The Grapes of Wrath

In this novel about Oklahoma farmers forced by the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression to seek a new life for themselves as migrant laborers in California, John Steinbeck may well have written the Great American Novel. "The Grapes of Wrath" is the story of the Joad family, but it's also the story of a people on the move, a nation in crisis, and humanity in its extremes of greed and goodness. The first quarter of the novel tells of young Tom Joad's homecoming after several years in prison for killing a man in a drunken brawl. Contact with his family has been minimal over the years, and he looks forward to seeing his parents, grandparents, and siblings again - but the house is empty, obviously abandoned, like so many others in this land where a combination of drought and poor agricultural techniques has resulted in failure and foreclosure on countless family farms. Fortunately, Tom learns from a neighbor that his family has gone over to his uncle's place, and he arrives there just in time to join them on their way to California, where they've been told there's plenty of work in the state's lush Central Valley. The second quarter of the novel is the story of the Joads' arduous journey west on Route 66, a trip distinguished by breakdowns, death, and intimations by those who have been there that California may be something less than the paradise they've been led to imagine. The final half of the novel follows the Joads after they arrive in California, only to discover that it's possible to starve even in a land of plenty as too many would-be workers are forced to compete for available jobs by accepting wages barely sufficient to buy enough food from one day to the next. The novel ends with one of the most stunning and affecting scenes you'll ever read, and although nothing at all is resolved, the story feels complete. The structure of the novel underscores Steinbeck's creation of the Joads as the human face of a social crisis. Long chapters that advance the plot alternate with short chapters in which the Joads are never mentioned, in which Steinbeck's richly poetic prose establish the physical and moral setting of his work: the conditions leading to the Dust Bowl, the loss of a way of life, the journey to a new beginning, and the disillusionment and growing anger of the migrants - all on a massive scale. These short, poignant chapters are as beautiful, captivating, and necessary as the story chapters, as they provide context and grant a kind of holy universality to the Joads' experiences. Steinbeck's writing is raw, earthy, and viscerally powerful. This is realism at its finest: full of small, telling details, and at times casually vulgar, not for shock value but because life itself is casually vulgar. I was about 13 the first time I read this novel, and the blunt honesty of the writing was a bit much for my somewhat sheltered mind; I remember feeling uncomfortable when an old man reached into his pants and "contentedly scratched under the testicles," as that wasn't a word I was used to seeing in print, at least outside of biology texts. I loved the background chapters but found the Joad chapters distasteful for the first hundred pages or so, when I finally allowed the vivid immediacy of Steinbeck's style to make the characters real for me. As an adult, I have no such difficulties and am able to appreciate the masterful style and rich characterizations immediately. This is a mature novel, about people too crassly human to elicit our pity, but too warmly human not to elicit our compassion. I must admit that as a native Californian, I feel a special connection with this novel. For most of my life I lived just a few blocks away from the old Route 66 (although farther west than the point where the Joads left it to go north). Several of my husband's children live in the Central Valley, around places Steinbeck mentions by name. However, Steinbeck's skill is such that even if you've never been there, you'll close this novel feeling as though you had. This is a novel every American should read - indeed, everyone interested in what it means to be human in trying times. These days more than ever we need this book, we need this reminder of the values of proud self-sufficiency and fierce decency, for it is when we stop pulling, and pulling together, that we lose our way.

