![]() ![]() After picking for most of the day, they are only paid enough to buy food for that night's supper and some for the next day. The Joads find work as strikebreakers in a peach orchard. In response to the exploitation, Casy becomes a labor organizer and tries to recruit for a labor union. How can you frighten a man whose hunger is not only in his own cramped stomach but in the wretched bellies of his children? You can't scare him – he has known a fear beyond every other. Nonetheless, as a Federal facility, the camp protects the migrants from harassment by local deputies. Weedpatch Camp, one of the clean, utility-supplied camps operated by the Resettlement Administration, a New Deal agency, offers better conditions but does not have enough resources to care for all the needy families, and it does not provide work or food. At the first migrant Hooverville camp the Joads stop at, Casy is arrested for knocking down a deputy sheriff who is about to shoot a fleeing worker for alerting others that the labor recruiter, travelling with the officer, will not pay the wages he is promising. All police and state law enforcement authorities are allied with the growers. The big corporate farmers are in collusion and smaller farmers suffer from collapsing prices. Reaching California, they find the state oversupplied with labor wages are low, and workers are exploited to the point of starvation. Led by Ma, the remaining members continue on, as nothing is left for them in Oklahoma. The family dwindles on the way: Grampa dies and they bury him in a field Granma dies close to the California state line and both Noah (the eldest Joad son) and Connie Rivers (the husband of the pregnant Joad daughter, Rose of Sharon) leave the family. The group worries that California may not be as rewarding as suggested. In makeshift camps, they hear many stories from others, some returning from California. Traveling west on Route 66, the Joads find the road crowded with other migrants. Although leaving Oklahoma violates his parole, Tom takes the risk, and invites Casy to join the family. The Joads put everything they have into making the journey. The family sees no option but to seek work in California, which has been described in handbills as fruitful and offering high pay. Tom's family is loading their remaining possessions into a Hudson sedan converted into a truck with the crops destroyed by the Dust Bowl, the family has defaulted on their bank loans and their farm has been repossessed. ![]() The next morning, Tom and Casy go to Uncle John's. They have moved away, but Muley refuses to leave the area. Graves says the banks have evicted all the farmers. Disconcerted and confused, Tom and Casy meet an old neighbor, Muley Graves, who says the family is at Uncle John Joad's home nearby. Arriving at Tom's childhood farm home, they find it deserted. While hitchhiking to his home near Sallisaw, Oklahoma, Tom meets former preacher Jim Casy, whom he remembers from his childhood, and the two travel together. The narrative begins just after Tom Joad is paroled from McAlester prison, where he had been incarcerated after being convicted of homicide in self-defense. A celebrated Hollywood film version, starring Henry Fonda and directed by John Ford, was released in 1940. The Grapes of Wrath is frequently read in American high school and college literature classes due to its historical context and enduring legacy. Due to their nearly hopeless situation, and in part because they are trapped in the Dust Bowl, the Joads set out for California along with thousands of other " Okies" seeking jobs, land, dignity, and a future. Set during the Great Depression, the novel focuses on the Joads, a poor family of tenant farmers driven from their Oklahoma home by drought, economic hardship, agricultural industry changes, and bank foreclosures forcing tenant farmers out of work. The book won the National Book Award Īnd Pulitzer Prize for fiction, and it was cited prominently when Steinbeck was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1962. The Grapes of Wrath is an American realist novel written by John Steinbeck and published in 1939. ![]()
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