The Grapes of Wrath

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The Grapes of Wrath

John Steinbeck

Literature

Jul 31, 2018

Published in March 1939, Steinbeck’s saga of the havoc wreaked by the Great Depression was soon the country’s number one bestseller, selling thousands of copies each week despite the difficult economic times. At the same time, communities from coast to coast found it obscene and banned (and even burned) it. The author’s portrait of the poverty suffered by members of the Joad family, the Oklahoma sharecroppers the novel follows from the Dust Bowl to California’s Salinas Valley, made the book politically suspect as well—its obvious sympathy for the victims of economic devastation called into question the virtues and verities of American capitalism. The Joads are a hard, funny, tenacious, colorful bunch, but the road they travel is strewn with death, hunger, social unrest, violence, and misfortune of every stripe. Still, the family endures, with a dignity distilled from survival, stripped of all material comfort or social adornment. Modern literature had no champion of that dignity more steadfast than John Steinbeck, and The Grapes of Wrath is his masterpiece.

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