It quite paradoxical and embarrassing how I became known about Grapes of Wrath. I was introduced to Grapes of Wrath from a youtube clip of Louis C.K. who is stand-up comedian. In this specific video clip Louis makes a farcical argument that all men love women's breasts. Regarding the book, he says "I don't want to ruin the book for you, but you should have read the book by now. If you read the book, Grapes of Wrath, that's how it ends. With an old dying man sucking milk out of pretty young girl's boobs. And then the book is over. And you are like Geez... What happened at the end there? There is no other book in that genre -Dense historic classic that ends with weird ‘porny’ paragraph. We [men] love breasts" Then I bethought myself of reasons to read this book. First, as an immigrant American, I have duty to know and appreciate History of the Great Depression. Second, I already knew the book will end with an old dying man sucking milk out of a pretty young girl. I have to disclose that the latter was a stronger motivation for me to purchase this very book. Third, I desired to know what let up to such an ending. Fourth, is the curiosity in that how such a book of pornographic content has become an American Classic quintessential to that epoch. Whichever the motivation was – either more perverted content or curiosity – was I glad that it made me purchase the book and commit myself to read this thick book cover to cover. The story is about a family. It is people's story with whom you will smile, laugh, frown, and cry together. Each character is very special in their own ways. I felt the deepest connections with each one than any other books I had read thusly, even though I had had nothing in common with these characters. I grew up in a different country; I lived all my life in urban surroundings; I knew nothing about farming; I had never experienced hunger, poverty, or famine of any sort; I had never encountered any inhuman treatment from others. I drove cross country twice from east to west. Even then my experience was very different than that of the Joad's family. I found myself fraught with anger for the family throughout their journey to West and then their journey to happiness and stabilization (living like a normal family). The book is very straight forward. It shows from the beginning that the family won't ever reach to what they are look for, all of which are jobs, house, and food. Nothing goes right for them. The family was told on multiple times that bright expectations California are false -- an illusion created by greedy farm owners. The family presses on with hope that everything would work out. They did not lose hope when the grandpa, grandma died in a horrible way; Connie ran away; The preacher was arrested and died; multiple occasions that the truck broke down; they ran out of food to eat; they were treated inhumanly; they were underpaid; Tom was wanted again for murder; Rose of Sharon had a stillborn baby. The book shows sad political and societal background and injustice towards migrant farmers during the great depression through the Joad's family. Is the book just valuable because it contains the historic accounts of reality during the Great Depression? I do not love this book because it has the historic value to it, of which, however, I enjoyed. Nonetheless, I love this book because this book is all about hope. Through the story of the Joad family, I learned that I could hope no matter what situation in which I find myself, and I can always hope more. The ending of the book wherein the dying old man feeds on Rose of Sharon's breastmilk with her smiling is not "porny". Rather is it a “hopy”. The hope the family has been dragging on goes on and spreads onward. The book is 464 pages. Has the book been thicker and the story went on further, the family would have still had that hope which helped them to continue on. Maybe that's the same hope as the hope that the poor were able to survive with during the Great Depression in real life, and the author just wanted to capture that in his book.

