Billed as perhaps the greatest of all American novels, John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath offers a vividly painful glimpse into a chapter of American history that is difficult to embrace. Set in the late 1930s, The Grapes of Wrath is the story of the Joad family’s journey westward in pursuit of the American Dream. In the midst of the Oklahoma Dust Bowl during the Great Depression, the tenant farming Joad family is forced off the land and on to the road; the family travels westward to California in hope of a better life. The Joads’ journey to California is meticulously chronicled in Steinbeck’s novel. Desperation, death, murder, hunger, and homelessness plague the family’s journey; the novel overflows with tragedy. The tragedy, however, is tempered by a sense of determination and dignity that Steinbeck instills in the Joads. Steinbeck’s novel unquestionably captures the humanity of the migrants, the relentless pursuit of the American Dream, and the sustained hope that drives the American Dream forward. These are the elements that define the greatness of Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath.

Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath is unique in both its structure and its form. Throughout the novel’s many chapters, multiple voices offering varying perspectives tell the story of the Joads; the way in which the story is told points to Steinbeck’s greatness as an author and the greatness of The Grapes of Wrath as a novel. The narrative chapters, centering on the Joad family, are in chronological order and are told primarily from the third person point of view in vivid detail; the reader is with the Joads, experiencing life and suffering in the Dust Bowl alongside Ma Joad and the Joad clan. Interspersed with the narrative chapters centering on the Joads are interchapters dealing with larger issues that address the social and historical concerns of life in America’s Dust Bowl in the late 1930s, the plight of the migrant workers of California, and the political history of the world at large. These interchapters provide the context through which the Joads’ plight can be viewed. John Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath is a monumental literary work; a work that paints such a remarkably vivid portrait of life during America’s Great Depression that it serves, even decades after its publication, to define an era of American history.

-RLG