The story begins with the Joads getting ready to leave their farm, which has been repossessed by the bank because the Joads have been unable to plant anything in the dusty soil. Steinbeck portrays the banks as greedy monstrosities: "They breathe profits; they eat the interest on money" (Steinbeck 32)
Steinbeck was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962, with The Grapes of Wrath singled out for special mention by the Nobel Committee. John Steinbeck died on December 20, 1968. (Covici, pp
Clearly, the novel has stood the test of time, but it is also an experimental and at times eccentric work. Most unusual and unique is Steinbeck's insertion, in the otherwise linear text, of the sixteen relatively short, generalized "intercalary chapters," as Steinbeck himself called them (Owens, 28), not about the Joads in particular, but about the entire phenomenon of displacement and westward movement of migrant farm workers in general
It settled on the corn, piled up on the tops of fence posts, piled up on the wires; it settled on roofs, blanketed the weeds and trees. (Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath, p
He recognizes that love is at the root of all his actions, but he fails to recognize that he is fundamentally torn between love of self and love of God. It was 4th century philosopher and theologian Augustine who taught that all actions were founded in love, that all love was essentially rooted in God, but that sin was misplaced love -- love that was directed not toward God and motivated by His will but rather toward some other end and motivated by selfishness and a will contrary to God's (Jones 17)
They are the socially marginal characters of a self-satisfying culture. They are the ones Steinbeck admires in his novel for they are the ones who "wander through the wilderness of hardships, seeking their own Promised Land" (Shockley 87)
There's just stuff people do. it's all part of the same thing" (Steinbeck 23)
This was detailed in the story when the Joads first arrived in California and were astonished to discover that it was not a nice place to live; while the landscape may have been nice, they found that migrants were not entitled to any of it. (Steinbeck 139) Steinbeck's experiences touring these camps were put down in words as the tale of Tom Joad, who upon his release from prison found his family the victims of an economic disaster
In researching this novel Steinbeck toured many migrant labor camps and "saw firsthand the destitution of migrant families in government camps and spontaneous Hoovervilles." (Railsback, 2006, p
"Okies" were thought of as "invaders" by the local Californians who claimed that "they bring disease, they're filthy. We can't have them in the schools." (Steinbeck, 1939, p
But was Steinbeck accurate in his portrayal of "Oakie" life? In a 2002 article Keith Windschuttle presented a series of demographic statistics and census data which he claimed supported his assertion that the numbers of people characterized as "Okies" were far fewer than Steinbeck presented in his novel. (Windschuttle, 2002) While it is difficult to argue with hard facts, Steinbeck's point in writing the Grapes of Wrath was not to make claims about the numbers of people harmed, but to present a social problem in terms of the story of an individual family
Well, sir, you may get a laugh outa this -- I'll take a Buick-Puick. That's good enough. (Steinbeck, 1939, p
If this is true, it means that in order to survive, in order for the soul to live, everyone must look after each other rather than just after himself. This is what Eric Carlson argues in his essay on the novel: "kindness breeds kindess" in the "naturalistic and humanistic" world that Steinbeck has created (Carlson 172)
But that journey is accompanied by an ever-present danger -- the danger of starvation. As Steinbeck himself noted when researching the lives of the migrant laborers, his characters are based on real people who "move, frantically, with starvation close behind them" (Demott xxxv)
The novel itself is an enormous work of approximately 500 pages. And in the words of Howard Levant, it is "an attempted prose epic, a summation of national experience of genre" (Levant 91)
The epic theme or nature of the novel focuses on finding this "cure." Casy hits upon the cure early on when he talks to Tom and tells him that maybe all men share one big soul (Steinbeck 23)
In fact, Shiva, decades after The Grapes of Wrath, describes similar goals of the feminine principle: It is simultaneously an ecological and a feminist political project which legitimizes the way of knowing and being that create wealth by enhancing life and diversity, and which delegitimizes the knowledge and practice of a culture of death as the basis for capital accumulation." (Allen, cited Shiva, 2001) Unfortunately, perhaps Steinbeck's espousing of the feminine principle has led some universities in today's politically correct society to believe that The Grapes of Wrath is not a text that will appeal to contemporary students: "Feminists
He is preceded by a bevy of women writers from the Romantic period, who inspired by Wollstonecraft's Vindication, held up the benefits of a revolution in female manners. Indeed, Mellor locates Mary Shelley, along with such writers as Jane Austen, Maria Edgeworth, Charlotte Smith, Susan Ferrier, Helen Maria Williams, and Felicia Hemans, in the context of a set of values that emphasizes the rationality of women, celebrates community, conceives of nature as an ally, and espouses an ethic of care rather than an ethic of individual justice (Fisch et
¶ … Grapes of Wrath Human society, by and large, was historically organized on patriarchal lines till the feminist movement picked up real momentum in the twentieth century. In America, for instance, women were given the right to vote only in the 1920s, post the suffrage movement (Johnston, p
In Ma, then, is the paradigm of Lao Tze's balanced man -- the one who sees and copes with the paradoxical nature of yin and yang, of strength residing in apparent weakness." (Meyer, p