This novel takes its place among the five finest novels I have ever read: the others being "Crossing to Safety"by Wallace Stegner, Tolstoy's "War and Peace", "Gilead" by Marilynne Robinson and Towles"A Gentleman in Moscow". It is shame that it was not until my 81st year that I picked it up. I was moved to do this by my recent reading and great admiration of Steinbeck's "East of Eden" and Steinbeck's letters which constitute a virtual biography of his life. Of all these five novels, however, "Grapes of Wrath" is the one that has most deeply penetrated my life. For many reasons. But above all because I came to know and feel the characters more intimately and viscerally and emotionally than inany other book I have ever read. I understand what Norman Mailer meant in writing of "Steinbeck's marvelous and ironic sense of compassion…daring all the time to go up to the very abyss of offering more feeling than the reader can accept." Again and again, that is how I felt, hanging on every word and phrase, wondering, worrying about what comes next. It did not happen by accident. Steinbeck records this in the midst of writing the book: "Yesterday it seemed to me that the people were coming to life. I hope so. These people must be intensely alive the whole time". The whole time. Exactly. No false notes.Through detailed depiction of the environment, layer upon layer, in cinema-like detail, through the development of the looks, gestures and clothes of every character and through dialogue, authentic and colloquial, matched to the individual, I am PRESENT. I am THERE. Steinbeck greatly respects his theme, the magnitude of the undertaking: "I went over the whole of the book in my head—fixed on the last scene, huge and symbolic (and I would add brave and unexpected), toward which the whole story moves. And that was a good thing, for it was a re-understanding of the dignity of the effort and mightiness of the theme. I feel very small and inadequate and incapable but I grew again to love the story which is so much greater than I am. To love and admire the people who are so much stronger and purer and braver than I am." Such humility combined with reverence and ambition and incredibly hard work—the sources of greatness. Like many, I resonate to this story today because it presents vividly what immigrants fleeing violence and life-threatening poverty face today. And the homeless too. It dramatizes how many will take advantage of them, some will castigate them as being dirty and threatening and dangerous, and a few generous souls will step forward as Good Saviors to try to help them on their journey. For me, this story cries out for individual and collective action today. We need the equivalent of "Grapes of Wrath" today to reveal viscerally and authentically the challenge that hundreds of thousands of threatened women, men and children face today as they seek safety and freedom for their families. In the broadest sense, this novel presents the urgent need for social justice, understanding and compassion so needed in our world today. As one commentator observed, it is also at once an elegy and a challenge to live in harmony with the earth. Hope and valor present themselves repeatedly in this magnificent novel, but never, ever at the expense of recognizing the raw often brutal challenge of life. The ex-preacher Casy captures this combination of challenge and hope as he describes how a friend looks back on being violently jailed by vigilantes because he had tried to setup a union among exploited workers. "Anyways, you do what you can. The only thing you got to look at is that every time there is a little step forward, she may slip back a little, but she never slips clear back. You can prove that and that makes the whole thing right. And that means they wasn't no waste even it seemed like they was." No matter what, we must continue on. Recalling one of my favorite texts the Talmud: "You are not required to complete the work, but nether are you free to desist from it." Steinbeck honors the uniqueness and complexity of every individual's life but also the strength to be drawn in being part of something bigger than oneself, ones family above all and the whole of humanity beyond. It is a noble calling. One worthy of our best effort.

"What some people find in religion a writer may find in his craft...a kind of breaking through to glory." —John Steinbeck, in an interview from 1965 Winner of the 1940 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, Steinbeck's powerful ode to the working poor is mandatory reading. The reader is given a front seat to the plight of migrant workers during the Dirty Thirties, a time when drought and famine displaced thousands of families and pushed even the most virtuous to the extremes of their humanity. Starting in the summer of 1930, weather conditions changed for the worse across the Great Plains—a region occupying the middle expanse of the contiguous U.S. marked by flat, relatively arid farmland and temperate climate. Rainfall hit record lows, with the growing season gains in the climatically favorable 1920s insufficient to offset the rapidly swelling shortfall. When drought eventually set in, the windswept grasslands eroded and the topsoil moldered into thin films of dust. As one of the windiest regions of the country, high-energy winds swept across the Plains, lifting the dusty particulate matter and carrying it as far east as New York City and Washington, D.C. With the breadbasket desiccated and an already depressed economy exacerbated, more than three million Great Plains natives vacated west in search of work and better conditions. It's a story that couldn't have waited any longer to be told. Initially working as a reporter on the abject conditions ripping through the American heartland, Steinbeck quickly became verklempt over the millions of Midwestern vagabonds forced out by the Dust Bowl. During multiple stints in the 1930s he witnessed the hardship firsthand in Visalia and Nipomo, where some five thousand able-bodied families, many from Oklahoma, were "not just hungry, but starving to death." Drawing on notes borrowed from the Farm Security Administration, Steinbeck recounts how government assistance was forestalled all down the line by oligarchic interests, in which the feudal-like dispositions of wealthy landowners and corporate farmers reigned wickedly over the lives of millions and ensured the deplorable conditions continued unabated. The sting to his conscience over the crisis out West grew so sharp that The Grapes of Wrath burst from Steinbeck's pen in a mere 100 days. It was the culmination of many years of anger, unrest and passive advocacy, a literary opus that sought to throw light on the scourge of social inequality the way that Uncle Tom's Cabin paved the way for abolition. Yet Steinbeck's novel is not a classic solely for its uncompromising portrayal of the era, but for its indefatigable cast that sets down roots in the reader's mind. The close-knit Joads are a microcosm of the tumult that swept the agricultural belt during the Great Depression, and they come across vibrantly as their sense of dignity, pride and sanity is tested at every turn. This is an unhappy novel with an unhappy ending that all but forces you to admire the unflagging resolve and indomitable spirit of the harried families that trudged across state borders in search of the most basic means of survival. As an embattled generation charges through fantastic adversity, Steinbeck's dramatis personae stand out as inspiration for us all. Some have faulted the lyrical structure of the book, which alternates between narrative and meta-exposition, as amounting to tedious filler and interrupting the flow of the story. But this is much more than just a story; operating here are themes of history, of politics, of social structure and of human nature. The symbology of the chapters intervening the Joad plight serves as a means of expressing a national-historical mood through metaphor and helps ground the narrative in its larger context. In Steinbeck's hands it is an effective tool for digging through to these more open-ended themes and passing them down through the coffers of history. For newcomers as well as repeat readers I recommend the Penguin Books edition for its scholarly introduction by Robert DeMott. You'll get a lot of interesting foreground on Steinbeck and the series of events that compelled him to lend a voice to this memorable era in American history.

