Title: The Grapes of Wrath Author: John Steinbeck Creation Date: 1939 Location: New York, United States Collection: Banned, Burned & Dangerous Books
Brief
John Steinbeck published The Grapes of Wrath in April 1939, having written the full novel in one sustained push between June and October 1938 — roughly a hundred days of composition that left him, by his own account, physically and emotionally emptied. The book arose from journalism: Steinbeck had spent years writing articles about the migrant agricultural workers flooding into California from the Dust Bowl states of Oklahoma, Texas and the Great Plains, driven west by ecological catastrophe and Depression-era bank foreclosures. He had visited the camps, talked to the families, watched the inadequacy of relief systems. The response was immediate and polarising: three hundred thousand copies sold in its first year and the Pulitzer Prize in 1940, but also banning, burning and denunciation by the Associated Farmers of California, Oklahoma congressmen and the Hearst press.
Steinbeck's technique is distinctive: intercalary chapters — short, generalised prose poems about the Dust Bowl, the land, the social conditions — alternate with the main narrative following the Joad family from Oklahoma to California. The intercalary chapters provide historical dimension; the family chapters provide the human face. Eleanor Roosevelt publicly defended the novel after visiting migrant camps and confirming Steinbeck's descriptions. John Ford's 1940 film, with Henry Fonda as Tom Joad, extended its reach further. When the Swedish Academy awarded Steinbeck the Nobel in 1962, the citation specifically mentioned this novel.
Time has neither wholly confirmed the critics' subsequent dismissal nor entirely refuted it; the novel survives by the force of its rendering of specific suffering at a specific historical moment, which is the most resilient quality a social novel can possess.
The Banning
On 21 August 1939, the Kern County Board of Supervisors in California voted to ban the novel from the county's libraries and schools. The resolution was introduced by Stanley Abel, a former Ku Klux Klan member, at the instigation of the Associated Farmers of California — the powerful agribusiness lobby whose labour practices the novel exposed. Bill Camp, the local Associated Farmers leader, argued the novel was a "libel" depicting growers as "inhumane vigilantes." County librarian Gretchen Knief removed all sixty copies despite a waiting list of more than six hundred readers. The ban held for approximately eighteen months until rescinded in January 1941 amid sustained national backlash.
Kern County was not alone. Kansas City's Board of Education removed the novel from twenty public libraries for "indecency and bestial portrayal." Buffalo barred it for "vulgar words." East St. Louis's library board voted to burn copies on the library steps — the resolution was reversed shortly after amid uproar, and the novel was instead moved to "Adults Only." The Associated Farmers orchestrated a public book burning in California, enlisting a migrant worker to perform the act for newsreel cameras and claiming migrants themselves were offended by their portrayal.
Oklahoma congressman Lyle Boren denounced the novel on the House floor as a "dirty, lying, filthy manuscript." The Hearst press attacked it as communist propaganda. The Associated Farmers produced a counter-narrative — Ruth Comfort Mitchell's Of Human Kindness (1940) — forgotten before the ink dried. The novel won the Pulitzer regardless and continued to face challenges in American schools through subsequent decades, removed from reading lists in towns from Mississippi to Idaho on grounds of language, sexuality or political tendency, depending on which scandal a given school board found most expedient.
The Fallout
The Kern County ban was the most revealing of the novel's suppressions, because Kern County was the novel's setting — the county where the Joads arrive and find not the promised land but Hoovervilles, starvation wages and vigilante committees burning migrant camps. The ban was the county banning a description of itself, confirming the novel's accuracy more persuasively than any review could have managed.
The Associated Farmers' campaign backfired comprehensively. The controversy boosted sales and drew national attention to the very conditions the growers wanted hidden. Eleanor Roosevelt publicly defended the novel after visiting migrant camps and confirming Steinbeck's descriptions. Carey McWilliams, the journalist and state housing commissioner, called it "essentially accurate." The La Follette Civil Liberties Committee of the United States Senate investigated the Associated Farmers and found their anti-novel campaign was part of broader anti-labour repression including strikebreaking, blacklisting and vigilante violence against organisers.
