Book Bearings
The Grapes of Wrath
- 544 pages · about 9 hours
- First published 1939
- 321 editions
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1 About this book
The Joads are tenant farmers in Oklahoma during the Great Depression. Tom Joad comes home on parole from prison to find the family farm deserted: drought has ruined the crops, and the banks are putting tenants off the land. Hoping for work, the family, three generations of it, loads everything onto an old truck and joins the thousands heading west along Route 66 to California. What they find there is not what they hoped for. John Steinbeck alternates the Joads' story with short chapters that widen the view to all the migrants on the road. The novel was published in 1939.
- Classics
- Family life
- Political
- Historical fiction
- Medicine
- Labor camps
- Depression
- Pulitzer Prize Winner
2 What to expect
The story of an Oklahoma farm family driven off their land in the Dust Bowl years, who travel to California in search of work. It is a novel of social protest, angry about poverty and the treatment of migrant workers, and tender toward the family, above all its mother. Chapters about the family alternate with short, lyrical chapters about the migration as a whole; the dialogue is in dialect, the pace is steady, and the story is bleak.
Good for readers who want: an American classic, the Great Depression, and a family's endurance.
3 About John Steinbeck
Bio adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
4 More by John Steinbeck
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