Analysis Of The Grapes Of Wrath

John Steinbeck wrote The Grapes of Wrath and had it published in 1939. Tom Joad, the main character, and his family lost their farm and sold all of their belongings to move to California. Before they reached west the family and Jim Casy encountered many hardships just to come to many more and also bad weather. The Joads finally settle into a nearby cottonfield where the pay was better and save a near-dead man with Rose of Sharon’s, a cow that just gave birth to a stillborn baby, milk. The story takes place during the Great Depression on a trip from Oklahoma to California. Some of the characters from the story include Jim Casy, a preacher who has given up on his calling, Rose of Sharon, a female cow, and Ma and Pa Joad. The novel has many prominent themes like shifting family and gender roles, environmentalism, and unity (“Steinbeck in the Schools”).

The first reason is that the novel captures millions of American lives that were crushed by the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression (“Steinbeck in the Schools”). For example the novel teaches a significant event in our nation's national history and how some people could have been affected around this time. The second reason is that Steinbeck showed mankind’s disrespect for the earth and the penalties we pay for thinking the things we do are invisible and don’t affect the world (“The Grapes of Wrath…”). This is important because, if you don’t know that if you “hurt the Earth” it can affect many of things. Steinbeck shows this in the novel. There are even more benefits of reading this novel, but some say