The Grapes of Wrath is a novel by John Steinbeck. Published April 14, 1939 in New York, it is considered the masterpiece of the American writer, Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962.

The story tells of the epic story of the ‚biblical‘ transmigration of the Joad family, which is forced to abandon its farm in Oklahoma aboard a truck and – through the Texas Panhandle, New Mexico and Arizona, along Route 66 – groped to settle in California, where he hopes to rebuild a future. In the same situation there are hundreds of other families, evicted from the houses where they had lived for generations because the banks to which they had asked for the loans do not renew the credits and confiscate the land by sending the „tractors“ to level everything, including wooden houses.

I repeat that the bank is something more than a human being. He is the monster. They did men, yes, but men can’t keep it under control.

The story begins with Tom, who has just been released on parole with a special prison permit – where he has already served four of the seven years he was sentenced for killing a man who stabbed him. He returns home crossing a desolate landscape of aridity and torrential rains that ruin yet another harvest and that herald the impending misery. With his family he decides to leave Oklahoma to try his luck in the West. They take a long journey aboard a truck along Route 66 to California after reading a job search flyer.

During the long and exhausting journey they meet other families of emigrants and occasionally camps to finally reach the threshold of California.

-linate