When was grapes of wrath

The camps are overcrowded and full of starving migrants, who are often nasty to each other. Fearing an uprising, the large landowners do everything in their power to keep the migrants poor and dependent. When the argument turns violent, Jim Casy knocks the sheriff unconscious and is arrested. Police officers arrive and announce their intention to burn the Hooverville to the ground.

A government-run camp proves much more hospitable to the Joads, and the family soon finds many friends and a bit of work. However, one day, while working at a pipe-laying job, Tom learns that the police are planning to stage a riot in the camp, which will allow them to shut down the facilities. By alerting and organizing the men in the camp, Tom helps to defuse the danger. Still, as pleasant as life in the government camp is, the Joads cannot survive without steady work, and they have to move on.

Tom runs into Jim Casy who, after being released from jail, has begun organizing workers; in the process, Casy has made many enemies among the landowners. Tom goes into hiding, while the family moves into a boxcar on a cotton farm.

One day, Ruthie, the youngest Joad daughter, reveals to a girl in the camp that her brother has killed two men and is hiding nearby. Fearing for his safety, Ma Joad finds Tom and sends him away. The end of the cotton season means the end of work, and word sweeps across the land that there are no jobs to be had for three months. There he met Tom Collins, manager of the Weedpatch Camp who became a major source of information and a travelling companion.

Collins collected statistics on camp life which Steinbeck used as primary material for his articles, and both traveled together on three trips through California. They visited the settlements, went to meetings, stayed on camps and ranches, worked in the fields. After the publication Steinbeck and his wife drove west along Route 66, from Oklahoma to California, like countless migrants before them. These experiences provided Steinbeck with more than enough material to depict the lives of poor farmers forced to migrate west.

He set out to write a novel, conscious of the importance of what he saw and experienced. I am not writing a satisfying story , he told his editor, Pascal Covici.

I've done my damnedest to rip a reader's nerves to rags, I don't want him satisfied I tried to write this book the way lives are being lived not the way books are written. All through the process, Steinbeck remained aware of the fact that he was creating a literary work. DeMott describes The Grapes of Wrath as an engaged novel with a partisan posture, many complex voices, and passionate prose styles.

Steinbeck saw the composition process of the novel similar to the composition of a symphony - he wanted his chapters, voices and styles speak to each other, resonate with recurring themes, the total impression far more powerful than its individual parts. Steinbeck wrote of events and people he himself experienced and knew, and his concern was humanitarian: to do justice to the migrant men and women, their desire to work and their efforts to retain their dignity and settle in the Promised Land, be an advocate for the common working people whose abuse by their corporate employers was largely a silent tragedy.

Men willing to work were hungry and starved in the land of plenty, which for Steinbeck and any moral human being was unacceptable; He sided with David rather than Goliath, and set out to write an epic which would surpass all of his other work. This must be a good book , he wrote in his journal, it simply must. I haven't any choice. It must be far and away the best thing I have ever attempted - slow but sure, piling detail on detail until a picture and an experience emerge.

Until the whole throbbing thing emerges. Steinbeck was aware of his ambition and consciously employed imagery from and parallels to the single best read epic text in the US - the Bible. The exodus of the Joad family to California was written with the attention and momentum of the Biblical Exodus of the Isrealites, led by Moses out of Egypt.

California is the Promised Land, a good and spacious land, a land flowing with milk and honey Exodus The Okies arriving at the border of California are stopped by the border patrol guards, who refuse to let them enter except for when the labor is needed - much like the Israelites faced persecution and cruelty from the Amonites, Moabites and Edomites when they were trying to enter Caanan.

Tom Joad can be seen as Moses - he killed a man who spoke bad about Jim Casy, like Moses killed an Egyptian who was beating a Hebrew slave, and both served as leader figures for their people. Jim Casy is a Christ figure, down to the same initials - a preacher who questioned the established religion and fought the temptations of flesh, and lead the twelve Joads like Christ lead his twelve disciples. Like Jesus, he disappeared and wandered alone; He taught the gospel of social and spiritual unity: love for all men, sympathy for the poor and oppressed.

The Joads depend on their car like Noah depended on his ark, and like Noah gathered all the necessary species to preserve life on earth they gathered all their important things to ensure their own survival. The old Testament practically jumps off the page - there's even a literal flood in this story.