John Ford's 1940 film adaptation extended the novel's reach to audiences who would never have read a six-hundred-page novel. The film was banned in the Soviet Union — which might have welcomed an indictment of American capitalism — because Soviet censors noticed the Joads owned a car. For Steinbeck personally, the novel's reception was both triumph and burden. The intensity of political controversy drove him from social fiction for years. He never wrote another novel as ambitious or politically charged, and the literary establishment's subsequent turn against him — the critical opinion that he was sentimental, schematic, insufficiently ironic — was partly a reaction against the directness of political engagement the novel represented.
Why It Was Feared
The power generating the bans was not the novel's language — though the profanity was cited in every complaint — but its method of making structural economic violence visible through individual experience. The intercalary chapters describe the Dust Bowl, the bank foreclosures, the labour contractors' strategy of flooding California with more workers than there are jobs to drive wages below subsistence. These chapters make the argument: the Joads' suffering is not accident but system, the poverty of migrant workers not a natural condition but the product of specific decisions made by specific people for specific profit.
The Joad chapters give that argument a face. When Ma Joad sits beside her dead mother-in-law's body in the truck and answers border agents' questions with composure so the family can cross into California, the reader understands something no statistical analysis could convey: these are people who cannot afford to grieve, who must keep moving because stopping costs more than going on.
Tom Joad's speech — "Wherever they's a fight so hungry people can eat, I'll be there" — is the passage the growers most feared. It advocates not any specific political programme but solidarity, the recognition that individual suffering connects to collective suffering and demands collective response. This is the idea the growers needed to suppress: not communism, but the simpler, more dangerous idea that the people who pick the fruit are human beings with the same rights as those who own the orchards. Rose of Sharon's final act — offering her breast to a dying stranger after her own child is born dead — asserts, in absolute destitution, the irreducible human capacity for generosity. The growers understood this image was more dangerous than any manifesto.
The Reading
To the red country and part of the grey country of Oklahoma, the last rains came gently, and they did not cut the scarred earth.
The land, the sky, the dust. Clouds build but bring no rain. Topsoil, destroyed by years of overcropping, lifts into the air in curtains and columns that blot the sun and settle on everything — on the fences, on the cars, on the faces of men who stand in their doorways and look at the ruined corn and say nothing because there is nothing left to say. Short declarative sentences. The landscape is a character suffering its own affliction. The dust is not mere weather; it is judgement. The land has been used past the point of endurance, and the dust is the land's answer.
Tom Joad returns from a prison stint — manslaughter, a fight, four years served — hitchhiking toward a family farm he expects to find intact. What he finds instead is the process of dissolution. The banks have foreclosed on half the farms in the county. Tractors are knocking down the tenant farmhouses — not maliciously but mechanically, the driver of the tractor a local boy paid three dollars a day to destroy the homes of people he grew up with. The tractor driver's perspective comes in one of the intercalary chapters: a man who knows what he is doing and does it anyway because the alternative is being dispossessed himself. The system does not require individual villains. It requires tractors.
Tom finds the family at his uncle John's place, packing. Ma Joad, Pa, his pregnant sister Rose of Sharon married to a dreamy young man called Connie, his younger siblings, the grandparents and Uncle John are loading everything they own onto a secondhand Hudson Super-Six converted badly into a truck. Casy, a former preacher who has lost his faith in organised religion but retained his feeling for what he calls "the spirit of the people," attaches himself to the family. Casy is a man who has stopped preaching because he can no longer separate the holy from the human — he has discovered that the spirit he used to invoke in his sermons is the same spirit he felt lying with women in the grass after his revivals, and the discovery has left him unable to pray but not unable to think. He has the particular eloquence of a man who has spent years practising the rhythms of public speech and now turns those rhythms toward questions he does not know how to answer.
The car barely runs. The family's possessions barely fit. They carry with them the things that will not fit in the truck — the memories of the land, the knowledge of planting and harvesting that their bodies carry in the calluses on their hands and the ache in their backs, the names of the neighbours who are making the same journey in the same direction for the same reason. They are leaving not just a farm but a way of life, and the leaving is a kind of death — the people who arrive in California will not be the same people who left Oklahoma, because the journey itself will change them, will strip away the isolation that made them tenant farmers and replace it with the collective consciousness that will make them something else.
