a near-by tenant farmer, told Tom that his family had moved to their Uncle john's house: " . . . They was going to stick it out when the bank come to tractorin' off the place." A long drought was making barren ground out of what had once been fertile farmland. Early the following morning Tom and Casy walked the eight miles to Uncle John's farm. As they approached, Tom saw his Pa working on a truck in the yard. Pa's "eyes looked at Tom's face, and then gradually his brain became aware of what he saw." With Tom's homecoming, the Joad family unit was complete. Now Ma and Pa, the pregnant oldest daughter Rose of Sharon, and her husband Connie, Grampa, Gramma, and all the rest started packing: they were all "goin' to California" to start over as fruit pickers. Like thousands of other displaced tenant farmers, the Joads, spurred on by the promise of good wages and sunshine, sold what they could, bought a used car and headed out on Highway 66, "a people in flight, refugees from dust and shrinking land, from the thunder of tractors and shrinking ownership." After the supplies and tools were loaded into the old Hudson, which teen-aged Al load had converted into a truck, the Joad family and Casy (twelve people in all) squeezed into what little space was left and started west. During the first overnight stop, Gramma suddenly was hit by a stroke and died. They buried him on the roadside. Soon the loads met up with the Wilsons, a married couple with a broken-down car. After Al had fixed the vehicle, Ma and Pa joad invited the Wilsons to travel with them. "You won't be no burden. Each'Il help each, an' we'll all git to California," Ma said. The two groups "crawled westward as a unit", suffering along the way from too little money, not enough food, dilapidated vehicles, profiteering junk dealers and overpriced replacement parts. Eastward-bound migrants warned the travelers that working conditions in California were bad; but they still pressed on toward the "promised land." Crossing the border into California, the family camped next to a river that ran parallel to the town of Needles. They'd wait until nightfall to cross the desert. As Tom, Noah and Pa sat down in the shallow river water to wash off the road grime, they were joined by an itinerant father and his son who aprised them of the treatment they could expect in California: "Okie use'ta mean you was from Oklahoma. Now it means you're a dirty sonof-a-bitch. Okie means you're scum." Later that day, Tom's aloof and backward brother Noah notified him that he was staying to live by the river, and then wandered away. That evening, after saying good-bye to the Wilsons, the Joads began the last leg of their journey. Early during the desert crossing, Gramma quietly died, but Ma waited until they reached Bakersfield before she told anyone. After another roadside burial, the family drove on into a "Hooverville" - one of many designated migrant camps opened during the Depression. Like other Hoovervilles, it was a haotic community; "little gray tents, shacks, and c cars were scattered about at random." But the Joads elected to stay. On their first evening in the camp, two men in a shiny sedan drove up, a labor contractor and a local sheriff. The contractor had come out to offer jobs to the migrants, but when he declined to reveal the actual