Book Review : The Grapes of Wrath

This story is quite possibly the ultimate road trip in a novel as well as being a commentary on the social and economic history of the period. The Joads have to leave The Dust Bowl in Oklahoma of the early 1930s where big business is demolishing their shacks and find a better life in California.

The whole family are piled into their truck, some of them riding on their belongings on top. Not all the family make it to the promised land where the amount of people looking for paying work drives down the wages to such low levels that the family earn their money and immediately spend it at the collective store to buy food to eat, so they have the strength to work the next day to buy…and so it goes on.

A lapsed preacher called Casy who Tom Joad meets at the start of the novel appears again in California as the ‘leader’ or loudest proponent of a strike, where the workers have organised themselves into collectively not accepting the low wages of 2.5 cents per hour on offer for picking fruit. The company who runs the operation breaks the strike by killing Casy, but Tom Joad gains revenge.

Tom is the major character of the whole book, who moves from being a recently released prisoner to realising the workers of America need to organise in order to achieve better wages and working conditions.