They head west on Highway 66 — the mother road, the road of flight. The road is not just a physical journey but a social fact: hundreds of thousands of dispossessed families moving in the same direction for the same reason, making the same calculations about petrol and food and whether the radiator will hold. The intercalary chapters that describe the road are compressed, rhythmic, almost choral passages in which individual families dissolve into the mass movement and the mass movement produces, in the friction of its collective desperation, the beginnings of a political consciousness that no individual family could have arrived at alone. Twenty families become a community. The evening campfire becomes a parliament. The shared misfortune becomes, almost despite itself, the foundation of solidarity.
The grandfather dies before they leave Oklahoma; he had not really wanted to go, had sat on the running board and refused to get in, and was fed enough soothing syrup to get him into the truck, and died that night of a stroke — or of leaving, which amounted to the same thing. The grandmother dies crossing the California desert, in the night, while Ma sits beside her body without telling anyone so they can clear the agricultural inspection station at the border without delay. The old woman dead, the border agents peering into the truck, Ma answering their questions with perfect composure, the family crossing into California not knowing what lies beside them. Ma Joad holds her grief inside her body because the economics of the situation do not permit its expression. The scene says everything about what poverty costs: not only material comfort but the basic human right to mourn.
California is not what the handbills promised. The camps are crowded, the wages impossibly low — labour contractors have flooded the area with more workers than there are jobs precisely to drive wages down, a mechanism the intercalary chapters have already explained so that the reader understands the system before seeing its human effects. The economics are laid out with devastating clarity: the big farms need workers for the harvest, but they need them desperate, because desperate workers accept lower wages. So the handbills go out — thousands of them, printed cheaply, scattered across Oklahoma and Arkansas and Texas — promising work that exists for a few weeks at most, drawing ten workers for every job, twenty, thirty. The surplus is the point. The surplus is the system. When a man stands in a line of three hundred waiting for work that will employ thirty, the man with the job will accept what he is given because the man behind him will accept less.
The local Californians regard the Okies with a contempt captured in permanent detail: the sneering, the laws designed to keep them moving, the vagrancy statutes used to arrest men who have committed no crime except poverty, the vigilante committees that burn migrant camps when the migrants begin to organise, the word "Okie" itself deployed as sufficient contempt to require no elaboration. The family finds a roadside Hooverville — named after the president whose policies had done nothing to prevent the catastrophe — damp, inadequate, constructed from cardboard and canvas and salvaged sheet metal, and settles in among hundreds of other families in the same condition. The Hooverville is a community despite itself: shared cooking fires, shared information about where work might be found, shared recognition that the individual catastrophe is also a collective one.
Tom and Casy, working through the camp network, begin to understand the labour organising that is the only structural response to their situation. Casy has been evolving throughout — from a lost preacher into something like a labour organiser, his theology of collective spirit finding its practical application in the recognition that the people in the camps are being systematically cheated and that the cheating can only be opposed collectively. "Maybe all men got one big soul everybody's a part of," he says, and the sentence is both a theological statement and a political programme. When Casy is murdered by a deputy during a strike — clubbed with a pick handle, the blow described with flat, terrible brevity — Tom kills the deputy in retaliation. He is a fugitive again, carrying in his body the anger that Casy's death has crystallised into something harder than anger.
The family moves to a government-run camp — the Weedpatch camp, based on the real Federal Migrant Camp at Arvin — which is clean and organised and governed with democratic self-rule, and is briefly a respite from the degradation of the Hoovervilles. Indoor plumbing. Elected committees. Saturday night dances. Ma Joad straightens her shoulders. But there is still no steady work. The interlude is precisely that — a demonstration that decency is possible, set inside a system that makes decency expensive. The growers send provocateurs to start a fight at the Saturday dance, hoping to give the county sheriff an excuse to shut the camp down. The migrants anticipate the provocation and handle it themselves, removing the troublemakers without violence. It is a small victory, but it carries the weight of people who have been treated as less than human demonstrating, through their own self-governance, that they are capable of the dignity their exploiters deny them.
