The purpose of this paper is to introduce, discuss, and analyze the book "The Grapes of Wrath" by John Steinbeck. Specifically it will contain a book review on the book. Steinbeck's classic novel of poverty, the Great Depression, the Dustbowl, and inequity is especially poignant today, when so many Americans are facing their own form of the Great Depression with a depressed economy, mortgage foreclosures, and high energy prices. The book follows the hapless Joad family as they lose their farm in the Midwest and make their way to California in hopes of making a new life for themselves during the 1930s.
             The Joad family is dirt poor, and much of the book chronicles their struggle to get across the country in a broken-down car they can barely afford to fix. They lost family members along the way, learn that California is not the "promised land" they were led to believe, and learn they will still have to live in poverty and despair once they reach the fields of California, because the wages are barely wages at all, and there are too few jobs for too many people. Another picker tells him, "Ten hours for a dollar an' a half, an' ya can't stay on the place. Got to burn gasoline getting' there" (Steinbeck 245). Tom attempts to form the workers into a union to gain better wages, and that makes him an enemy of the growers, and ultimately the law, even though the law is corrupt and Tom's motives are all just and pure.
             Steinbeck's main theme of this book are the many inequities of life between the rich (the growers and the bankers) and the poor (Tom and the other agricultural workers), and how Tom simply cannot overlook these differences. Steinbeck writes, "And in the south he saw the golden oranges hanging on the trees, the little golden oranges on the dark green trees; and guards with shotguns patrolling the lines so a man might not pick an orange for a thin child, oranges to be dumped if the price was low" (Steinbeck 234). The peopl...