(April 17, 1939)

On California's highways during the last few years a tourist sometimes encounters a mysterious and appalling sight--thousands of jalopies, driven by hungry-faced men, bulging with ragged children, dirty bedding, blackened pots and pans. Hatred terrorized, necessary, they are migrant workers who harvest the orchards and vineyards, the cotton and vegetable fields of the richest valleys on earth. Their homes are filthy squatters' camps on the side roads beside the rivers and irrigation ditches. Their occupational diseases are rickets, pellagra, dysentery, typhoid, pneumonia, starvation, sullen hatred exploding periodically in bloody strikes. Old American stock, they are mostly refugee sharecroppers from the Dust Bowl of the Southwest and Midwest. They are called the "Oakies." There are 250,000 of them--a leading U.S. social problem, and participants in one of the grimmest migrations of history.

The Grapes of Wrath is the Oakies' saga. It is John Ernst Steinbeck's longest novel (619 pages) and more ambitious than all his other combined (Tortilla Flat, In Dubious Battle, Of Mice and Men, et al.) It is Steinbeck's best novel, i.e., his toughest and tenderest, his roughest written and most mellifluous, his most realistic and, in its ending, his most melodramatic, his angriest and most idyllic. It is "great" in the way that Uncle Tom's Cabin was great--because it is inspired propaganda, half tract, half human interest story, emotionalizing a great theme.