Rose of Sharon's husband Connie deserts her — walks off one evening and does not come back, heading for the city where he plans to study tractors, or radios, or something that will make him the man he was not able to be in the camps. His departure is one of many small cruelties: not a dramatic betrayal but the quiet abandonment of a man who married too young and discovered, under pressure, that he was not equal to the situation. Rose of Sharon is heavily pregnant, increasingly isolated, listening to a religious woman in the camp who tells her the baby will be born dead because she has danced, because she has sinned, because God punishes. The religious woman is one of the sharpest secondary portraits in the book: a person who has substituted the cruelty of theological certainty for the unbearable uncertainty of the camps, and who inflicts her certainty on the most vulnerable person available.
Ma deals with this with the fierce pragmatism that characterises her throughout: she burns the woman's religious tracts and threatens to slap her if she comes near Rose of Sharon again. Ma is the moral centre — not the ideological centre, which belongs to Casy and Tom, but the human centre, the figure who keeps the family intact by willpower and by the refusal to permit despair as a permanent condition. She carries the family the way the truck carries the furniture: by main force, by refusing to stop. There is a scene where Ma picks up a jack handle and tells Pa that the family is not going to split up, that they will stay together or she will knock him down, and Pa backs off because he recognises in her face the force that holds the world together — the force that is not political and not theological but something older than both, the force of a woman who has decided that the people she is responsible for will not be scattered.
Tom's killing catches up with him — his face is marked from the fight, recognisable to anyone looking — and he goes into hiding in a culvert near the camp while the family shelters him, bringing food and blankets. The hiding is itself a kind of preparation: Tom has been thinking about what Casy said, about the big soul, about the connection between individual suffering and collective action, and the time in the culvert is the time in which Tom Joad, a man who went to prison for a bar fight and came home wanting only to eat his mother's cooking and sleep in his own bed, becomes something else — becomes the figure who will walk out of this story and into the American imagination as the image of the worker who will not stay down.
In the last days before he leaves permanently, he and Ma have the most celebrated exchange in the book. She asks how she will know where he is, what he is doing. He gives her the answer: "Wherever they's a fight so hungry people can eat, I'll be there. Wherever they's a cop beatin' up a guy, I'll be there." It is not a political manifesto. It is a son telling his mother that he has found a purpose larger than survival, and that the purpose will keep him alive in the world even when she cannot see him. The promise is also a farewell, and the grief in the scene is the grief of a woman who understands that what her son is promising is true and will probably kill him.
He disappears north. Ma watches him go — a woman who has lost her parents, her home, her son-in-law, and now her eldest son, standing in the darkness of a California night and letting him walk away because she understands that what he has become is larger than what she can hold, and that the love between them has found its final form, which is the form of letting go.
The remaining family — diminished, battered, but still together through Ma's force of will — find a boxcar and settle in for the winter. The rains come — the uncontrolled California rains of winter — and the valley floods. The boxcar fills with water. Rose of Sharon gives birth to a stillborn child, grey and silent. Uncle John sets the dead baby in a box on the floodwaters and sends it downstream — toward the town, toward the people who did this, a silent accusation carried on the flood. The family retreats to a barn on high ground.
In the barn they find a dying man and his young son. The man is starving; he needs milk but there is no milk. Rose of Sharon, who has just lost her baby, has milk. She looks at Ma. Something passes between them — not speech, not argument, something older than language. She goes to the dying man and puts him to her breast. And in the dim barn she smiles mysteriously. The floods are still rising. The family has no plan. The system that produced their suffering is unchanged and shows no sign of changing. But the woman whose grief has just been most complete performs an act of total giving, and the image is held without resolution — the irreducible human fact that no system of exploitation has managed to destroy and that no amount of burning could make disappear from the page.
This post is part of Books They Tried to Destroy, a series on the Banned, Burned & Dangerous canon — works that frightened states and survived them.
Two trustworthy editions of an American classic that survived its burning:
The Penguin Classics edition, with an introduction by Robert DeMott — the standard scholarly text, drawing on Steinbeck's working journal to illuminate the hundred-day composition.
The Centennial Edition, also from Penguin, marking Steinbeck's centenary in 2002 — the same authoritative text in a clean trade paperback designed for first-time readers.