The Grapes of Wrath

John Steinbeck

Mar 2006 · Penguin

About this ebook

The Pulitzer Prize-winning epic of the Great Depression, a book that galvanized—and sometimes outraged—millions of readers.

One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years

First published in 1939, Steinbeck’s Pulitzer Prize-winning epic of the Great Depression chronicles the Dust Bowl migration of the 1930s and tells the story of one Oklahoma farm family, the Joads—driven from their homestead and forced to travel west to the promised land of California. Out of their trials and their repeated collisions against the hard realities of an America divided into Haves and Have-Nots evolves a drama that is intensely human yet majestic in its scale and moral vision, elemental yet plainspoken, tragic but ultimately stirring in its human dignity. A portrait of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless, of one man’s fierce reaction to injustice, and of one woman’s stoical strength, the novel captures the horrors of the Great Depression and probes into the very nature of equality and justice in America. At once a naturalistic epic, captivity narrative, road novel, and transcendental gospel, Steinbeck’s powerful landmark novel is perhaps the most American of American Classics.

This Centennial edition, specially designed to commemorate one hundred years of Steinbeck, features french flaps and deckle-edged pages.

For more than sixty-five years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,500 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Ratings and reviews

I am not an economist so I am not even going to try to understand the economic mess were are in as a nation - but I cannot help but think about The Grapes of Wrath and the odyssey of the Joad family when I think about our current financial times. Massive debt. Budget shortages. Home foreclosures. Business failures. Bankruptcies. Job losses. In some ways I feel that we are all (well many of us) Joad's now - trapped in a financial system that we do not understand, trying to make a daily living, but always feeling that we are taking one step up and two back. My favorite scene in The Grapes of Wrath was early in the book, when a tenant farmer is trying to stop his home and land from being plowed over by tractor-operator hired by the bank. This is a man he knows, a local, who has taken a job with the bank to gain a regular salary and some stability for his family. But, this stability comes with a huge price. His job is to repossess the land of his friends and neighbors and ready it to be turned over to the banks. How many of us would do the same? Life is a struggle and when money is tight we would do most anything to pay the bills and feed our own - but where do we draw the lines? The tenant wants to shoot him - but the man explains the truth - it's not him, not his fault - it's no one's fault - we are all ghosts in the money machine. This is a slice of that conversation: "It's not me. There's nothing I can do. I'll lose my job if I don't do it. And look -- suppose you kill me? They'll just hang you, but long before your hung there will be another guy on the tractor, and he'll bump the house down. You're not killing the right guy." "That's so," the tenant said. "Who gave you orders? I'll go after him. He's the one to kill." "You're wrong. He got his orders from the bank. The bank told them: "Clear those people out or it's your job." "Well, there's a president of the bank. There's a Board of Directors. I'll fill up the magazine of the rifle and go into the bank." The driver said: "Fellow was telling me the bank gets orders from the East. The orders were: "Make the land show profit or we'll close you up." "But where does it stop? Who can we shoot? I don't aim to starve to death before I kill the man that's starving me." "I don't know. Maybe there's nobody to shoot. Maybe the thing isn't man at all. Maybe, like you said, the property's doing it. Anyway I told you my orders." The financial machine we live inside often challenges our morality, our faith, our ethics in exchange for a paycheck. Think Glengarry Glen Ross, think sell or be fired, think it me or you and its not going to be me. So we take a nice long trip to Disney to forget all about it. Maybe we have a food drive at school - help the less fortunate. How are we supposed to live? Is this really it? Work your butt off, get as much as you can, hoard as much as you can - every man for himself. Really? The Joad's are not bums, not lazy, not moochers. They are simple folk who want to work - an honest days work for an honest days pay. But the fruit growers of this novel are the factories of Mexico, China, Vietnam, and every other "third world" country that produces our clothes, shoes, food and products. They are in a race to the bottom - pitted against one another for jobs - always pushed to do more for less. Why? So we can buy three dollar T-shirts at Wal-Mart. Don't get me wrong - I shop at Wal-Mart - we all do - we have to make our money stretch. We are all stuck. But can it change? As the tenant farmer went on to say: "I got to figure," the tenant said. "We all got to figure. There's some way to stop this. It's not like lightning or earthquakes. We've got a bad thing made by men, and by God that's something we can change." I think the beginning is within each of us - within me. We (I) made