This has always been one of my favorite books. This is my 2nd time reading it. I feel like I’m in the book and put myself back during the Great Depression.

John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath is a towering tale of human endurance, etched in prose that sings with both grit and grace. The story sweeps across a battered America, where families chase fragile dreams against a backdrop of dust and despair. Its scope is undeniably epic, painting a vast canvas of struggle that feels as boundless as the highways it follows. Steinbeck’s characters—raw, flawed, and fiercely real—anchor this grandeur, their hearts laid bare in moments of quiet resolve and unspoken pain. As one voice in the novel declares, “How can you frighten a man whose hunger is not only in his own cramped stomach, but in the wretched bellies of his children? You can’t scare him—he has known a fear beyond every other.” This fierce spirit drives the narrative, making every step a testament to human will. Steinbeck’s writing is a marvel—simple yet profound, with descriptions so vivid you can taste the dust and feel the weight of a family’s burdens. His alternating structure, weaving intimate family drama with broader societal insights, is masterful, offering a lens into the systemic injustices that haunt the story. “There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation,” Steinbeck writes, capturing the sorrow of a world where “children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange.” This unflinching look at social wrongs, paired with the emotional depth of family ties, creates a story that’s both personal and universal, resonating with readers who crave deep characters and grand stakes. Yet the novel’s relentless sadness can weigh heavily. The opening hundred pages unfold slowly, demanding patience as the journey takes shape. For some, the lack of clear redemption—hoped-for moments of stability or renewal that never fully arrive—may leave the heart aching. The story’s sorrows, while purposeful, rarely lift, and certain character arcs, like those seeking faith or security, remain unresolved, which might frustrate readers yearning for brighter closure. Still, Steinbeck ensures the hardship carries meaning, culminating in an ending that channels inspiration through shared humanity. As he writes, “In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage,” a line that evokes the simmering strength born from collective struggle. Overall, The Grapes of Wrath leaves you moved, if not uplifted, its emotional weight lingering like dust on the tongue. It’s a story that doesn’t shy from life’s harsh edges but finds beauty in resilience and connection. For those drawn to epic narratives and characters who feel like kin, this novel is a powerful, if somber, triumph.

