4/14/21: On this day in 1939, John Steinbeck published this book, not satisfied it was any good, but acknowledging "It was the best he could do." He thought many readers would object to the book's political statement.

I first read Grapes of Wrath in high school, then again taught it in a rural parochial (Christian) high school in western Michigan in the late seventies. I loved teaching that book, that had been a staple of the Modern Novels elective class there for many years, but that year one of the more conservative parents complained to the school board that the book was immoral, not consistent with the values of the community (and it was a farming community!). He saw that his son was being required to read it, recalled reading the book and finding it personally offensive. He thought the swearing was excessive (he made a list of the swear words used with corresponding pages), there was an ex-preacher in the book that had slept with some of his female parishioners he took objection to, and the final scene in the book, where a young nursing mother who has lost her child feeds a starving man, he found disgusting. If he had dug a little deeper he might have discovered that the author of the book, John Steinbeck, was also once a member of the Communist Party and there were no (known) commies in this community. If he known that, he might just have then had enough evidence to justify burning it.

The only member of the school board that had read the book was the Chairman of the Board, who thought it was a very good book, but none of the other members had read it, nor would they choose to be defiled by doing that, and they voted to remove it from our English curriculum, though they--sensing a possible insurrection from students and teachers---allowed us to finish teaching the book.

Why fear an uprising? As I had known the board was going to vote on the book, I had invited my students to write essays for them on the question of the book’s morality, and several of them wrote stirring defenses of the book, to no avail. I am sure our reading of the remainder of that book was some of the most passionate learning I have ever been part of, and I will never forget my engaged, thoroughly committed students; I loved them (some [minor] students bringing me bottles of wine when we were done reading it) and the book; what a great and anguished experience for us all.

Thanks to Phillip, here is a link to an NPR story on how it is this book got banned in California and other places:

https://www.npr.org/templates/story/s...

When John Steinbeck wrote The Grapes of Wrath he had spent time in the camps in California. He had helped organize farm workers for a living wage. He had seen first hand the lowering of wages for hundreds of thousands of Americans in his state to the point of starvation and disease. When he wrote the book he had the King James version of the Holy Bible with him at all times, I had read, hoping to have his passionate prose echo its lyrical moral tone.

The story, which is at its base a critique of the inhumanity of unbridled capitalism, a story of man-made environmental disaster and the strength of the human spirit in the face of unspeakable challenges and tragedy, focuses primarily on one family, the Joads, one of thousands who lost their farms in the “Dust Bowl” era in the thirties when adequate safety nets were not available, when there was no unemployment relief, when adequate union action was still a dream, when American citizens were actually refugees in their own country, when people starved in the streets for lack of a crust of bread. In other words, it is both historical fiction and a cautionary tale, a time of Economic Depression and people (often, and largely) hating each other in their struggles rather than supporting each other in crisis.

The Joads--Ma, Pa, Uncle John, Tom, Noah, Rose of Sharon, Grandpa, and Grandma, Ruthie and Winfield, their dogs, accompanied for a time by ex-preacher Jim Casey--were living through a drought, their farms had become clouds of dust, they couldn't raise crops, so they couldn’t make mortgage payments to the bank as hundreds of thousands could not, they were pushed off their land, their house and barn razed.

“Sure, cried the tenant men, but it’s our land. . . We were born on it, and we got killed on it, died on it. Even if it’s no good, it’s still ours. . . That’s what makes ownership, not a paper with numbers on it."

And they, from Oklahoma, called “Okies” and worse, saw flyers for jobs in California and suddenly they and a whole area country headed west for twenty times fewer jobs than there were people. And what happens in a capitalist system when that happens? Wages go down to criminal levels, prices stay up, and food is literally kerosened or dumped into ditches in front of starving people (as is now being done!!).

“Dump potatoes in the rivers and place guards along the banks to keep the hungry people from fishing them out. Slaughter the pigs and bury them, and let the putrescence drip down into the earth.

There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificate- died of malnutrition- because the food must rot, must be forced to rot.”

Hatred is showered on poor people for their poverty, for their willingness to attempt to feed their families for less money, for impossibly low wages, police forces are doubled to move people along, doctors won’t see these refugees, these migrants, these “shitheels,” and prices are gouged by their fellow Americans for almost every essential item.