It is also interesting to see from the perspective of a contemporary reader how the novel reads like a perfect example of a dystopian novel: large banks took hold over the land of the Joads and evicted them from it, forcing them to leave their native land of Oklahoma where society has collapsed and migrate towards a new, better world.

The theme of large corporations and financial institutions effectively assuming control over lives of individual people is a classic dystopian theme, and so is the journey of a group of those who survived the collapse of society - classic example being The Stand , more recent being the Pulizer winning The Road.

Steinbeck's landscape is bleak and hostile, his protagonists experience real life-threatening risks and deprivations which forces them to cross many boundaries. The Grapes of Wrath became the most successful social protest novel of the 20th century, and its message remains fresh and accurate even today, especially today.

We live in a period characterized by growing income inequality and the widening gap between the richest and the poorest, where certain institutions of the financial sector have been deemed "too big to fail" effectively making them more dangerous than ever.

Corporations lobby the politicians to ensure that their own interests are met, and enjoy a wide range of big government subsidies and tax breaks, sponsored by ordinary citizens.

While the big corporations enjoy all the benefits guaranteed by a big, nanny state ordinary citizens are being told that they don't deserve it and that they have to help themselves and pull themselves up by their own bootstraps; politicians and pundits use the words "welfare" in pejorative context when it comes to their own viewers and constituents, as if it was something shameful instead of an extended hand, which helps the ordinary working people stay afloat. A welfare state is inconsiderable if it could actually benefit those who need it most - the poor and struggling ordinary citizens, who are left to walk on their own and slowly cross to the other side.

In this vision of society all that I regard as a vice is turned into a virtue: greed, selfishness and no care for the weaker, a world where people push forward with sharp elbows and know the price of everything and the value of nothing.

American economist Robert Reich recently made a succinct post on his Facebook page, which I quote here in its entirety emphasis mine. Play us out, Mr. The private sector, it was assumed, could do it better; competition and the profit motive would generate savings and efficiencies; citizens would be better served if they were treated as "customers" and "clients. What happened? The rich have seceded into their own private schools, private jets, private health clubs, and privatized communities; most Americans must now pay individually for what previous generations paid for collectively, through their taxes.

Certain public goods, like higher education, have morphed into private investments. But the biggest loss, I think, has been our sense of the common good itself: out understanding that we are all in it together, that we are bound together by an implicit social contract involving obligations to one another that define a decent society, and that much of what we have and enjoy in life depends on what we achieve in common with others.

View all 73 comments. May 11, Carol rated it it was amazing Shelves: read , favorites , historical-fiction , classics , chunkster. Powerful and Tragic Dec 27, Madeline rated it really liked it Shelves: the-list. This was a tough one to read.

I don't just mean it was depressing. It was, obviously - a book about a poor family being forced from their home during the Great Depression and having to beg for the chance to pick cotton at fifteen cents per hour can't be anything except depressing - but it wasn't the most depressing book I've ever read.

This was hard to read, not because it was a por Chirst. This was hard to read, not because it was a portrayal of a horrible period of history that actually happened. That contributed to the tragedy of the book, of course, coupled with the knowledge that there were not just a few Joad families during the Great Depression, but millions of them, so your percentage of possible happy endings is going to be pretty low.

It wasn't even sad because Steinbeck was using the backdrop of the Great Depression to illustrate the greater problems in America - the disparity between rich and poor, the way low-level laborers have to fight tooth and nail to achieve the most basic human rights, the fact that the people who run the major banks and farms are horrible unfeeling shells of human beings, etc.

The Grapes of Wrath is sad for all of these reasons, but here is what makes it sadder than anything: not the fact that Steinbeck is writing about a horrible period in history that's behind us now. It's because that horrible period went away, and then it came back. We aren't in the middle of a second Dust Bowl, but make no mistake: we are living in the second Great Depression.

If you haven't read yet and have always been meaning to, there's no better time than now. Steinbeck's book was written in the late 's, but just about everything that happens here is happening right in your state - possibly in your neighborhood - as you read this. You read about the banks in the Great Depression sending men to bulldoze people's houses while the family stood outside, and find yourself thinking, "Well, at least now they just pile all your stuff on the curb after you get foreclosed on.

You read about the Joad family and the others being called "Okies" and forced out of their camps by the cops, and think about politicians who scream about "illegals" taking away the good American jobs and deporting kids' parents. Is this review getting too politcally-minded? That's how Steinbeck would have wanted me to talk about his book, because let me assure you - The Grapes of Wrath is extremely fucking political. Another reviewer called it the anti- Atlas Shrugged , which is pretty damn apt.

