Why this book

This novel won the Pulitzer Prize and helped earn Steinbeck the Nobel. When it appeared in 1939 it was banned and burned, for it named a hard truth about hunger and greed that a comfortable nation did not wish to hear.

The Story

Tom Joad walks home along a hot Oklahoma road, newly released on parole. Four years back he killed a man in a drunken fight, therefore he carries that weight quietly. He wears his prison suit and wants only to reach his family's farm.

On the way he meets Jim Casy, a former preacher who has given up religion. Casy no longer believes in sin, but he believes all people share one great human soul. Tom likes the old man, therefore he invites Casy to walk home with him.

But they reach the Joad farm and find it deserted, the house shoved crooked off its foundation. A gaunt neighbor, Muley Graves, creeps from the shadows and tells them the truth: the bank has emptied the whole country of its people.

Muley says the Joads have gathered at Uncle John's place, therefore Tom hurries there at dawn. He finds his whole family alive and frantically loading a rickety truck, selling their tools and animals for pennies, preparing to leave Oklahoma forever.

At the family's heart stands Ma Joad, calm and unbreakable, the one who truly holds them together. Handbills have blown across the plains promising plentiful work picking fruit in California, therefore they pin every last hope on that golden western valley.

But old Grampa suddenly refuses to leave the land where he was born. There is no time to argue, therefore Ma soothes him with cough syrup laced with sleeping medicine, and the men lift the drowsing old fellow gently onto the loaded truck.

Casy asks to come along, and Ma welcomes the extra hands, therefore twelve souls and one preacher crowd onto a single groaning truck. They roll out onto Route 66, the great migrant highway, pointed west across a thousand hard and dusty miles.

Yet Grampa's heart is already broken from leaving his soil. That very first night on the road he suffers a stroke and dies, therefore the family buries him quietly in a roadside field, and Casy speaks a few plain, honest words over the grave.

The truck grinds westward day after day, sharing the road with countless ruined families chasing the same rumor of work. Their money dwindles fast, therefore they ration food, patch worn tires, and sleep in crowded ditch-side camps each cold night.

Along the way the scattered families learn to become one people. At each night camp strangers share food, tools, and grief, therefore twenty families can behave as a single household — born together at dusk, dissolved again at dawn as the trucks roll on.

Beside a cool green river the family stops to rest and bathe. But Noah, the quiet, slow-minded eldest son, decides he will simply not go on, therefore he wanders away downstream to live by the water, and the family cannot bring him back.

Ahead lies the terrible night desert. Granma falls gravely ill as they cross, and in the dark she dies. But Ma lies still beside the body and tells no one until dawn, so that nothing will stop the family from finally reaching California.

At last they crest the mountains and see California spread below, green and gold and rich beyond dreaming. For one moment their hearts lift. But down in the valley they find no welcome — only ten thousand hungry families who arrived long before them.

There are far too many workers and far too few jobs, therefore the growers cut wages lower and lower while men beg to labor for pennies. The settled townsfolk fear and despise the newcomers, spitting the word 'Okie' at them like a curse.

Tom's young sister, Rose of Sharon, is pregnant and dreams of a snug little house with her husband, Connie. But Connie loses all hope in this misery and slips away for good, therefore she is left to face motherhood frightened and utterly alone.

In a squalid roadside camp a deputy comes to bully the migrants, and a fight erupts. Tom trips the deputy, but Casy quietly steps forward and takes the blame to protect Tom's parole, therefore the police drag the preacher off to jail.

The Joads move on and reach a clean government camp run by the migrants themselves, with hot water, kind order, and no cruel police. For a short while they live like human beings again. But there is still no lasting work to be found nearby.

Hunger drives them out again. Word comes of good pay picking peaches at a large orchard, therefore they load up and go — and find the entrance guarded by armed police and lined with angry people being held back from the gates.

The strangely high wages puzzle Tom, therefore that night he slips out past the fences to investigate. Beyond the orchard he discovers Casy, freed from jail and now leading a strike — for the pay is bait that will collapse the moment the strikers give in.

Suddenly police raid the strikers' hideout in the dark. A man smashes Casy's skull with a pick handle and kills him, therefore Tom, blind with grief and rage, wrenches the handle free and beats the killer dead before fleeing into the black night.

Tom escapes, but his face is battered and marked, therefore he can no longer be seen in daylight. The family flees the orchard hiding him flat beneath their mattresses, and they take shelter in an abandoned boxcar beside a stream to pick cotton.

Tom knows his presence endangers them all, therefore he tells Ma he must leave. He has finally grasped Casy's truth: no soul lives alone. He vows to fight wherever the poor are wronged, so in every struggle for the hungry, Ma will feel him close.

The winter rains come and will not stop, and the stream swells toward the boxcar where they shelter. Rose of Sharon goes into labor amid the rising flood, but after months of hunger and heartbreak, her baby is born dead.

The water finally floods them out, therefore they wade away on foot through the downpour toward higher ground. They stumble into a dry barn, where they find a small boy kneeling beside his father, a man slowly starving to death, too weak now to eat.

Ma looks at Rose of Sharon, and without a word the two women understand each other. Therefore Rose of Sharon, who has just lost her own child, gently bares her breast and feeds the dying stranger her milk, cradling his head to keep him alive.

What it means

This is the great wound of the book. Drought killed the crops, therefore the tenant farmers could not pay their debts. So the banks sent tractors to knock the houses flat and plow the land clear, for a bank is a monster that must always feed.

Tom begins to see how the trap is built. The growers scatter thousands of handbills for a hundred jobs, therefore desperate men underbid one another into starvation, and the hungrier the workers grow, the cheaper their labor becomes.

In that camp Ma glimpses what her people could be: governing themselves with fairness and without fear. It is a vision of another world, therefore leaving it stings all the more when hunger soon forces the family back onto the pitiless road.

Here lies the whole heart of the book. The Joads set out thinking only of 'I' and 'my own,' but suffering transforms them into 'we.' Steinbeck warns that when the many are crushed for the profit of a few, anger ripens like grapes — and our only salvation is that we belong to one another.

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