Let’s just pause a second and think of the environmental disaster in Syria that created waves of migrants/refugees all over Europe, and that wall at the US-Mexican border, and the ongoing refugee crises all over the world and see if you think this might be a useful book for us to again read.

The structure of the book includes a close reading of one family’s tale alternating with the story of the situation writ a little larger, with unnamed folks appearing, inter-callary chapters that allow the author to help us understand the economic crisis and its human/moral costs on a broader, systemic level, and lyrical/metaphorical interludes such as one featuring a turtle persistently trying to cross a highway.

The key theme is that The People can stand against the rich and powerful if they are unified, if they are One, if they see themselves as Ma tells them they must be, a Family, supporting each other with love and decency. That final scene in the rain reminds me of the father and son at the end of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road: You do the right thing and live the right way until you die. But while tender acts of charity are present, there are also also warnings in the book: If you keep a family from feeding its children that rage--the grapes of wrath--will come to pass. The people will come together to save themselves. This in part explains the overfunding of the military and the expanse of the police: The fear of reprisal.

“. . . and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.”

Ma emerges as the matriarchal moral center of the book, and women are seen as the central foundation of human survival. Which makes sense more now than ever (exceptions in congress noted!).

“She seemed to know, to accept, to welcome her position, the citadel of the family, the strong place that could not be taken.”

And along the way they learn moral/political lessons in the face of police crackdowns on the hungry:

“And the little screaming fact that sounds through all history: Repression works only to strengthen and knit the repressed.”

“If he needs a million acres to make him feel rich, seems to me he needs it 'cause he feels awful poor inside hisself, and if he's poor in hisself, there ain't no million acres gonna make him feel rich, an' maybe he's disappointed that nothin' he can do 'll make him feel rich.”

"We’re sorry. It’s not us. It’s the monster. The bank isn’t like a man.

Yes, but the bank is only made of men.

No, you’re wrong there—quite wrong there. The bank is something else than men. It happens that every man in a bank hates what the bank does, and yet the bank does it. The bank is something more than men, I tell you. It’s the monster. Men made it, but they can’t control it.”

“The bank - the monster has to have profits all the time. It can't wait. It'll die. No, taxes go on. When the monster stops growing, it dies. It can't stay one size.” [you may recall the bailout concept here in the old US of A: Too Big To Fail?]

“This is the beginning—from ‘I’ to ‘we’. If you who own the things people must have could understand this, you might preserve yourself. If you could separate causes from results, if you could know that Paine, Marx, Jefferson, Lenin were results, not causes, you might survive. But that you cannot know. For the quality of owning freezes you forever into ‘I,’ and cuts you off forever from the ‘we.’ ”

A great and powerful and majestic book, with principles in it to save a planet. One of the greatest ever.

فکر میکردم بعد از "کافکا در کرانه" قرار نیست کتابی جذاب تر به عمرم بخونم، تا اینکه این به پیشنهاد یکی از دوستام خوندن این کتاب رو شروع کردم، فقط و فقط 30 صفحه کافی بود تا غرق بشم تو کتاب و حتی زمان هایی که یک دقیقه وقت آزاد داشتم کتاب رو دستم می گرفتم...!!

واقعا شاهکار، واقعا تاثیر گذار... به هیچ وجه نمی تونم توصیف کنم حسم رو از خوندن این کتاب...

تشکر می کنم از فرشاد عزیز ، که ریویو این دوست عزیزم منو بیشتر ترغیب کرد برای خوندن کتاب، تکه ای از ریویو فرشاد:

کتاب با هر سطرش روح ‌خواننده ‌رو‌به ‌درد میاره ..جاهایی از داستان قلب ادم واقعا به درد میاد .. عجیب نیست که خود نویسنده بعد از نوشتن این رمان مدتی دچار اختلال روحی میشه .. داستان روایت اوارگی یه خانواده پرجمعیت تووی شاهراه شماره ۶۶ هست و مصیبت هایی که یکی بعد از دیگری گریبان گیر این خانواده میشه .. شخصیت ها به راحتی اب خوردن حذف میشن .. و هر بار یه بهت سنگین فضای سیاه داستان رو‌در بر میگیره .. میتونم بگم دیگه محاله بتونم همچین‌داستان زیبایی بخونم .. مخصوصا پایان داستان .. بدون شک نقطه اوج داستان همون سه سطر انتهایی داستان هست .. اونقدر دردناک که انگار هیچ وقت قرار نیست از ذهن خارج بشه .. بهترین رمانی بود که تووی زندگیم خوندم ..

