The Grapes of Wrath

What The Grapes of Wrath is about

When drought, dust storms and the banks drive them off their Oklahoma farm during the Great Depression, the Joad family load everything they own onto an old truck and head west on Route 66 for California, where handbills promise work picking fruit. With them travel Tom Joad, just paroled from prison for killing a man in a fight, and Jim Casy, a former preacher who has lost his faith. The grandparents die on the road. In California they find hundreds of thousands of other migrants competing for too few jobs, starvation wages, hostile police, and growers who burn surplus crops rather than let hungry people eat them. Casy is killed organising a strike, Tom becomes a fugitive, and the novel ends in a flood with an image of human compassion that shocked many readers.

Steinbeck alternated the Joads' story with short chapters about the migration as a whole: the dust, the car salesmen, the road, the camps.

The ban, in full

Viking Press published the novel in April 1939, and it became the year's best-selling book. It also caused fury in the places it described. In August 1939 the Board of Supervisors of Kern County, California, where much of the second half takes place, voted to ban it from the county's schools and public libraries; large landowners and growers' associations said it libelled the county's farmers. The county librarian, Gretchen Knief, protested the ban. It was lifted in 1941. In Oklahoma, politicians denounced its portrayal of their state, and in November 1939 the public library in East St. Louis, Illinois, burned copies on the steps. The novel has also often been challenged in schools for its language and the ending.

About John Steinbeck

John Steinbeck (1902–1968) grew up in Salinas, California, and worked on ranches and farms as a young man. He researched The Grapes of Wrath by visiting migrant camps, including government camps, and wrote a series of newspaper articles about the migrants in 1936. His other books include Of Mice and Men, also often challenged, Cannery Row and East of Eden. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1962.

Which edition to read

Penguin publishes the standard text in the US and UK. Some editions include Steinbeck's 1936 articles about the migrants, published as The Harvest Gypsies.

Reception and legacy

The novel won the 1940 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. John Ford's 1940 film, starring Henry Fonda as Tom Joad, was released less than a year after the book. Woody Guthrie wrote "The Ballad of Tom Joad" after seeing it.

Questions

Why was The Grapes of Wrath banned?

Kern County officials and growers said it was obscene and libelled local farmers; others objected to its language and its sympathy for labour organising.

Is it still banned?

No; Kern County lifted its ban in 1941. More: books banned in the United States.