American writer John Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath (1939), about the bleak struggle of displaced farmworkers during the Great Depression (1929 to the early 1940s), has inspired many other artists interested in social justice.

The Grapes of Wrath and Artistic Protest

By Jim Cullen

Although John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath has not been a great favorite of literary critics—The Columbia Literary History of the United States, summarizing a common view, has described it as “slicker and more sentimental” than a number of other radical protest novels of the 1930s—the book has been a durable favorite of readers since it was first published in 1939. Though the drastic conditions of ecological and economic disaster that the book depicts have not recurred on the same scale in the United States, its heartfelt outrage over social injustice has made it the focus of continuing artistic political protest.

Part of a genre of realistic protest novels written during the Great Depression, the book describes the oppression of migrant Oklahoma farm workers in California (the novel's title, a reference to the “Battle Hymn of the Republic," alluded to the harsh punishment that awaited those responsible for the human misery of the 1930s). Its characters are tightly drawn: Tom Joad, an ex-convict whose common sense of decency is aroused by the injustice around him; Ma Joad, matriarch of the migrant farm family; and Jim Casy, a former preacher who rekindles his faith in humanity through political action. So clearly did the book represent the trials of the Great Depression that Grapes became an immediate bestseller, and won the 1940 Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

The power of Steinbeck's story immediately attracted interest from Hollywood, and Twentieth Century Fox producer Daryl Zanuck put a film version in the works even before the novel was published. Zanuck hired John Ford, later known for his classic Westerns, to direct it. Following a script by screenwriter Nunnally Johnson, Ford shot the picture in black-and-white, using the stark lighting of cameraman Gregg Toland. For the role of Tom, Zanuck cast Henry Fonda, a major Hollywood star who had previously worked with Ford as the lead in Young Mr. Lincoln (1939). John Carradine was cast as Casy, and Ma Joad was played by Jane Darwell. The film was eventually released in 1940 and won Ford an Academy Award as best director and Darwell the Academy Award for best supporting actress.

Although the film version of Grapes of Wrath tracked Steinbeck's story line, there were some differences, not only to keep the film's length manageable, but also because Ford softened some of the book's more radical edges. Steinbeck, for instance, ends the novel with the Joads in a very difficult situation, finding refuge in an abandoned barn. Ford, by contrast, ends with the family on the road again, seemingly stabilized. Nevertheless, both book and film share core values, among them the importance of community and the dignity of ordinary people.

Meanwhile, folk singer Woody Guthrie—a native Oklahoman—was the next to interpret the Grapes saga. In early 1940, with both book and film still prominent in the public's consciousness, he premiered his composition “Tom Joad” at a New York benefit concert for agricultural workers. The song, which runs for 17 verses, encapsulates many elements of Steinbeck's story, including Tom Joad's commitment to fighting social injustice.

However urgent and moving the work of Steinbeck, Ford, and Guthrie, all were outpaced by history. By 1941, the Tom Joads of the United States were finding work in California defense plants gearing up for World War II. Twenty years later, many once-starving migrants were hosting barbecues, and the defining music of the times was not that of Woody Guthrie, but the “good vibrations" of the Beach Boys.

The Grapes of Wrath has never been forgotten, however. The book remains a fixture of high school and college literature classes. A theatrical version of the story premiered in New York City in the early 1990s, in the wake of a recession. The most recent invocation of the story came from rock artist Bruce Springsteen's album The Ghost of Tom Joad, which described contemporary characters in situations that resembled those of the Okies of the 1930s. The narrator of the album's title song describes his search for Tom Joad's crusading spirit, skeptical that he'll find it (eventually doing so).

“We're the people that live,” Ma Joad says to her husband at the close of the film version of Grapes. And the Joads, as a set of characters in American culture, have lived on. Like the Okies it depicts, The Grapes of Wrath survives as a vivid document of the Depression years, a cautionary tale alongside the sunnier stories of American mythology.

About the author: Jim Cullen is the author of The Art of Democracy: A Concise History of Popular Culture in the United States (1996).