The Grapes of Wrath

ByJohn Steinbeck

enotes.com. The Grapes of Wrath. Summary and Study Guide, enotes.com, Inc., n.d. Web. 21 Feb. 2010.

Introduction• Written during the Great Depression and about it• Everywhere people lost their savings, homes, and

means of earning a living.• Especially hard hit were the farming areas of the

Midwest.• Poor farming practices had depleted the soil, and it

became less capable of supporting the individual families who farmed their small sections of it.

• Agriculture changed drastically because markets and prices for crops declined.

• Small farms were consolidated into larger, and more profitable units.

• Tractors, other machines, and day laborers replaced mules and family labor.

• Independent farm life, which had developed the area and dominated it during the 1800s, dwindled.

• In the mid-1930s there were severe droughts and erosion of the dry soil by strong winds.

• This created a “Dust Bowl” in the states of Oklahoma, Texas, Kansas, and Colorado.

• The small farmers, now tenants and sharecroppers, were uprooted from the homes and farms which had belonged to their families for many years.

• By the tens of thousands these victims of depression, drought, and dust headed west to seek a better life in the fertile fields of California.

• They found themselves as much victims there.

• Work was scarce, wages were low, and they were resented, resisted, and repressed by the residents.

• Their attempts to better their lives were branded as Communism, a system much disliked and feared by many Americans of the time.

• Reaction to The Grapes of Wrath was immediate, and ran to extremes of praise and condemnation.

• The novel strongly exposed social injustice and called for social redress; but many people denounced it as Communist propaganda.

• People in California and Oklahoma charged it was full of exaggerated lies about the conditions and treatment of the migrants in their respective states.

• A Congressman from Oklahoma denounced the book, on behalf of the people of his state, on the floor of the House of Representatives as “a dirty, lying, filthy manuscript-a lie, a damnable lie, a black, infernal creation of a twisted, distorted mind.”

• Copies of the book were symbolically burned in a town in Illinois by order of the Library Board.

• Ironically, the waiting list for the book at this library was longer than for any other book in history.

• The burning order came in the same week the book had its largest sales in seven months.

• The general public embraced The Grapes of Wrath.

• It became a best-seller shortly after publication and has been in print and widely read continuously since that time.

• The story was also made into a successful major motion picture starring Henry Fonda.

• A crowning accolade for the novel was the award of the 1940 Pulitzer Prize for fiction to Steinbeck.