The Grapes of Wrath (1939) is two books printed alternately. One follows the Joad family from a foreclosed Oklahoma farm to the California valleys. The other has no characters in it at all and describes what is happening to several hundred thousand people at once. Steinbeck interleaves them, chapter by chapter, for thirty chapters. Readers who skip the second book, and many do, are reading something considerably smaller than what he wrote. Spoilers throughout, including the final page.
The Two Books Inside The Grapes of Wrath
The alternation in The Grapes of Wrath is almost mechanical, though not quite. Sixteen of the thirty chapters have no named characters in them at all; the remaining fourteen follow the Joads. The pattern runs odd and even for most of the book and doubles up twice, at chapters 11 and 12 and again at 14 and 15, both times to cover the move onto the highway. A chapter follows the Joads; the next pulls back to a used-car lot where nobody is named, or a diner on the highway, or a tractor driver turning a family off land his own grandfather farmed. Then back to the Joads.
These general chapters are usually called interchapters or intercalary chapters, and they do work the narrative cannot. The Joads are one family. If the novel consisted only of their journey, every misfortune would read as bad luck particular to them. The interchapters remove that defence. The reader learns about the handbills printed in their thousands to draw more workers west than there are jobs, and then watches the Joads answer one. The general case is established first, and the family is then shown falling into it.
It is a propagandist’s structure, and Steinbeck knew it. He was not writing a neutral book. What saves it from being a pamphlet is that the Joad chapters are allowed to complicate the argument rather than illustrate it.
The Turtle in Chapter Three
The clearest demonstration of the method in The Grapes of Wrath is three pages long and contains nothing but a reptile.
A land turtle crosses a road. It drags its shell up the embankment, carrying a head of wild oats caught in its front legs. A woman swerves to avoid it. A man in a light truck deliberately swerves to hit it, clips the shell, and spins it off the shoulder into the dust, on its back. The turtle rights itself, crawls on, and the oat seeds it was carrying fall into the earth it has just scraped open.
Nothing in the chapter refers to the Joads. Everything in it describes them. The dogged forward motion, the shell that takes the blow, the driver who hurts it for sport, and most of all the seed carried accidentally and planted by the act of being knocked over. Steinbeck describes the creature “turning aside for nothing” and leaves the connection entirely to the reader.
Tom picks the same turtle up two chapters later and carries it in his coat; later still he lets it go and it heads southwest, the direction the family is travelling. Steinbeck does not say so.
This is the technique the whole novel runs on, and it is worth naming because it is easy to miss under the book’s reputation for shouting. Steinbeck is frequently accused of hammering his politics, and in the weaker interchapters he does. But the turtle chapter is the opposite of hammering. It is an image offered without a gloss, trusting the reader to carry it forward three hundred pages. When people say the novel is heavy-handed they are usually thinking of chapter 19 and forgetting chapter 3.
Route 66 and the Shape of the Journey
Chapter 12 of The Grapes of Wrath does something unusual: it is largely a list of place names. The road runs from the Mississippi to Bakersfield, and the chapter recites the towns along it, Oklahoma City, El Reno, Clinton, Hydro, Elk City, Texola, and then announces an end to Oklahoma.
“66 is the mother road, the road of flight.” The litany of names does something a description could not. It makes the distance felt as duration, and it establishes that this is not one family’s trip but a migration using a single artery.
The journey also functions as the novel’s attrition counter. Grampa dies before the family is out of Oklahoma and is buried in a field with a note in a jar. Granma dies crossing the desert and Ma lies beside the body all night without telling anyone, so the truck will not stop. Noah walks away down a river. Connie disappears. Casy is arrested, released, and killed with a pick handle. By California the twelve who set out are substantially fewer, and the book never pauses to mark it.
How The Grapes of Wrath Earns Its Title
The phrase arrives in chapter 25, and it arrives as an argument rather than an image. Steinbeck describes fruit deliberately destroyed to hold prices up: oranges sprayed with kerosene so the hungry cannot eat them, potatoes dumped in rivers with guards posted, pigs killed and covered with quicklime. Then the sentence that gives the book its name, about the grapes of wrath filling and growing heavy for the vintage.
The phrase is from “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”, which takes it from Revelation. Choosing it places the novel in a specific American tradition of righteous anger, and the choice was deliberate; Steinbeck wanted the hymn printed in full at the front of the book.
What the chapter actually describes is the thing the novel is angriest about, and it is not poverty. It is the sight of food being destroyed in front of starving people as a matter of commercial logic.