* به راستی که بهترین رمانی بود که تو زندگیم خوندم

Blood, frogs, lice, flies, pestilence, boils, storms, locusts, darkness, and death. These were the plagues the Lord clamped onto Egypt (Exodus, 7-10). And these plagues triggered the migration of the people of Israel into the wilderness. After spending forty years in the desert, they finally reached the “land of milk and honey”. More plights and perils were awaiting them there.

Some three thousand years later, on another continent across the ocean, a people of farmers went through a similar ordeal once again. And this is how John Steinbeck elevated the story of the impoverished sharecroppers from the Dust Bowl region during the Great Depression to the level of an epic voyage, comparable to the Exodus or the Odyssey. Like the Israelites of yore, these Oklahomans were forced, by drought and economic hardship, to leave their land and travel down the Road 66 to a new “promised land”, a new Canaan named California.

The Grapes of Wrath is a re-interpretation of the Bible in yet another way. A few characters are, indeed, sometimes very explicitly, Christlike figures. Compare Casy’s “You don’ know what you’re a-doin’.” (Penguin Modern Classics paperback, p. 386) with Luke 23,34. Compare Tom’s “I’ll be there” (p. 419) with Matthew 18,20. Even the title is a quote from the Apocalypse of John 14,19. And the whole novel is the story of a people looking for redemption and a new land, which they may or may not find on this Earth…

Further still, one could argue that Steinbeck is also retelling some of the canonical works of 19th-century literature. In a sense, The Grapes of Wrath is the American version of Les Misérables: Tom Joad is the Jean Valjean of the New World, and the corporate farmers of 1930s California are just as awful as the police and army of 1830s Paris. In brief, Steinbeck’s novel is the paragon of the “Great American Novel”; a multi-layered narrative that lends itself, like the Bible, to a typological reading on different levels.

At any rate, despite its epic or mythical dimension, Steinbeck’s writing is anything but lofty. On the contrary, it conveys people’s mindset and daily struggles, their constant concern for simple material things: the state of disrepair of their car and how they manage to fix a flat tire, the need to put bread on the table and the recipe they use to make fried dough, the toilet flush and lack of loo roll. The narrator describes these things with meticulous precision – a technique typical of survival literature, from Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe to McCarthy’s The Road. More could be said about the characterisation and the deft and consistent use of dialect and turns of phrases of the people of Oklahoma – this also harks back to Mark Twain and William Faulkner’s novels.

The Grapes of Wrath is also, among many other things, a compelling political manifesto. The novel’s structure oscillates between classic narrative chapters (the Joads’ story) and discursive, slightly outraged lectures whereby Steinbeck examines the causes and effects of the Southern migration (from a Marxist point of view). Namely, the rising mechanisation and automation of agricultural labour and the constant push for higher corporate profits and lower individual wages.

In short, the terrifying “pillars of fire” of ancient Israel are now replaced by the dehumanising “invisible hand” of modern capitalism: a vast network of socio-economic forces that engirdles the whole of Western civilisation. In the end, forced migrations, people trying to flee wars, persecution, deprivation and starvation, unsanitary refugee camps, combined exploitation and hatred of incoming migrants, viewed as subhuman in their new “land of milk and honey” – all this is as real as ever today, in many parts of the world. All of which makes Steinbeck’s novel as essential as ever.

The 1940 film adaptation is, for the most part, faithful to Steinbeck’s plot and dramatic tone, except for the final section – notably, the bleak and slightly disturbing motif of the Caritas Romana at the end of the novel is absent from the film. Nonetheless, it is one of John Ford’s finest movies. Steinbeck’s novel also influenced many other works of fiction, from Stephen King’s The Stand to Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar.

