The Grapes of Wrath

Steinbeck’s classic account of dispossessed migrant labour in the 1930s summed up its era in the way that Uncle Tom’s Cabin had summed up the years of slavery before the Civil War. Although it follows the movement of thousands of men and women and the transformation of an entire nation, The Grapes of Wrath is also the story of one Oklahoma farm family, the Joads, who are driven off their homestead and forced to travel west to the promised land of California. Out of the harrowing saga of their struggle for survival, Steinbeck created a drama that is intensely human yet majestic in its scale and moral vision, elemental yet plainspoken, tragic but ultimately stirring in its insistence on human dignity.