Context
John Steinbeck was
born in Salinas, California, on February 27, 1902.
He attended Stanford University without graduating, and though he
lived briefly in New York, he remained a lifelong Californian. Steinbeck
began writing novels in 1929, but he garnered
little commercial or critical success until the publication of Tortilla
Flat in 1935. Steinbeck frequently
used his fiction to delve into the lives of society's most downtrodden
citizens. A trio of novels in the late 1930s
focused on the lives of migrant workers in California: In
Dubious Battle, published in 1936,
was followed by Of Mice and Men in 1937,
and, in 1939, Steinbeck's masterpiece, The
Grapes of Wrath.
During the early 1930s, a severe
drought led to massive agricultural failure in parts of the southern
Great Plains, particularly throughout western Oklahoma and the Texas
panhandle. These areas had been heavily overcultivated by wheat
farmers in the years following World War I and were covered with
millions of acres of loose, exposed topsoil. In the absence of rain,
crops withered and died; the topsoil, no longer anchored by growing
roots, was picked up by the winds and carried in billowing clouds
across the region. Huge dust storms blew across the area, at times
blocking out the sun and even suffocating those unlucky enough to
be caught unprepared. The afflicted region became known as the “Dust
Bowl.”
By the mid-1930s, the drought had
crippled countless farm families, and America had fallen into the
Great Depression. Unable to pay their mortgages or invest in the
kinds of industrial equipment now necessitated by commercial competition,
many Dust Bowl farmers were forced to leave their land. Without
any real employment prospects, thousands of families nonetheless
traveled to California in hopes of finding new means of survival.
But the farm country of California quickly became overcrowded with
the migrant workers. Jobs and food were scarce, and the migrants
faced prejudice and hostility from the Californians, who labeled
them with the derisive epithet “Okie.” These workers and their families lived
in cramped, impoverished camps called “Hoovervilles,” named after
President Hoover, who was blamed for the problems that led to the
Great Depression. Many of the residents of these camps starved
to death, unable to find work.
When Steinbeck decided to write a novel about the plight
of migrant farm workers, he took his task very seriously. To prepare, he
lived with an Oklahoma farm family and made the journey with them
to California. When The Grapes of Wrath appeared,
it soared to the top of the bestseller lists, selling nearly half
a million copies. Although many Oklahomans and Californians reviled
the book, considering Steinbeck's characters to be unflattering
representations of their states' people, the large majority of readers
and scholars praised the novel highly. The story of the Joad family
captured a turbulent moment in American history and, in the words
of critic Robert DeMott, “entered both the American consciousness
and conscience.” In 1940, the novel was awarded
the Pulitzer Prize and adapted to the screen. Although Steinbeck
went on to have a productive literary career and won the Novel Prize
for Literature in 1962, none of his later
books had the impact of The Grapes of Wrath. He
died in 1968.
Today, readers of The Grapes of Wrath often
find fault with its excessive sentimentality and generally flat
characterizations, which seem at odds with Steinbeck's otherwise
realistic style of writing. However, in writing his novel, Steinbeck
attempted not only to describe the plight of migrant workers during
the Depression but also to offer a pointed criticism of the policies
that had caused that plight. In light of this goal, Steinbeck's
characters often emerge as idealized archetypes or epic heroes;
rather than using them to explore the individual human psyche, the
author presents them as embodiments of universal ideals or struggles.
Thus, the novel stands as a chronicle of the Depression and as a
commentary on the economic and social system that gave rise to it.