During the bleakness of the dry, dust bowl days as the suffocating particles fall everywhere ...you can't breathe... in your nose, eyes, clothes, food, house, the darkness at noon unable to see the Sun during a dust storm, the top soil flying away carried by the winds never to return in the Depression, when people ... farmers lost their homes and land to the banks incapable to repay their loans , (no crops no money) symbolized by the Joad family of Oklahoma in the 1930's . Seeing black and white pictures tell only a small portion of this, the real story that John Steinbeck wrote about masterfully in his novel The Grapes of Wrath. Where a hungry large group of people, travel to the promise land of California a distant 1,500 miles away but find more starvation, abuse and death. In an old dilapidated automobile the Joad's , Ma the de facto leader and Pa, Tom, just released from prison for killing a man in self defense ( it didn't help that both were drunk) . Rose a teenager married to a lazy, shiftless dreamer Connie and pregnant, Uncle John who likes the bottle and his late wife he mourns too much for, their ancient parents and four other children. And last but not least the preacher Reverend Jim Casy who doesn't want to preach any more, having lost his faith the thirteenth member ( some will not get to their goal) . He's now after walking around searching for a purpose, in fact living like a bum decides since the people have left for the Golden State , why not him too ? Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and at long last crossing the Colorado River into the paradise of California, with high mountains and hot steaming deserts, discovering more desert wastelands and still hundreds of miles to the fertile, prosperous , pretty, fabulously wealthy valley of San Joaquin the richest one on the planet. But not for the 300,000 Okies , ( a misnomer, since many are not from Oklahoma) an unknown name to the newcomers as they're scornfully called here, unfriendly natives and police hate , greatly distrust these poor needy miserable folks and frightened of them, most assuredly. The affluent farmers keep cutting the wages 30 cents an hour, 25, 20 and dropping how can the workers survive? Tom is angry , tired of the endless struggle going from place to place in search of work, lack of food, housing, especially the treatment by the well off... like he is scum . Nevertheless believes that nobody is above him and will fight back if necessary. Deadly strikes, deputies burning down the laborers camps, violence and starving the old and the young, the vulnerable will not endure. A strong statement about man's inhumanity to his fellow being ...A little kindness sought but will it be found ?

پنج ستاره خیلی کمه برای این کتاب! خیلی کم.
اینکه یک نویسنده 80-90 سال قبل در یک جغرافیای خیلی دور و متفاوت از تو، کتابی نوشته که از واقعیت اون دوره‌ی زمانی الهام گرفته و در حال حاضر که تو میخونیش با همه‌ی تفاوتها تا مغز استخوانت نفوذ میکنه و با تمام وجود درکش میکنی، فقط از یک شاهکار برمیاد.
این کتاب برای من یک شاهکار به تمام معنا بود.

Han pasado 100 años y nada ha cambiado.

Oklahoma, años 20. Los Joad son una familia de granjeros, pequeños propietarios de sus tierras, que les dan para vivir con humildad pero sin carencias. Una mala cosecha les obliga a pedir un préstamo al banco, y una larga sequía les impedirá devolverlo en el plazo previsto. Consecuencia: el desahucio.

Con ellos, millares de familias pasarán por lo mismo. El paro se dispara. Miles de personas sin tierra, sin casa y sin dinero para comer, salen en busca de trabajo rumbo a la tierra prometida: California, donde las uvas y las naranjas inundan los campos esperando a que las coja el primero que pase. O eso dicen...

El viaje, sin medios y sin dinero apenas ni para comer, será largo y duro. Pero lo que encuentran a su llegada será aún peor.

Con millares de personas buscando trabajo y dispuestos a cualquier cosa para dar de comer a su familia, los empresarios californianos encuentran el paraíso: los sueldos no caen, se arrastran. Los inmigrantes, matándose a trabajar de la mañana a la noche, apenas son capaces de ganar lo suficiente como para comprar un poco de mala comida con la que alimentar a su familia por ese día. Ni pensar en “lujos” como una vivienda. Y con cada remesa de nuevas familias hambrientas que llegan a California, la situación va a peor.

Hacinados en campamentos insalubres, los inmigrantes son repudiados por la población local: mira cómo visten, mira qué sucios van… son prácticamente infrahumanos, no los queremos aquí. Míralos, no son como nosotros. Sí, dicen que roban y cosas peores. Malditos okis… (de Oklahoma….)