The Three Camps Are an Argument in Three Stages
Once the family reaches California the novel stops moving and starts comparing. The Joads pass through three places to live, and the sequence is engineered rather than incidental.
The Hooverville is the roadside camp: no sanitation, no organisation, deputies who burn it when anyone talks about organising. It shows the migrants at the mercy of whoever turns up.
The Weedpatch government camp is the opposite, and it is the only hopeful stretch in the book. The residents run it themselves through elected committees, police themselves, and keep out the deputies who try to provoke a riot at the Saturday dance. There are hot showers and flush toilets, and Ruthie and Winfield do not know what the latter are for. Crucially, there is almost no work within reach of it, so the family has to leave.
The Hooper ranch completes the figure: steady work and decent pay for exactly as long as the strike outside the gates lasts, with the wage cut the day it breaks, and guards on the gate to keep the pickers from learning why.
Set end to end, these three places make the novel’s political case without a single speech. The migrants are not incapable of order; given a camp of their own they produce better order than the police do. What they are denied is the combination of order and work, and The Grapes of Wrath is careful to show that the denial is a decision somebody made rather than a misfortune.
The Language Experiment
The Grapes of Wrath writes its interchapters and its Joad chapters in different registers, and the gap between them is the book’s main stylistic risk.
The general chapters use long cadenced sentences, repetition and parallel clauses, borrowing openly from the King James Bible. The Joad chapters are written in close-recorded Oklahoma speech, spelled phonetically, with dropped consonants and contractions on nearly every line.
When it works, the two registers reinforce each other: the biblical cadence supplies scale, and the dialect supplies the specific human being. When it does not work, the general chapters tip into sermon. Chapter 19, on the history of California landholding, is the usual example, and a reader who finds it hectoring is not wrong.
Historical and Social Context
The Grapes of Wrath is set between roughly 1936 and 1938 and was published in April 1939, which is to say it was reporting on events still happening. Steinbeck had written a newspaper series, The Harvest Gypsies, for the San Francisco News in 1936 after visiting the migrant camps, and had worked with a Farm Security Administration camp manager who supplied much of the detail.
The reaction was immediate and violent. In August 1939 the Kern County board of supervisors voted four to one to ban the book from county libraries and schools. The local Associated Farmers organised a public burning, and their leader Bill Camp and a farm worker named Clell Pruett set a copy alight for photographers. The book was called a pack of lies and communist propaganda, and Steinbeck wrote that a personal campaign had been started against him. The FBI took an interest that lasted decades.
The burning itself belongs to a longer history, which our piece on the Nazi book burnings sets out, and readers who want the same decade from a different angle should try The Four Winds.
It also won the Pulitzer Prize in 1940 and was the best-selling novel of 1939, which is the part of the story usually left out. The book was not suppressed into obscurity; it was attacked because it had already been read by an enormous number of people, and the burning in Kern County was a response to its success rather than a cause of its notoriety.
Why The Grapes of Wrath Still Causes Arguments
Two criticisms have real weight and are worth meeting rather than dismissing.
The first is that the Oklahoma speech is a performance by an educated Californian, and that the Joads are sometimes closer to a type than to people. The second is the ending.
There is a third, less often made, which is structural. The novel’s political argument is delivered mostly by Casy and Tom, two men, while the thing the novel actually demonstrates is done by Ma, who holds the family together through every crisis and makes the decision the book ends on. The speeches get the ideas; the woman gets the action. Whether that is Steinbeck seeing something his own argument had not caught up with is a genuinely open question.
The Ending
The Grapes of Wrath ends in a barn in the rain. Rose of Sharon has delivered a stillborn child. In the corner is a man who has not eaten for six days, who has been giving his food to his son and is now too weak to swallow solids.
Ma looks at her daughter. Nothing is said aloud. The two women look at each other and Rose of Sharon says yes. The others are sent out to the tool shed. She lies down beside the starving stranger, bares her breast, and tells him he has to. The last image is of her smiling, and the book stops there with nothing resolved.
Publishers asked for a change and Steinbeck refused. He was right to. Every argument in The Grapes of Wrath has been building to the proposition that the unit of survival is no longer the family, and the final scene is that argument executed rather than stated: a woman with nothing left gives the only thing she has to a man she has never met, and the family she was supposed to be feeding is standing outside in the rain.
Edition cited: Penguin Books, with an introduction by Robert DeMott. First published by The Viking Press, 1939. All quotations are from Steinbeck’s text rather than the critical apparatus.