The Grapes of Wrath was published by The Viking Press, New York, on 14 April 1939, in a first printing of approximately 50,000 copies priced at $2.75. The novel won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1940 and was a primary factor in Steinbeck’s Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962. It was also banned, burned, and denounced — Oklahoma congressmen called it a “dirty, lying, filthy manuscript”; California Associated Farmers called it “communist propaganda.” It sold 430,000 copies in its first year.
The Novel
The Joad family — Tom (recently paroled from prison), Ma (the family’s granite centre), Pa, the preacher Jim Casy, Rose of Sharon, and a sprawling extended family — are driven from their Oklahoma tenant farm by drought, dust, and the mechanical cotton picker. They join the great westward migration of the Dust Bowl era, heading for California on Route 66 in a broken Hudson Super Six sedan converted to a truck. They expect work and wages; what they find is exploitation, starvation wages, vigilante violence, and the organised hatred of California landowners toward “Okies.”
The novel alternates between the Joads’ specific narrative and intercalary chapters — general, lyrical, sometimes documentary passages that widen the lens from one family to the entire migration. These chapters describe the banks, the used car lots, Route 66, the migrant camps, and the economics of agricultural exploitation with a precision that is simultaneously journalistic and mythic.
Steinbeck’s achievement is to maintain both the particular and the universal — the Joads are vividly individual (Ma’s quiet ferocity, Tom’s slow-burning rage, Rose of Sharon’s transformation from petulant girl to sacrificial figure) while simultaneously representing the 300,000 Dust Bowl migrants who made the same journey.
Reception and Legacy
The novel’s reception was polarised along class and political lines: left-wing critics and the general public embraced it; agricultural interests and political conservatives attacked it furiously. Eleanor Roosevelt defended it publicly. The FBI investigated Steinbeck. California farm owners distributed pamphlets accusing the novel of communist conspiracy.
John Ford’s 1940 film adaptation (starring Henry Fonda as Tom Joad) is a masterpiece in its own right — though it softens the novel’s ending and omits its most radical political content.
Collecting The Grapes of Wrath
First edition (1939, The Viking Press): Approximately 50,000 copies, priced at $2.75.
Identification points:
- “First Published in April 1939” on the copyright page
- Published by The Viking Press
- Beige cloth boards with brown/red lettering
- “First Edition” appears on the copyright page
First edition, first printing:
- Fine/Fine in dust jacket: $10,000–$30,000
- Near Fine in jacket: $5,000–$10,000
- Without jacket: $500–$1,500
Signed copies: Steinbeck signed books with reasonable frequency. Signed first editions: $10,000–$25,000.
Value trajectory (2016–2026): Approximately 1.5× for fine copies in jacket. Steinbeck’s market is mature but stable, with consistent institutional demand.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is the ending really that shocking? The final scene — Rose of Sharon, whose baby has been stillborn, breastfeeding a starving man in a barn — is one of the most powerful and controversial endings in American fiction. Steinbeck was told to remove it; he refused.
Is this communist propaganda? Steinbeck was not a communist, though he was sympathetic to organised labour. The novel is more accurately described as Christian-socialist: its moral framework draws on Biblical imagery (the exodus, the sacrifice, the communion) more than on Marxist theory.
How accurate is the depiction of Dust Bowl migration? Extensively documented as accurate. Steinbeck researched the conditions personally, visiting migrant camps and travelling with the workers. If anything, he understated the worst abuses.