¿Os suena? Oklahoma o California a comienzos del siglo XX, o cualquier país occidental a comienzos del siglo XXI. Okis o panchitos, okis o sudacas, okis o moros, okis o negros… qué más da. A menudo, con un “de mierda” a continuación. Huyendo del hambre en busca de un futuro mejor sólo para encontrarse con la miseria y la explotación. Nada cambia.

Las uvas de la ira no sólo es el duro retrato de la emigración y el hambre: es también un duro alegato contra la sociedad capitalista, contra el liberalismo económico y las “leyes del mercado”. A comienzos del siglo XX, las tremendas consecuencias para un amplio espectro de la población de ese liberalismo radical condujeron a que incluso países tan “liberales” como los Estados Unidos introdujesen mecanismos de regulación del mercado que evitasen esos desmanes: salario mínimo, controles a las actividades empresariales y bancarias… Había que evitar que una situación así volviera a suceder. Cien años después, parece que todo esto se ha olvidado, y ahora los "gurús" de la economía (no todos, ahí están las advertencias de premios Nobel como Paul Krugman, pero sí los más poderosos) sólo hablan de desregulación, de liberalización. Eliminar las trabas a las empresas y a la banca, dejar que el mercado se autorregule, bajar los impuestos… neoliberalismo, lo llaman. Creará más empleo, dicen. No creáis en los sindicatos, no creáis en las regulaciones, todo lo que sean trabas a las empresas al final irá contra vosotros, dicen. Por supuesto: el escenario que nos muestra esta novela, ese escenario que ya se ha producido y aún se produce en muchos lugares, es el paraíso para algunos. Aunque sea el infierno para otros muchos.

Qué pronto olvidamos. Qué fácilmente nos engañan…

*Review contains a partial spoiler*

If you read enough reviews, you'll notice that most of the people who gave this book 1 or 2 stars had to read the book for a high school class. Most of the 4 and 5 star ratings came from those who read it as adults. I recommend listening to those who read it as adults.

Many people hate the ending, but I thought it was great. Creepy? Yes, but there was an immense amount of beauty and generosity in that creepy little ending. At one point in the story, Ma tol' Rosasharn that it ain't all about her (most high school kids think everything is all about them, which is probably one reason they couldn't enjoy this book or most other classics they are forced to read). Realizing this at the very end made Rosasharn crack her first smile in ages (at least that's my take on the mysterious smile). I wasn't disappointed in the lack of closure at the end, because the closure came in the middle when Ma said, "Rich fellas come up an' they die, an' their kids ain't no good an' they die out. But we keep a'comin'. We're the people that live. They can't wipe us out; they can't lick us. We'll go on forever, Pa, 'cause we're the people." So you know they will be fine whether life continues to be a struggle or not. They will be better off than the rich man with the million acres they talked about - "If he needs a million acres to make him feel rich, seems to me he needs it 'cause he feels awful poor inside hisself, and if he's poor in hisself, there ain't no million acres gonna make him feel rich, an' maybe he's disappointed that nothin' he can do'll make him feel rich." Another good quote is "I'm learnin' one thing good...If you're in trouble or hurt or need - go to the poor people. They're the only ones that'll help - the only ones." I saw a special on 20/20 around Christmas time about how the lower class are more generous overall than the middle and upper class, so this still applies today. Would anyone like my savings account? I think I'm going to give poverty a shot : )

Five brilliant stars for this American classic!
A story of the American spirit set during the Dust Bowl/Depression Era.
Such an emotional ending as I have never read before.
Heartrending and highly recommended.

The Grapes of Wrath is the kind of book that pulls you in and refuses to let go.

There’s just something completely gripping about the way the narrative begins and the way each sentence is put together, it pulls and pulls with its expertly rendered descriptions that do wonders at capturing a landscape and a people undergoing great change. I didn’t want to stop reading, but I also took the time to savour each chapter because I knew that I could only read this for the first time once. So, I stretched it out, I made it last longer than I wanted to, and for me this is one of the surest signs that I was reading a truly great novel.

There’s so much to talk about here. There’s so much brilliance to discuss and so many themes, characters and motifs that warrant reflection. But I want to keep it simple. I want to talk about the things I liked most about the writing. Firstly, I like the naturalness of it. I like the way Steinbeck’s words felt authentic and real. Now let me explain, he does wonders at capturing the essence of time and the ever-changing nature of it. And he is also remarkably talented when it comes to capturing the bigger picture.

