2006 Penguin classics edition (fair use)

(12) JOHN STEINBECK –

THE GRAPES OF WRATH (1939)

Okies on a road trip to California! Also, a proposed contender for the Great American Novel – not bad for a novel that is arguably the ultimate road movie plot. Not so sure about that weird breast-feeding scene at the end, though.

Oh, who am I kidding? I’d have all road movies end with weird breast-feeding scenes – and start with them or have them throughout, really.

The Grapes of Wrath is summed up in its famous quote of Highway 66 as “the mother road” of an almost chosen people to a half-promised land in California:

“Highway 66 is the main migrant road, 66 – the long concrete path across the country, weaving gently up and down on the map, from the Mississippi to Bakersfield – over the red lands and the gray lands, twisting up into the mountains, crossing the Divide and down into the bright and terrible desert, and across the desert to the mountains again, and into the rich California valleys, 66 is the path of a people in flight, refugees from dust and shrinking ownership, from the desert’s slow northward invasion, from the twisting winds that that howl up out of Texas, from the floods that bring no richness to the land and steal what little richness is there. From all of these the people are in flight, and they come into 66 from the tributary side roads, from the wagon tracks and the rutted country roads. 66 is the mother road, the road of flight.”

Steinbeck was a quintessentially Californian writer, which makes it perhaps stranger that he has always struck me as a Biblical writer, albeit in a secular sense. By that, I’m talking Old Testament, where God’s wrath is always just around the corner and anything good only happens, if at all, on payment or penalty of sacrifice – in blood, sweat, or tears (or some combination of all or any of them).

It reminds me of an old gag about the punchline if Hemingway told the joke why the chicken crossed the road – to die, in the rain – although Steinbeck would probably have it lay an egg first.

“Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord:
He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;
He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword:
His truth is marching on.”

Many have noted the Biblical or Christian imagery in The Grapes of Wrath – that breast-feeding scene replicates a pieta for one – from the title onwards.  Yes, I know the title is from The Battle Hymn of the Republic, but those in turn refer to the Book of Apocalypse with “the great winepress of the wrath of God”.

“John Steinbeck’s works have become popular school study media and are still read today, traumatizing generations of American teens” – particularly The Grapes of Wrath, although schools tend to skip in-depth discussion of that breast-feeding scene.