Grapes of Wrath Steinbeck is one of my favorite authors. His style can be recognized throughout his writings. It is timeless, moving yet has an easy flow. The Grapes of Wrath is a story written in the depression era. This is a moving tale of a poor farming family who are getting kicked off their land. The characters and the story come to life with each word. This could easily be a true story of its time. It is a time in history we need to contain knowledge of. Though fictional, The Grapes of Wrath is a good choice for a history student to read as they turn the pages in their history book to The Great Depression. Many hard-working families suddenly became penniless, homeless and hopeless during this wretched era. The term “sharecroppers” was nearly said with a sneer.Many Americans were duped into traveling out west with promises, hope and dreams of a bountiful land filled with wealth and riches untold. Yet upon their arrival, they like all the other hundreds of starving families find themselves living in camps and begging for work on a day to day schedule. The people were treated as if they were a blemish on society because they were poor and hungry. This is a moving story and a

The Grapes of Wrath, a story that describes a family-in an effort to describe all the families- forced off their farm and looking to make ends meet elsewhere. John Steinbeck does a phenomenal job with his vivid descriptions that create the essence of the moment over a mere description. The book is not for ESL learners, however, as much of the book is meant to imitate sounds over words, scenery over voluminous description, and the words are hard to get unless one already has a good grasp of English language

About the author

John Steinbeck (1902–1968), born in Salinas, California, grew up in a fertile agricultural valley, about twenty-five miles from the Pacific Coast. Both the valley and the coast would serve as settings for some of his best fiction. In 1919 he went to Stanford University, where he intermittently enrolled in literature and writing courses until he left in 1925 without taking a degree. During the next five years he supported himself as a laborer and journalist in New York City, all the time working on his first novel, Cup of Gold (1929).
 
After marriage and a move to Pacific Grove, he published two California books, The Pastures of Heaven (1932) and To a God Unknown (1933), and worked on short stories later collected in The Long Valley (1938). Popular success and financial security came only with Tortilla Flat (1935), stories about Monterey’s paisanos. A ceaseless experimenter throughout his career, Steinbeck changed courses regularly. Three powerful novels of the late 1930s focused on the California laboring class: In Dubious Battle (1936), Of Mice and Men (1937), and the book considered by many his finest, The Grapes of Wrath (1939). The Grapes of Wrath won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize in 1939.
 
Early in the 1940s, Steinbeck became a filmmaker with The Forgotten Village (1941) and a serious student of marine biology with Sea of Cortez (1941). He devoted his services to the war, writing Bombs Away (1942) and the controversial play-novelette The Moon is Down (1942). Cannery Row (1945), The Wayward Bus (1948), another experimental drama, Burning Bright (1950), and The Log from the Sea of Cortez (1951) preceded publication of the monumental East of Eden (1952), an ambitious saga of the Salinas Valley and his own family’s history.
 
The last decades of his life were spent in New York City and Sag Harbor with his third wife, with whom he traveled widely. Later books include Sweet Thursday (1954), The Short Reign of Pippin IV: A Fabrication (1957), Once There Was a War (1958), The Winter of Our Discontent (1961), Travels with Charley in Search of America (1962), America and Americans (1966), and the posthumously published Journal of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters (1969), Viva Zapata! (1975), The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights (1976), and Working Days: The Journals of The Grapes of Wrath (1989).
 
Steinbeck received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1962, and, in 1964, he was presented with the United States Medal of Freedom by President Lyndon B. Johnson. Steinbeck died in New York. Today, more than thirty years after his death, he remains one of America’s greatest writers and cultural figures. 

Robert DeMott (editor/introduction) is the Edwin and Ruth Kennedy Distinguished Professor at Ohio State University and author of Steinbeck's Typewriter, an award-winning book of critical essays.