The Grapes of Wrath is a famous classic novel by John Steinbeck
published in 1939. It was awarded a Pulitzer
Prize the
following year after its publication, and a Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962.
The setting of the story is during the Great Depression. It tells about Oklahoma farmers who are driven off their land by soil erosion. In particular, the Joad family drives to California, hoping to take advantage of what they imagine to be a land of promise. Along the way, the grandparents die, and the Joads arrive only to be worn down by the impossibly hard life of migrant fruit-pickers. They find a temporary respite in a government labor camp, but when it closes they are forced to take work at a blacklisted orchard. There Tom Joad joins with Jim Casy, a minister turned labor organizer.
Due to the exploitation of laborers, the workers started to join unions. At one point, some members of the family worked on an orchard involved with a strike which turned violent. Casy is killed, and Tom, who had once served a sentence for killing a man in Oklahoma, kills again to avenge the death of Casy. The Joads are in continuous struggle to hide Tom from the law.
Ultimately, the matriarch, Ma Joad, decides that for the good of the family, Tom must leave them. He did. The rest of the family struggles together. To add more stress and despondency, Rose of Sharon, the eldest daughter, gave birth to a stillborn baby. Ma Joad exhibited such inner strength and brings up the family to go through the sufferings, including the recent bereavement.
The final scene is such an act of faith and hope for the morrow, as Rose of Sharon feeds a starving unknown man with her own milk. The story, with its overflow of depression and trials, equally displays a willpower and a shared hope in the characters. It renders the reader reflectively speechless even when the book has been closed for some time.