The Grapes of Wrath

By John Steinbeck

Pulitzer Prize winner in Novels, 1940.

This is the story of the Joads, a family of Oklahoma sharecroppers, who are driven off their land by the prolonged drought of the dustbowl and by the change in agriculture from animal powered labor to the tractor. The small sharecrop sections were done away with as it was more efficient for a landowner to farm with a tractor and 1000 acres than to split it up into many small sections farmed by families and a team of mules or whatever.
The Joads have suffered through years of drought and crop failures, like many of their contemporaries. What little savings they may have are vanished and many are in debt trying to keep their families fed. When the landowner evicts them from their little section, these people have no money, no jobs and no prospects. Word gets around that there are lots of jobs in California, picking crops and fruit. So thousands of families packed up what they could on whatever vehicle they could acquire and headed west to the land of milk and honey, not realizing that everybody else was doing the same thing and they were all going to be competing for a limited number of jobs.
This story is about the Joad's trip out west and of the hardships they endure to get there and of the hardships they face once they make it to California. Because even though it is a land of great opportunity, there just aren't enough jobs to go around and because of the glut of laborers, the wages hit rock bottom and people are not able to earn enough money to feed their families.

This book has a very strong socialist slant and the socialist spiel is pretty tedious. But the story of the Joads is compelling and fascinating and I thoroughly enjoyed reading about their struggle. It is an amazing picture of an desperate era in American history.

Review by Melvin Bragg on The Guardian:    https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/nov/21/melvyn-bragg-on-john-steinbeck.