It's all about unions and the rights of the worker and how poor people need government assistance because sometimes life just sucks for no fucking reason. It's sad and it's searing, and beautifully written, and unrelentingly depressing. But it should be read. Look, I know that Steinbeck didn't have to give the Joads a happy ending, and I'm not saying he gave them a sad one either - he gave them a weird one instead.

I was already pretty sick of hearing about Rose of Sharon and her magical pregnancy, so it was just the cherry on top of a shit subplot sundae that the ending view spoiler [had her breastfeeding an old man after her baby died. First: allow me to turn into a middle-schooler for a second and say ewwwwwwwwwww. Second: I kind of get what Steinbeck was trying to say with his ending, because it kind of tied into his idea that the only ones who help poor people are other poor people, and Rose of Sharon was literally feeding a dying man with her own body and oh my god personal sacrifice And it was weird and gross and then the book was over.

View all 19 comments. Oct 11, Elyse Walters rated it it was amazing. View all 27 comments. Steinbeck describes the hardships, readers, moods and developments very forcefully. Steinbeck has a grandiose style of Storytelling and has become one of the Nobel Prize winners for a reason. I really liked this book, because it was written in a very lively language. John Steinbeck manages to transfer feelings directly to the reader.

Nevertheless, it is very easy to understand with the language level he choosed. That being said, i was delighted to find that it was really exciting - a literary delight. This man really can write! It is characterized by a striking language that avoids sentimentalities and therefore looks very honest. Exciting until the end! View all 10 comments. I was very reluctant to give it a try after reading reviews that it's a slow story.

To my surprise, I listened to the second half twice. It was that good and the ending was very moving. I must disclose this is a BBC audio production and it feels like listening to a classic story on the radio.

This is a version with 3 4. This is a version with 3 narrators and is 2 hours and 46 mins long. Shelves: read-in , best-ever , dost. Oklahoma, Tractors invade the barren plains, ruining crops, demolishing houses, stripping farmers of their livelihood, leaving only billows of dust and ransacked land behind. Bewildered families choke with disbelief at the lame excuses of the landowners who blame a monster bigger than them. Not the severe droughts, not the iron machines, not their useless greed, but the bank, the bank forced them to do it.

And so a pilgrimage of thousands of destitute families to the promised land of Calif Oklahoma, And so a pilgrimage of thousands of destitute families to the promised land of California where the valleys are ripe with fresh hope and sweet grapes begins, and the roads become a limbless reptile hauling an endless tail of wrecked trucks and rootless people who have exchanged their living heritage for the expectation of honest jobs and decent lives.

Framed in bold dialogue and raw dialectical jargon, a menagerie of styles, dissonant voices, folk wisdom and biblical imagery gives shape to the mystic soul of the book, which orbits around two concentric points: land and family.

When the Joads are obliged to abandon their farm they are also deprived of their dignity, of their ancestry, of their roots. View all 99 comments. Sep 02, Natalie Vellacott rated it did not like it Shelves: classics. This was a library book. I didn't get on with it at all despite trying to read it twice. I gave up about a third of the way through in the end. It is about the life of one American family during the Great Depression.

There is some beautiful creative writing in places but the story itself is so very slow. It just didn't hold my interest due to the lengthy dialogue between the characters who were talking about nothing in particular. It was like being a fly on the wall at a really dull tea party wh This was a library book. It was like being a fly on the wall at a really dull tea party where everyone is making small talk. It seems they were allowing waves of nostalgia to sweep over them--forcing everyone to listen as one by one they recounted monotonous tales from their youth.

I guess I probably shouldn't make such comments about something labelled a classic, but for me it was not. As a Christian, I also found the language, particularly the regular blasphemy, offensive and would probably have stopped reading earlier for that reason had it not been a classic. I also didn't appreciate the early scenes where the local vicar was using his position to bed all of the young women in his parish. I don't recommend this book due to the language, the sexual content and the monotony, I'm sorry I wasted a few hours on it.

I consider that I have carried out my duty by advising you, fellow readers, not to do the same. View all 78 comments.

