It’s a novel about migrant workers escaping environmental catastrophe, being subjected to racist abuse and robbed of their dignity and basic rights by extreme poverty. It has the ingredients of a contemporary narrative of forced migration driven by climate change but The Grapes of Wrath was written during the Great Depression and the mass displacement of farming families by drought, floods and the dust bowl in south-west America. The dust bowl migration was the largest in America’s history with the number of migrants reaching 2.5 million by 1940. John Steinbeck immersed himself in the migrant experience and had already published two books, In Dubious Battle (1936) and Of Mice and Men (1937), about the labouring class in California. But The Grapes of Wrath became his towering achievement with the physical toll of writing 260,000 words in a year nearly finishing him as a writer. During one of his long trips along migration routes he witnessed deplorable conditions in migrant camps in the valley of Visalia, California, where he tried to assist starving workers marooned by floods, knee deep in mud and lacking basic sanitary facilities. He invested the seething anger induced by these experiences into his writing and said ‘I’ve done my damndest to rip a reader’s nerves to rags’. In his introduction to the book, academic Robert De Mott describes its mission to expose:
“the entrenched power, wealth, authority and consequent tyranny of California’s industrialized agricultural system (symbolized by Associated Farmers, Inc.) which produced flagrant violations of the migrant’s civil and human rights and ensured their continuing peonage, their loss of dignity through threats, reprisals and violence…”.
The market as ‘monster’
