Revisit The Grapes of Wrath

Given the economic times , the worst since the great depression

you will feel better about things if you revisit Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck.

In 1936, John Steinbeck conducted research on the groupings of farmers who had traveled to California from Arkansas and Oklahoma; in 1937, he toured the Dust Bowl and traveled with migrants on their continual drive to California. From those experiences he wrote The Grapes of Wrath.

Plot Summary

The novel’s most the plight of the Joad kinsfolk as hardship befalls them. The novel opens with the kinsfolk being evicted from their farm in Oklahoma. Banks are eating up the kinsfolk farms, and the bankrupt farmers are being replaced by mechanization. Instead of a kinsfolk farming a small amount of cash crop to feed their kinsfolk and delude to live on, the banks want cotton grown with tractors. The cotton will bring in a much larger profit than the small families can. With no prospects in Oklahoma, some families have decided to leave the land that they have lived on for generations for the promised riches of California. Why do they think Calif.will bring them riches? Simply, because they have all seen copies of the same handbill promising broad wages for fruit pickers. Thousands of families have seen these promises and are undertaking the journey. The naïve farmers believe the handbills, and place a broad importance on the cost it must cost to produce a handbill to validate its truthfulness.

  Of course there are not broad paying jobs for migrant workers in California. The enticing advertisements for broad paying wages are a ploy to pull in more workers than the landowners need. By increasing the supply of workers the wages go down—starving families needing impact will underbid each other just in order to make a small amount of money to feed them. Besides having little prospects for impact in California, the gypsy farmers meet with growing anger from the native workers.

Theme. The novel is realistic. With the Joads as they travel, we meet the dark underside of capitalism with its unending poverty, its inhumane greed and manlike cost, and sense a broken trust between polity and people. The underside contains injured characters: the despairing Muley Graves, the strange Noah and the obsessed Uncle John, a one-eyed man self-pitying his condition, the exemplary Mae serving in a Highway 66 cafe and the hell-bent vigilantes and deputies.

Main character Tom Joad:

The following sums up what Tom Joad learned and knew at the end of the novel.

“I'll be aroun' in the dark. I'll be everywhere-wherever you look. Wherever there is a fight so hungry people can eat, I'll be there. Wherever there is a cop beatin' up a guy, I'll be there..." Tom Joad

 He begins the new as a rough and thickened ex con who's hell-bent on heading home and relaxing at the kinsfolk farm for a while. When he realizes that times more desparate than ever., Tom doesn't run away. He doesn't sit back and let someone added make every of the decisions. He takes the lead. He helps usher his kinsfolk across the country. Tom is a leader.He learns in the end that a leader must seek justice for those treated unjustly.

At the end of the novel Tom's emotion drives him to fight not only for himself but for all the oppressed. It is righteous anger, motivated by a desire to see all groupings treated evenhandedly and with dignity, He attitude is to the unrighteous emotion of land owners who see the migrant workers as threats to their own richness and prosperity.