The Grapes of Wrath is so profound, so moving and so forever a source of debate and controversy that one may forget that it is first a great story. It gives voice to a people suffering badly and it portrays them as they surely would like to be seen - as honorable decent people trying to make their way against the forces of nature, man and economics. John Steinbeck masterfully interweaves the struggling of one family into the great calamity of the dust bowl that brought out the worst in some people and best in others as millions deal with poverty and dislocation. You could argue that he idealized the virtuous indigent and vilified the wealthy as cruel and callous but much of what he wrote came of direct observation and much of what occurred in fiction happened in fact. When the pie from which we all feed from shrinks the fight for what remains is dirty and there's a tendency for the empowered to leave the rest behind regardless of legitimacy. The Joad family have lost their farm in Oklahoma and they are joining the great migration to California and the promise of jobs and opportunity. They are a healthy close-knit family that care and look out for each other. The strain of homelessness and uncertainty pays a heavy price which is at the root of the book's story. It would be a hard man not to feel empathy for them and the millions like them. Steinbeck wrote the book in 1938-39. He is staring right into the abyss of the Depression. You can feel the immediacy still. His writing is beautiful as his characters take life and the scenes are clear. When you read one of the most famous books in American literature do you try to ignore the hype and just read the book? There is so much going on here. Is he arguing for bigger government? Is he anti-capitalist or perhaps supporting communism? My conclusion is he saying "look - people are suffering. We Americans have a collective responsibility to each other." I did not see this as philosophy or a soapbox polemic against anything other than the breakdown in respect for human potential. It is a book that is supposed to raise your empathy and recognize the wasted potential of so many. That the book is still popular and evoking passions 70 years later is a good thing. I wonder if our legislators in Arizona or Alabama recognize their own actions as creating another generation of homeless, dispossessed immigrants who are fleeing their homes, jobs and schools. What are the costs for these broken families that will no doubt slip into poverty similar to the Joads? I hope there's a Grapes of Wrath being written now to give voice to them

A magnificent saga of a family during the Depression years. I have to say that it is one of the best books I have ever read.

Basic Amazon print, the pixels of the cover art are visible because it is just copy pasted......

A experiência de leitura nessa edição é demais, começando pela introdução maravilhosa do Robert Demmot, um estudioso da obra de Steinbeck, que também é responsável pelas notas. O prefácio traz a contextualização e os desdobramentos do impacto da obra na história norte-americana, além de uma análise do autor, de suas obras e muitas dicas sobre filmes, documentários, músicas (há uma canção do Bon Dylan para um dos personagens) e até de uma paródia da revista Mad. Robert Demmot também é responsável pelas notas de rodapé, que são bem importantes nessa obra, pois há bastante gíria e o autor utiliza a forma coloquial da fala da região em sua escrita.

The Grapes of Wrath is a powerful novel that combines a family saga with sweeping social critique. It is a vivid depiction of the 1930's, but it also has a timeless urgency. It has very strong themes around ethics, justice and resilience. The characters are memorable. Steinbeck's style is distinctive. He alternates between intimate plot-driven realism and omniscient chapters. It is a historical document, but has a timeless moral argument that still resonates. Steinbeck’s novel is a moral argument for the ethical responsibilities of community.

Riletto in lingua originale dopo che non ero riuscito a finirlo quasi 60 anni fa in versione tradotta. La storia di disperazione e speranza di questa famiglia che va a Ovest oggi è tragicamente attuale vedendo un intero continente che cerca un futuro a Nord. Si fa fatica a finirlo, la disperazione non finisce mai. Poi il colpo di genio, nelle ultime righe. Da leggere, come tutti i libri di Steinbeck, d'altra parte.

