The Grapes of Wrath

Where the novel came from

By 1936, families driven out of the Dust Bowl were arriving in the Salinas and Monterey area, where Steinbeck lived. He began reporting on them. In 1936 he wrote a series of articles called "The Harvest Gypsies" for the San Francisco News about migrant farm workers. In 1938 some of that reporting came out as a pamphlet, Their Blood Is Strong.

He toured labor camps and interviewed migrant families. In the winter of 1938 he saw for himself the misery that floods at Visalia, California, brought to migrant families. He also wrote a satire called "L'Affaire Lettuceberg" and then destroyed it.

Robert DeMott, who edited Steinbeck's working journal, dates the writing of the novel from late May to late October 1938. Steinbeck told a friend that he had never worked so hard in his life. His wife, Carol Henning Steinbeck, typed and edited the manuscript as he went. The journal was published in 1989 as Working Days.

The title comes from Julia Ward Howe's song "The Battle Hymn of the Republic." Steinbeck liked it because the song is a march and the book is a kind of march. Carol found it. Writing to his editor, Pascal Covici, in September 1938, Steinbeck said the title was "Carol's again."

Two kinds of chapter

The novel has thirty chapters, and they come in two kinds. The long chapters follow the Joads. The short ones between them, most of the odd-numbered chapters, step back to show the migrants as a whole: the dust, the tractors, the used-car lots, the road. Scholars call these the intercalary chapters, meaning chapters inserted between the others. Steinbeck called them pace changers.

Chapter 12 is about Route 66 itself, the highway the migrants take west. Steinbeck calls it the path of a people in flight. Another short chapter shows a waitress at a hamburger stand being kind to a stranger and his two small children.

Steinbeck said what he wanted from these chapters. In 1953 he told a Columbia University student that they were designed to hit the reader below the belt. With the rhythms of poetry, he said, a writer could open a reader up and then get ideas in.

In January 1939 he wrote to Pascal Covici that he was not writing a satisfying story. He had tried to write the book the way lives are being lived, not the way books are written.

California

The Joads reach California having lost Grampa and Granma on the way. Noah has walked off along a river, and Connie soon deserts Rose of Sharon. Their first stop is a Hooverville, the name for the squatters' camps on the edge of towns, after President Herbert Hoover.

Then comes Weedpatch, a government camp run by a committee of the people living there. The camp has proper sanitary facilities, and the ground between the tents is swept and watered. The camp holds a dance every Saturday night. Steven Smith, writing for EBSCO, calls it a model of democracy and cooperation in the book.

None of the men can find work there, so after a month the Joads leave for the Hooper Ranch to pick peaches. There they earn five cents a box and spend the day's pay on dinner at the company store. Outside the gates, Casy is leading a strike.

Steinbeck based the government camp on real ones. The Center for Steinbeck Studies notes that the novel is dedicated to Tom Collins, who worked at the Weedpatch camp.

Burned, banned and bought

The book was a bestseller for most of 1939. The novel sold 428,900 hardcover copies that year at $2.75 each. Steinbeck became the most talked-about novelist in the United States.

Many people hated it. Farm owners' groups and some newspapers called Steinbeck a liar, and Collier's magazine called the book propaganda. School boards and libraries banned it, and copies were burned. Most bans were over the characters' rough talk and the mentions of sex.

Others stood up for it. Visiting migrant camps in 1940, Eleanor Roosevelt said she had never thought the book was exaggerated. Senator Robert M. La Follette Jr. held an official inquiry into working conditions on California farms.

The novel won the Pulitzer Prize in 1940, and Steinbeck gave the $1,000 prize money to his friend Ritch Lovejoy. When he received the Nobel Prize in 1962, the Swedish Academy's presentation called The Grapes of Wrath the great work principally associated with his name.

The Grapes of Wrath in Paris

French readers waited eight years. Gallimard published Les Raisins de la colère in Paris in 1947, translated by Marcel Duhamel and Maurice-Edgar Coindreau. The book ran to 495 pages, with a cover by the painter Mario Prassinos.

The translation sold fast. The copy the French national library holds from 1948 is marked the fifty-seventh edition. Its copy from 1956 is marked the hundred and seventy-fifth.

Maurice-Edgar Coindreau had already translated Of Mice and Men for Gallimard in 1939. Steinbeck himself spent the summer of 1954 living in Paris and writing for the newspaper Le Figaro.