Steinbeck's classic blew me away again with the power of its vision, the depth of its character, and the realism of its dialogs. I also rewatched the movie and found it to be relatively faithful to the book. A few things were dropped the Wilsons, Noah's leaving, the pathos-laden ending with Rosasharon in the farmhouse and a few things were swapped around the government camp and the peach camp , but Henry Fonda did a perfect performance as the interesting Tom Joad whose character arc goes from Steinbeck's classic blew me away again with the power of its vision, the depth of its character, and the realism of its dialogs.

A few things were dropped the Wilsons, Noah's leaving, the pathos-laden ending with Rosasharon in the farmhouse and a few things were swapped around the government camp and the peach camp , but Henry Fonda did a perfect performance as the interesting Tom Joad whose character arc goes from somewhat hardened criminal to socially conscious drifter. I also loved Casy and found John Carradine stupendous in that role.

I feel that this technique was borrowed in principle at least from the Dos Passos USA Trilogy - the closeups reminded me of the Camera Eye sections and the sweeping passages of the Newsreel sections. The book itself tells the story of the Joads and by extension of an entire generation of mid-western farmers in the US that were forced off their land after the Dust Bowl, a period of several years of famine, to seek their fortunes in a promised land out west in California.

The harsh realities of life on the road, the prejudice of stationary observers towards the "Oakies", and the exploitation by farmers and farming associations of the labor surplus are painfully delineated. There is nonetheless some great humor Ma's beating a man with a chicken as told by Tom, Ruthie and Winfield's discovery of the toilets, etc in here and some great moments of humanity - primarily in Casy's speeches and in my all-time favorite one, "wherever there's a man, I'll be there too" by Tom.

The relationships in the book, particularly between Ma and Tom are beautifully drawn and yet the minor characters are also given time to change with the situations. Of course, not everyone makes it to the land of milk and honey, and the land itself does not welcome them with open arms but rather with rejection and disdain. As for the historical context, it is hard for us to get exact numbers, but somewhere between , and 3.

It is also hard to estimate the number of deaths, but most sources settle on a number of about primarily from malnutrition and disease both hinted at in the book, of course. Steinbeck depicts this vividly with sharply drawn images and an appeal to our emotions: we see that unfortunately, the Great Depression has also impacted California and there are no jobs there either.

It is important to note his insight that it was not just farmers that were driven from the land: in the book at the first stop for the Joads, they meet a shopkeeper who left because he had no more customers. In fact, people from across the economic spectrum were impacted and forced to rethink their means of getting an income.

Also important to this book is the fact that it was not just climate change that pushed people off the land, it was also the ruthlessness of banks and speculators as well as technological change. This period represents a shift from manual sharecropping of smallish plots to the massive scale of industrialized agriculture. The heartlessness with which the guys in suits drive the Joads and their neighbors of their land is shocking, and yet realistic.

The practice of printing handbills for wide distribution in order to drive down labor prices as well as the labeling any resistance to falling wages as "red" was a powerful theme in the book. There is a feeling of inevitableness, but also injustice as few provisions were made by the government for these victims of change, and the gutting of legislation to protect small landholders from rapacious actions by the large financial interests during the Coolidge, Harding, and Hoover administrations left gaping holes in the safety net.

An absolute American masterpiece, there is no question in my mind of this novel deserving the Pulitzer Prize over other great books like Chandler's The Big Sleep and Tropic of Capricorn also being published in This one just has an eternal, lasting perfection to it. Grapes of Wrath was one of the primary sources quoted when Steinbeck was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in His moving acceptance speech here. My votable list of Pulitzer winners which I have read only have the 40s, 50s, and 60s to finish!

View all 21 comments. Shelves: setting-united-states , books-for-adults , read-for-school , eras , not-for-christians , romance-too-much , rating-r , sad-books , setting-usa-west , written-during-period. But I agree with lil' high school me still. Forced by her mother, a young girl listened to an audiobook version of The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck. It was something like forty hours long and all , seconds were moments of extreme torture.

The Jungle by Upton Sinclair was one of those. The Jungle showed the world the terrible conditions of meat processing factories bringing about safer conditions, cleaner food, and less disease. The Grapes of Wrath, though? As far as I can tell, it can only lead to negative consequences - blaming the government for everything that goes wrong in your life, insistence and later dependence upon Welfare, and some very incorrect views of the world. There are many things wrong with The Grapes of Wrath.

I think people over analyze things like paintings and books. The turtle in chapter three symbolizes the perpetuation of the life circle, as does that whole creepy thing at the end with Rose of Sharon and the old guy.

