Just some rambling thoughts about The Grapes of Wrath, which I just recently read for the first time.
My first ramble is why did it take me so long to get around to reading this book?
If you read much you know that certain books stay with you more than others. For me, such books are Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert, Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut, Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad, Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, several of Jack London’s books and Shelby Foote’s Civil War trilogy to just name a few. This book will join that list. It is a powerful novel not easily forgotten.
This quote from Wikipedia gives an idea of the impact of the book at the time of its first publication:
“At the time of publication, Steinbeck’s novel “was a phenomenon on the scale of a national event. It was publicly banned and burned by citizens, it was debated on national talk radio; but above all, it was read.” According to The New York Times, it was the best-selling book of 1939 and 430,000 copies had been printed by February 1940. In that month it won the National Book Award, favorite fiction book of 1939, voted by members of the American Booksellers Association. Soon it won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. “
It is the main reason John Steinbeck was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962
The basic theme is the following of one family of Okies, the Joads, who were pushed off their land in the Dust Bowl days. They travel to California thinking it the Promised Land where all their troubles would be resolved. However, when they arrive there, they find hatred, oppression and exploitation. On the way out the grandparents die. In California the family begins to fall apart and their plight becomes even more desperate.
Perhaps one reason the book affected me so deeply is because I am an Okie by birth. My great grandparents sharecropped around Sallisaw where the fictional Joads were from. My grandparents left the mountains of Arkansas for the better opportunity of sharecropping in eastern Oklahoma! My grandparents sharecropped just a little west of Sallisaw in the Great Depression. So many of the place names mentioned in the first part of the book are very familiar to me.
This book does not have a happy ending, but it does tell a tale that affected hundreds of thousands of rural Americans displaced from the land by economic, financial and climatic changes. The sad part is that the themes that Steinbeck explored are still in play today, and are repetitions of many historical upheavals.
As I read about the displaced Okies I could not but relate their economic migration to that of Mexicans and Central Americans crossing our southern border. They are fleeing poverty; many endure horrendous, dangerous trips to come to this country. When they get here they are frequently exploited economically and forced to live in substandard conditions. I am sure analogies can be drawn about the migration into Europe of peoples from northern Africa and the Middle East.
One of the constant themes in the book was denigration of human beings based on the profit motive. In the book it was banks, land companies, and “eastern interests” bent on turning a profit that pushed all the little farmers off the land. It was these same forces that continued their economic abuse once they were in California. There are so many of examples of corporate greed and shenanigans running the common man through the corporate profit chipper that I could go on for pages. Think about the financial crisis of 2008 if nothing else. It was huge corporations focusing on profit over any ethical consideration that nearly drove this country into another depression.
While the wealth gap was not as huge in the late 1930s as it is now, it existed. There were definitely have and have nots. The “haves” were focusing on keeping what they had and adding to it even at the cost of exploiting the “have nots”. Today we have the one percent with a feeling of wealth entitlement and resentment of contributing to community wealth via taxes.
Another theme throughout the book was religion, particularly fundamentalist religion, and their power over people, especially uneducated folks. There is Rosasharn becoming convinced she was going to have a bad outcome to her pregnancy because a Jehovah Witness told her it was a sin to hug dance. There is the whole religious establishment pushing poor people to focus on happiness in the afterlife rather than this life. There is a global resurgence of fundamentalist religions pushing these themes.
Sometimes I think we are getting better as a race or a culture, but generally we just keep repeating the same old stories over and over. If you read this book with an eye for parallel themes you may well come to the same conclusion.
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Adapted as movie in 1940 with Henry Fonda as Tom Joad. The movie won two Academy Awards.