The Grapes Of Wrath

The Grapes of Wrath

John Steinbeck

In extreme detail, John Steinbeck illustrates the lives of ordinary people struggling to conserve their humanity in the face of social and economic desperation. When the Joads lose their tenant farm in Oklahoma, they join thousands of others, traveling the narrow concrete highways toward California and the dream of a piece of land to call their own again. Each night on the road, they and their fellow migrants recreate society: leaders are chosen, unspoken codes of privacy and generosity evolve. It is a portrait of the bitter conflict between the powerful and the powerless, one man's fierce reaction to injustice, and a woman's quiet, stoical strength. The Grapes of Wrath captures the horrors of the Great Depression as it probes into the very nature of equality and justice in USA.

John Ernst Steinbeck (February 27, 1902 Ð'- December 20, 1968) was born in Salinas, California, on February 27, 1902. He attended Stanford University without graduating, and though he lived briefly in New York, he remained a lifelong Californian. Steinbeck began writing novels in 1929, but he received little commercial or critical success until the publication of Tortilla Flat in 1935. Steinbeck frequently used his fiction to explore into the lives of society's most oppressed citizens. Steinbeck is one of the best known and most widely read American writers of the 20th century. A winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962, he is best known for his novella Of Mice and Men (1937) and his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Grapes of Wrath (1939), both of which examine the lives of the working class and the migrant worker during the Great Depression. Steinbeck situated struggling, disadvantaged people at the center of his stories. His characters and his stories drew on real historical conditions and events in the first half of the 20th century. Seventeen of his works, including Cannery Row (1945) and The Pearl (1947), went on to become Hollywood films, and Steinbeck himself achieved success as a Hollywood writer, garnering an Academy Award nomination for Best Writing for Alfred Hitchcock's Lifeboat, in 1945. John Steinbeck is known as a regionalist, naturalist, mystic, proletarian writer, moved to anger by the brutality of the Depression.

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Released from an Oklahoma state prison after serving four years for a manslaughter conviction, Tom Joad makes his way back to his family's farm in Oklahoma. He meets Jim Casy, a former preacher who has given up his position out of a belief that all life is holyÐ'--even the parts which are typically thought to be sinful. Casy accompanies Tom to his home, only to find it deserted. Muley Graves, a paranoid neighbor, wanders by and tells the men that everyone has been "tractored" off the land. Most families, he says, including his own, have headed to California to look for work. Tom and Jim set out for Tom's Uncle John's, where Muley assures them they will find the Joads. Upon arrival, Tom finds Ma and Pa Joad packing up the family's few possessions. Having seen handbills advertising fruit-picking jobs in California, they envision the trip to California as their only hope of getting their lives back on track. The journey