Banned Book: The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

Tom Joad is making his way home to his family’s farm in Oklahoma. He has served four years of his seven year sentence for murder. A man stabbed him during a bar fight and Tom retaliated with a shovel. Now he is on parole and the home he thought he would find is empty and broken. The only crop on the farm now is cotton. His Pa, Tom Joad Senior, has moved the family in with their Uncle John. The banks have taken the land and the only choice the family has is to move west to California. A hand bill has been circulating asking for workers. Farmers need people to pick peaches, apples and grapes. There is no work to be had in this part of the country. People are either moving or starving. Tractors are taking over and doing the work of hundreds. The Joads have bought and packed up a truck with all of their belongings. What they couldn’t pack, they sold. Tom has made the decision to go with his family the two thousand miles west, keep his head low and start anew. There’s a new life to be had in California. Or so they have all been told.

                The Grapes of Wrath is an amazingly poignant novel that thoroughly examines the Great Depression and the migration of families to the west during the Dust Bowl. The Joad family is the typical Oklahoma family. All the decisions that are being made are for the good of the family. They sincerely believe that their only option, at this point in their lives, is to move west to California. They have dreams of good paying jobs, white houses and stability. It seems like a dream. A dream they can believe in and pour their hearts into. Then the journey begins and slowly the dream starts to unravel. The truth is being revealed with each mile they travel. More and more people are migrating west. They are one family out of hundreds of thousands of families moving west with the same high hopes and expectations. Fear, hunger and desperation begin to hunt the Joads. It begins to change the Joads and all the people around them.

                In my opinion, it is hard to put into words what Steinbeck did with this novel. In the beginning you are filled with the same kind of expectancy as the Joads. You have high hopes for them and you want them to succeed. Then your heart starts to slowly break when you realize the hardships that they are going to face. Reading this now as an adult, opposed to the teenager I was the first time I read this novel, it’s terrifying. I could never imagine having to make the decisions that the Joads had to make. The idea of watching my child starve or suffer in this manner is unbearable. The Grapes of Wrath was hard for me to read at times because of all the emotions I was experiencing. Especially that sense of hopelessness that becomes overwhelming. This was so ingeniously written with the Joads as the center point but with moments during the narration when you were made aware of other occurrences. Just beautifully put together.

                Now this book was published in 1939. At that time the book was actually burned by a public library in East St. Louis and banned from a library Kansas City, Mo for its vulgar use of words. This novel has been challenged and banned for religious reasons like taking the Lord’s name in vain and because of its description of a preacher who lost its way. It saddens me when a story so full of life and descriptions of hardships are ridiculed for something as minor as foul language. Look beyond the script to find the deeper meaning in the text. I’m sure the last thing Steinbeck wanted anyone to focus on in the over four hundred page novel is the word “Bitch” and “Goddamn.” If anyone reading this book couldn’t handle the language within, they probably wouldn’t have been able to handle the hardships and life lessons experienced within these pages.

 http://www.ala.org/bbooks/frequentlychallengedbooks/classics/reasons      Retreived 06/27/2014