The Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck

The interweaving of the Joad family's move to California with the transformative agrarian revolution across rural America gives the trials of one, albeit fictional, family a sense of weight and impact. Even created details can convey human experience and the human condition; sometimes little else can. The thrust and impact of Steinbeck's work is deepened as we recognize that his story is simply one among countless others. The toll that the Dust Bowl and industrialization would wreck on the American farmer can, to this day, still only be guessed at. The human cost in lives uprooted, compromised, marginalized, and lost, can never be fully reconciled. It was not so long ago that the prospects of the Joad family were the prospect for hundreds of thousands of Americans - such prospects pervade our world more than we might care to admit.

In creating such a stark and unforgiving portrait of American dispossession, migration, and conflict, the Joads and Preacher Casey have come to transcend the pages to enter a part of the vast American consciousness. Along with Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, Captain Ahab, Jay Gatsby, Atticus Finch, Sal Paradise, and Hester Prynne, these people invade our thoughts and ourselves. Perhaps they are more accurately termed specters: dogging our foot-steps and receding around the unexplored roadway ahead. More than many captains of industry, politicians, war heroes, or social movements, to some extent these created lives shape the very form of our consciousness. Without mass, without tangible reality themselves, they are at once everywhere and nowhere. Perhaps this is what Casey and Tom meant when they wondered if everybody is just one big soul. How else can we explain the passage, the connection, between the lives of others and ourselves? That these people have been read about and cared for, and that they are still with us today, may prove the greatest evidence yet devised for the existence of common threads across the human experience. This commonality folds time; acquainting us not only with our neighbors, but with our predecessors and descendants. The Dust Bowl and the migration have not ended. Surely they have been transformed into something else, but they persist. Both a possession and foundation for each of us.