He tells Tom that his family are staying with Tom’s uncle, chopping cotton until they have enough to buy a car and head out West. He bumps into a childhood friend, Muley Graves, who explains things to Tom. He sees signs of neglect, of sudden abandonment, yet can’t understand why the neighbours haven’t stolen what’s left either. When the banks came to collect, families which had lived on their own land for generations, who had seen generations born and die on that land, were forced out.Īs Tom walks over his father’s deserted farm, nothing seems to make sense. By the 1930’s, severe droughts were causing huge dust storms which ruined what crops were still growing.
But years of intensive farming practices have left the soil in the region vulnerable to drought. In bad years, families like the Joads had been forced to take on debt to survive and hope for better next year. Small family farms like the Joad’s were already struggling when faced with increased competition from larger farms using the latest methods including tractors, harvesters and paid workers. When they come over the hill, the Joad’s house looks abandoned. Tom and Jim walk together to the Joad’s farm, Tom telling family stories. He compares his disillusionment to Jesus in the wilderness. He says he never meant to, but could not resist temptation, and now, under the burden of guilt, feels himself a hypocrite and has lost his calling.
He says he used to hold meetings, his preaching could inspire people to feel the spirit, but these meetings would inevitably end with him drawing a young woman away from the gathered crowd to have sex with. The driver takes Tom as far as he can, after which Tom walks barefoot in the thick dust until he comes across a man sitting under a tree. His name is Tom Joad and he’s heading for his father’s 40-acre farm. After serving four years, he’s been released for good behaviour. He was drunk at the time and the other man had a knife. He’d killed a man with a shovel during a fight at a dance. Unconcerned, the man tells the driver that he has just been released from McAlester where he was serving a seven-year sentence for homicide.
A little nosy, the truck driver pries into the man’s business. Its ability to travel far beyond its narrow circumstances is achieved through the author’s thorough understanding of the causes of this crisis, his method of showing the tragedy on two scales, small and large, simultaneously, and, above all, his empathy and compassion for his subject which he carries through to the reader.Ī truck driver stops to pick up a hitchhiker, a young man in ill-fitting clothes. Though it tells a story of a particular time and place, it has the power to transcend those limitations because the displacement of a desperate people is a story often repeated in human history. The Grapes of Wrath is one of the more impactful novels of the twentieth century.
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