When Tom Joad returns to his parents' farm after serving a prison sentence for murder, he finds it deserted. In the four years he has been gone, the land has turned to dust through a combination of drought and poor farming practices. The onset of the Great Depression has meant that the banks have taken over ownership of vast tracts of the land and, in pursuit of profit, are expelling the small tenant farmers to create massive one-crop farms, worked by machines rather than men. Driven by poverty and lack of work, many of the farmers are uprooting their families to go to California, their own promised land, where, they are told, the country is filled with fruit ripe for picking, and there is work for all. Tom and his family join the exodus. First published in 1939, this is a fairly contemporaneous account of the devastation wrought on Oklahoma farming communities during the Depression, and Steinbeck's anger and disgust come through loudly in the power of his prose. A starkly political novel, it's interesting that there is little or no reference to either the politicians or policies of the period. This adds to the feeling of the farmers being isolated, abandoned by their nation and utterly reliant on their own limited resources. It falls somewhere between a call to arms for the poor to unite to overthrow the forces of capitalism, and a warning to the powers that be that the result of driving people to the limits of desperation might be just such an outcome. I didn't know Steinbeck's own political stance before reading the book, but was unsurprised to read later that at this period he was involved in the Communist movement within the US. It's undoubtedly one of the most powerful books I've read and it has left me with many indelible images. The writing is never less than excellent and is sometimes stunning, while the characterisation and brilliant use of dialect make the Joad family and the people they meet on their journey completely real. The story is a simple one, of man's inhumanity to man - a story that has been told often, but rarely with such concentration and power. But it's several weeks since I finished reading the book and I still haven't quite decided what I think of it. On the one hand, most of the first half of the book drags terribly as Steinbeck tells the story of the journey in minute, endless detail. I feel I could now get a job as a car mechanic working on 1930s models. I get the importance of the car to these families, but I don't care whether bronze wire will wear away as the widget rubs against the doodah - I truly don't. But the tedium and repetitiveness of parts of the book didn't bother me as much as the heavy-handed and unnecessary polemical interludes, where Steinbeck spells out his message in case the reader has been too stupid to understand it. I'm guessing any reader who doesn't `get' it, will have given up the book long before Steinbeck gets to the political pamphlet chapters. Occasionally it stops feeling like a novel at all and becomes almost like a ranty student essay on the evils of capitalism. If he explained the process of supply and demand once, he must have explained it a hundred times - ironic really, since it is surely only needed once, if at all. And the constant misery! Again, yes, absolutely - the story is appalling, more so for being true, and of course we need to see the horrible impact of absolute poverty on people's lives and humanity. But when authors feel they have to top up the human misery with the old `dead dog' technique, I fear they cross the line between emotional truth and emotional trickery. Of Mice and Men was the book that taught me how easily pathos can turn into bathos, and decades later I feel exactly the same about this one. And then there's the ending... but we'll come to that... On the other hand, the story is an important one that is as relevant today, sadly, as at the time of writing. Whether one agrees or not with Steinbeck's call of Workers Unite! and class struggle as the solution to poverty and ongoing waves of mass migration, whether one believes that capitalism or socialism is the system most likely to bring a more fair and just society in the end, the vivid picture that he draws of humanity's imperative struggle for survival in even the most hopeless of circumstances cannot fail to move and must surely stir the consciences of those of us whose present comfort depends on the poverty of others. I found myself drawing parallels with the current influx of people from Africa and Asia into Europe, and the issues surrounding illegal immigration in the US. But more than that, I discovered I was making comparisons to slavery and reflecting that at least under that repellent system, the owners felt that they had to protect their 'investment', whereas these people belonged to no-one, had no intrinsic 'economic value' and were thus ultimately even more dispensable. An uncomfortable train of thought and a tribute to Steinbeck's anger that he made me think it against everything I believe. Sometimes the quality of the writing takes the book almost to the sublime. From the first chapter, with the unforgettable images of the windstorm and the dust and the dying corn, with the women watching to see if their men will break, he makes the land a character in its own right, as important as any Joad, and its death as moving as one of theirs. The story of the turtle's indomitable spirit as it unwittingly spreads the seed that will allow nature to have its rebirth is one of the most beautiful pieces of writing I have read. While I was never quite sure what message he was attempting to send with the biblical themes, they added a sense of eternality, of inevitability, to the struggle for a more just society. The sheer power and anger of the 'Moses' scene will stay with me forever, as will that ending - which I hated even while I recognised the force of its essential truthfulness, and which left me as angry about humanity being reduced to this as Steinbeck could possibly have desired. And just as angry about the emotional manipulation he used to achieve that effect. Not a book that I can say I wholeheartedly enjoyed, but one that I am glad to have read and will not forget. 4½ stars for me, so rounded up.