It would be easy to talk about the plot here and what pushes the story forward, though that is just half of the power the writing possesses. Steinbeck interposes his narrative with chapters that capture the heart of a nation: they capture the essence of America and the great American dream. They help to weave together a sense of collective consciousness that establish exactly what the characters are feeling against the backdrop of the Great Depression. He is setting the scene in a way that creates a sense of what the characters and people of this time were experiencing on a large scale. And its intoxicating. It’s a storytelling device that brought the novel to life in an incandescent way.

Aside from this, reading The Grapes of Wrath from an ecocritical perspective is quite rewarding. Above all it is a novel of migration, of discovering new landscapes after mass crop death: it is a novel of changing environments and changing circumstances. It’s also about ecology, about man’s ability to continuously affect his environment in largely detrimental ways. And because of this there is a stress on social community, on working together and learning to coexist and fit into the ecosystem and society at large.

Consider me thoroughly and completely impressed. Now I knew how great Steinbeck was from reading Of Mice and Men but I never really liked the sound of any of his other novels enough to pick one up. They just didn’t sound very interesting to me, but this appeared on a list of eco-fiction reads so I was quite curious to see how it fit the genre. And it seems to me this (important) aspect of the novel is a little overlooked, though (admittedly) there are many other significant themes to consider that do dominate the narrative and take centre stage.

More Steinbeck for me in the future!
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The Grapes of Wrath is an exceptional work of literary fiction. I cannot think of any novel that has more vividly and powerfully captured the years of the Great Depression in the US. I lived a thousand sorrows sharing the poverty, hunger, terror, despair, and hopelessness of at least half a million people who were driven from their homes in the Great Plains and the South to find land, work, and a future in places such as California in the West and the cities in the North.

The Dust Bowl of the 1930s meant severe dust storms, drought, dry fields, and dying corn. With the worsening drought and land not producing crops, the banks claimed the land back and the Joad family who were tenant farmers lost their home. Imagine uprooting the entire family: Grandpa; grandma; Pa; Ma; Uncle John, Tom (an ex-prisoner on parole); his brothers Noah, Al, little Winfield; his sisters Rosasharn (pregnant), little Ruthie; brother-in-law Connie. They extended hospitality to a former preacher, Casy, who went along with them. The journey to California, the land of promise, was fraught with incredible hardship. Their truck broke down several times, and the family was hard pressed to find accommodations and food on that impossible quest for a chance at survival.

What held my attention was Steinbeck’s depiction of the migrants’ longsuffering and resilience, and their capacity to extend generosity and compassion to fellow migrants. We read this about the squatters’ camps: ‘In the evening a strange thing happened: the twenty families became one family, the children were the children of all. The loss of home became one loss, and the golden time in the West was one dream.’ Ma Joad was a remarkable tower of strength and deserved special mention for her tenacity, feisty fighting spirit, and determination to feed and keep the family together a day at a time.

Lest we should think that Steinbeck wrote a story that was too good to be true, I submit that he captured with honest realism the evils of humankind. This was embodied in the greed, meanness, hostility, and selfishness of the comfortable folks out West. They regarded the migrants as a threat to their livelihood, condemned them as ‘Okies’ or scum. The deputies broke up or set fire to the squatters’ camps. The fruit farm and cotton farm owners exploited migrant laborers and kept paying them less and less money for working in the fields. Even within the Joad family, there were selfish individuals who cared only about themselves. The need for survival, then and now, is primal and ruthless.

Along with the Joad family, I looked forward to days when they had meat and coffee. After a day of cotton picking, this was a feast: ‘Side-meat tonight, by God! We got money for side-meat!’ I was relieved when they were treated well at a government camp site, shielded from bullying cops. As the story progressed, I became more and more invested in their well-being. I grew more and more anxious for them as their hardship deepened.

This is a rather long novel and I was amazed at how Steinbeck sustained my interest right up to the end. At the penultimate chapter, he kept up the energy with the precipitation of a new crisis. You have to read this for yourself to find out how this story ended.

By then, I understood why the title is The Grapes of Wrath. Apparently, it is from Julia Ward Howe’s ‘Battle Hymn of the Republic.’ ("Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord; He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored..."). In California where peaches and grapes were plentiful, the migrant fruit pickers starved. There is a very thin line between hunger and anger. For the Joad family and the other migrants, ‘…under the begging, and under the cringing, a hopeless anger began to smolder.’