My apologies to anyone who believes this, I respect you, but nope. Individualism in Jesus Christ for me! Casy is an immoral, stinking old man who seduces young women while masquerading as a preacher. Sounds like a special guy, right? Now, back to the government. Who is paying for the government camps?

The government. Who … the government wronged? Inventing new farming equipment. Look … I hate the government myself. But for the exact opposite reason of this book. I hate the government because it seeks more power than it should have … and people rely on it more than they ever should.

The government is there to govern. Not to provide us good lives. Uh … no. Most of the book consists of the meaningless conversations of one character with another character. They talk about everything under the sun - but it never gets anywhere. The rest of the book is extremely long descriptions which was sure to make you fall asleep.

Another literary technique Steinbeck uses often is repetition. There is no main character in this book. However, Steinbeck does nothing whatsoever to counteract this. Uh, good job grinding the reputation of Oklahoma into the ground? All of the Joad family and most of the characters we meet are incredibly dumb. They do dumb things; they say dumb things; they personify idiocy! Honestly, is anyone in this book likable at all? He has a terrible temper and is known for lashing out at everyone in sight.

He also sleeps around. A lot. On the surface, she seems pretty cool, the calm and controlled one of the family. However, she is also pretty dumb, seeming to think that Tom is actually a good guy.

Sorry, weak-willed mother. Your children mostly suck? She was probably the best character of the story. Good job. Jim Casy is the former preacher who makes fun of the Bible, of God, and basically everything related to Christianity. He sleeps around even more than Tom, seducing young women who he was supposed to be a spiritual guide to.

So likable. Though neither does anyone else in this book, to be fair. Rose of Sharon Joad or Rosasharn, haha. Whines about anything, thinks about nothing but herself, is generally weak-willed and annoying. Another point against Ma: she let that happen and in fact encouraged it. Ma is actually a pretty bad Ma, to be honest?

Pa Joad is weak-willed and annoying and has no idea how to lead his family, leaving them hanging and letting Ma take over. He loves having sex, and he has sex all the times with multiple girls and brags on it.

I just love this guy … one of my favorites! Granpa Joad. He cusses, walks around with his clothes unbuttoned … and I mean even his underwear … and is basically dirty filthy, inside and out. No grief when he dies. Granma Joad. She prays, but since Christianity is a ridiculous stupid silly thing this is just ridiculous and leaves her open to ridicule.

But they treated this as comical and make fun of her, kinda? Uncle John. Even when he almost asks for it. People in this book suck. Bossy and domineering little girl. Spoiled brat. But then in the end he wanders off. Yay for Noah? Even though Noah is only a good guy because his father bashed his brains out when he was a newborn? Part 4: Plot Is there one? Spoilers included, of course. Comes home, picks up Filthy Casy on the way.

Finds his family home abandoned. They slowly get there in another boring, long section. Granma and Granpa both die, by the way. No one really cares, though, let alone me. Eventually they leave the government camp and go to another place where they pick peaches. Good riddance to bad rubbish. And the river floods. And after a couple days of living on a platform they built above the water in the boxcar, they decide to leave.

Although Al stays behind. Part 5: Negative Content How could one book be so packed full of cruel and immoral men and women? Tom, Casy, and Al all talk about sleeping with women, degrading acts they've done with women, etc. Many, many sexual jokes and innuendos and references. Other: Death, destruction, murder, violence, scary scenes, police violence, mobs, scummy living conditions.

Part End: Conclusion Now, you can say whatever you want to me. But this is a 1-star book! Who would I recommend this book to? Absolutely no one. If you can get out of it, get out of it!

Your life is too precious to waste on The Grapes of Wrath. Why are so many high school students forced to read this? I first read Grapes of Wrath in high school, then again taught it in a rural parochial Christian high school in western Michigan in the late seventies.

I loved teaching that book, that had been a staple of the Modern Novels elective class there for many years, but that year one of the more conservative parents complained to the school board that the book was immoral, not consistent with the values of the community.

He saw that his son was being required to read it, recalled reading the book and found it personally offensive. He thought the swearing was excessive made a list of the swear words used , there was an ex-preacher in the book that had slept with some of his female parishioners he took objection to, and the final scene in the book, where a young nursing mother who has lost her child feeds a starving man, he found disgusting.

