When Steinbeck witnessed the flooding and starvation at Visalia in February and March of , his attitude toward the workers' plight deepened drastically. It was no longer possible for him to record those experiences in a cool, journalistic manner, as he had done in "The Harvest Gypsies. At first it was blind anger in the case of "L'Affaire;" then, when that unbridled ferociousness seemed to trivialize both his talent and his subject, he called up in its place every ounce of moral indignation and compassion.
Thus, besides providing the setting for the final chapters of The Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck's wounding at Visalia opened the floodgates of his attention, created the compelling justification ot the novel, provided its haunting spiritual urgency, and rooted it in the Project MUSE promotes the creation and dissemination of essential humanities and social science resources through collaboration with libraries, publishers, and scholars worldwide.
Forged from a partnership between a university press and a library, Project MUSE is a trusted part of the academic and scholarly community it serves. The others, with Tom and the preacher, pack their belongings on the second-hand truck, set out for the new land, to start over again in California.
The journey across is done in superb style, one marvellous short story after another, and all melting into this long novel of the great trek.
The grandfather dies on the way, and then the grandmother. The son Noah stops at a river and decides to stay there. Without quite knowing it, he is the Thoreau in the family. A fine river, fish to catch and eat, the day and night to dream in: he wants nothing else.
The little children have their fun along the road; wise little brats, they are growing up, secret and knowing. Tom and his brother take turns driving the truck, easing her over the mountains, grinding her valves, scraping the plugs: they are the mechanics. The sister, Rosasharn, christened for Rose of Sharon, expects to have her baby. Her husband disappears, aims to better himself in his own selfish way. Those coming from California are going back to their native Oklahoma, Texas or Arkansas, to die starving in what had once been their homes, rather than die starving in a strange country.
Californians are not going to like this angry novel. The grain fields golden in the morning, and the willow lines, the eucalyptus trees in rows. Join our community of educators and receive the latest information on National Geographic's resources for you and your students. Skip to content. Twitter Facebook Pinterest Google Classroom. Article Vocabulary. In the novel , John Steinbeck follows the fiction al journey of the Joads, a family of sharecropper s from Sallisaw, Oklahoma, forced to migrate west during the Dust Bowl.
The Joads join thousands of other migrants on the trek to the Salinas Valley of California, a place they idealize as rich with opportunity. Both a human and an environmental disaster , the Dust Bowl was a prolonged series of dust storm s brought on by drought and erosion in the United States Great Plains region in the s.
Chad Kauffman, professor of earth sciences at California University of Pennsylvania, explains that drought was not the only factor at play, however. While the region saw less rainfall than usual in the s, it was really the modification s humans made to the landscape —particularly uprooting native grasses and exposing the virgin topsoil to the elements —that set the stage for the erosion that would follow. These tall grasses have a deeper root structure, and that root structure helps to fix the soil in-place, allowing it to take on the loam y texture that made the region attractive to agriculture.
Coupled with the effects of the Depression on the nation as a whole, many families in the region were devastate d, particularly those who relied on agriculture to make a living. For many, the only choice they had was to leave, and they found themselves on Route 66 headed to California.
Many of these families ended up in the Salinas Valley, where John Steinbeck was born, raised, and lived the majority of his life. Dust Bowl migration, the shaping of Californian identity , and human connection to the environment are all deeply personal topics for Steinbeck. Susan Shillinglaw is a Steinbeck scholar and the author of On Reading The Grapes of Wrath , which reflects on the social, political, and creative impact of The Grapes of Wrath from the time of its publication through to today.
How do you write about weather pattern s, drought, migration, and identity at once, as it is happening? Containing that contemporary story was a challenge … and one way that he met that challenge was to construct a family story that is punctuated by interchapters that tell a larger cultural and historical story.
He structured the book so that it moves from one family, to many families, to the human experience. During this time, a long period of drought and high winds affected large parts of the American Midwest, including much of the state of Oklahoma, creating what was called the Dust Bowl. Many of the people in the lower Midwest moved elsewhere, hoping to find fertile land on which to make a living. Tom Joad is the protagonist, or main character, of The Grapes of Wrath. Tom is the book's hero as well despite the fact that Tom attacks a policeman at one point in the novel and beats a man at another point, becoming a cave-dwelling fugitive as a result.
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