I shall close with the words of my literary heroine for 2022, Ma Joad:
“Ever’thing we do - seems to me is aimed at goin’ on. Seems that way to me. Even gettin’ hungry - even bein’ sick; some die, but the rest is tougher. Jus’ try to live the day, jus’ the day.”

Read The Grapes of Wrath. It is an enduring classic and deserving of the 1940 Pulitzer Prize.

I miei bisnonni materni, agli inizi del novecento, appena sposati presero una nave e partirono verso la terra promessa, l’Argentina, fecero un viaggio faticosissimo di mesi spinti dalla speranza di un futuro migliore per loro e per i loro figli, con l’animo straziato tra la nostalgia di casa e il sogno di una meta ignota pubblicizzata da conoscenti o altri parenti che da là avevano scritto lettere invoglianti. Un viaggio lunghissimo, doloroso, che sarà stato costellato di difficoltà e soprattutto di miseria: povero era il paese che lasciavano, un’Italia arretrata e senza possibilità di lavoro (un po’ come oggi), poverissimi erano loro partiti con poche cose, il minimo indispensabile per non appesantire il viaggio. Che cosa avranno provato chiudendosi alle spalle la porta di casa sapendo di non vederla più forse per sempre? Ora, dopo aver letto Furore, posso immaginarlo. Posso capire la sofferenza per lo strappo dalle proprie radici, l’abbandono degli oggetti di ogni giorno, degli odori, dei rumori, delle abitudini più semplici che fanno compagnia, la paura per il salto nel buio, l’ignoto che attrae e fa paura. Posso capire il bisogno di avvicinare chi si trova nella stessa situazione, di aprirsi con chi ha lo stesso destino, la solidarietà incontrata durante il viaggio con chi è come noi. Posso capire la paura all’arrivo, il susseguirsi di speranza e delusione, la sconfitta imminente ed anche il furore che la fame scatena. Una famiglia è come una tartaruga, ovunque vada si porta dietro la casa, fatta non di muri ma di affetti e legami profondi, pronta a chiudersi a riccio in difesa dei suoi membri in difficoltà e ad allargarsi misericordiosa verso chi si trova nella stessa condizione, verso chi è misero e ha fame, una fame vera, quella che ti consuma il fisico, che ti annebbia la vista, che ti fa perdere la ragione. Così è la famiglia Joad, in cui ognuno è legato all’altro con un filo sottile che si incontra ad un capo della matassa, dove c’è lei, la mamma, colei che conserva ben duro il guscio della famiglia, lo protegge perché pur essendo protezione va protetto anch’esso dagli attacchi esterni.
Tutto questo –e molto di più- è contenuto in Furore, che narra in modo vivido e tanto, tanto coinvolgente il lungo viaggio della famiglia Joad verso ovest, verso la terra promessa, la California con le casette bianche ed i frutteti intorno.
Potrei scrivere ancora molto su questo romanzo stupendo, ma sarebbe superfluo perché non c’è bisogno del mio commento, c’è solo bisogno di leggerlo e di lasciarsi trascinare dalle emozioni.

It's the 1930s, the great depression is in full swing, the dust bowl is killing farms off all across the midwest, and Pa and Ma Joad are doing the most American thing you can do, loading up the family in the car for a great cross-country road trip. I mean, what else are you supposed to do when the bank kicks you off your land and runs over your house with a tractor?

I live for books that make you feel. Books that make you cry. Books that stick with you. Books that you find yourself thinking about throughout the day. Books that make you neglect your screaming children to finish because you can't wait to see what happens. John Steinbecks The Grapes of Wrath is one of those books!

The Joad family, having been run off their crop-share farm to make way for more profits for the bank, travel to California after having seen a handbill promising high wages and lots of work. Tragedy strikes multiple times along the road, but they make it to the "paradise," which is California. But what they find when they get there is not as promised.

Tom Joad, our hero ex con. Defender of family, freedom, and fairness. I don't think I've ever liked a character as much as Tom. Even with all his flaws and imperfections, he is absolutely amazing.

Do yourself a favor and read this. It's a classic for a reason!