If he had dug a little deeper he might have discovered that the author of the book, John Steinbeck, was also once a member of the Communist Party. We might have then had just enough evidence to burn it. The only member of the school board that had read the book was the Chairman of the Board, who thought it was a very good book, but none of the other members had read it, nor would they, and they voted to remove it from our English curriculum, though they--sensing a possible insurrection from students and teachersallowed us to finish teaching the book.

Why fear an uprising? I am sure our reading of the remainder of that book was some of the most passionate learning I have ever been part of, and I will never forget my engaged, thoroughly committed students; I loved them some [minor] students bought me bottles of wine when we were done reading it and the book; what a great and anguished experience for us all.

He had helped organize farm workers for a living wage. He had seen first hand the lowering of wages for hundreds of thousands of Americans in his state to the point of starvation and disease.

When he wrote the book he had the King James version of the Holy Bible with him at all times, I had read, hoping to have his passionate prose echo its lyrical moral tone.

In other words, it is both historical fiction and a cautionary tale, a time of Economic Depression and people often, and largely hating each other in their struggles rather than supporting each other in crisis.

We were born on it, and we got killed on it, died on it. And what happens in a capitalist system when that happens? Wages go down to criminal levels, prices stay up, and food is literally kerosened or dumped into ditches in front of starving people as is now being done!! Slaughter the pigs and bury them, and let the putrescence drip down into the earth.

There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. 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 certificate- died of malnutrition- because the food must rot, must be forced to rot.

The key theme is that The People can stand against the rich and powerful if they are unified, if they are One, if they see themselves as Ma tells them they must be, a Family, supporting each other with love and decency. But while tender acts of charity are present, there are also also warnings in the book: If you keep a family from feeding its children that rage--the grapes of wrath--will come to pass.

The people will come together to save themselves. Which makes sense more now than ever. Yes, but the bank is only made of men. The bank is something else than men. It happens that every man in a bank hates what the bank does, and yet the bank does it. The bank is something more than men, I tell you. It can't wait. It'll die. No, taxes go on. When the monster stops growing, it dies. In the novel , John Steinbeck follows the fiction al journey of the Joads, a family of sharecropper s from Sallisaw, Oklahoma, forced to migrate west during the Dust Bowl.

The Joads join thousands of other migrants on the trek to the Salinas Valley of California, a place they idealize as rich with opportunity. Both a human and an environmental disaster , the Dust Bowl was a prolonged series of dust storm s brought on by drought and erosion in the United States Great Plains region in the s. Chad Kauffman, professor of earth sciences at California University of Pennsylvania, explains that drought was not the only factor at play, however. While the region saw less rainfall than usual in the s, it was really the modification s humans made to the landscape —particularly uprooting native grasses and exposing the virgin topsoil to the elements —that set the stage for the erosion that would follow.

These tall grasses have a deeper root structure, and that root structure helps to fix the soil in-place, allowing it to take on the loam y texture that made the region attractive to agriculture. Coupled with the effects of the Depression on the nation as a whole, many families in the region were devastate d, particularly those who relied on agriculture to make a living. For many, the only choice they had was to leave, and they found themselves on Route 66 headed to California. Many of these families ended up in the Salinas Valley, where John Steinbeck was born, raised, and lived the majority of his life.

Dust Bowl migration, the shaping of Californian identity , and human connection to the environment are all deeply personal topics for Steinbeck.

Susan Shillinglaw is a Steinbeck scholar and the author of On Reading The Grapes of Wrath , which reflects on the social, political, and creative impact of The Grapes of Wrath from the time of its publication through to today. How do you write about weather pattern s, drought, migration, and identity at once, as it is happening? Containing that contemporary story was a challenge … and one way that he met that challenge was to construct a family story that is punctuated by interchapters that tell a larger cultural and historical story.

He structured the book so that it moves from one family, to many families, to the human experience. Capturing the human experience of migrant farmworkers also made The Grapes of Wrath controversial.

The political frenzy went so far that First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, upon reading the book, called for congressional hearings that resulted in reform to labor laws governing migrant camps. In reality, critics had very little to argue about. Like Steinbeck and everyone else in her community, she saw migrant families like the Joads arrive in droves , many living in cardboard boxes in camps. If you were coming up through the class es, you were a fan of him.

But even those that disliked him respected his writing. He just wrote things as they really were. I remember everything exactly as the way he wrote it.

How we all felt about Okies, that word had a horrible connotation. Everybody disliked them.