106 Fun Facts About The Grapes of Wrath

Near which Oklahoma town is the Joad family's farm in The Grapes of Wrath?

Sallisaw: when Tom returns home there from prison, he finds the farm deserted because the bank has evicted the family.

At the start of The Grapes of Wrath, Tom Joad has just been paroled from which prison?

McAlester: Tom got out after four years of a seven-year sentence, but leaving Oklahoma with his family means breaking his parole.

What was Jim Casy's former occupation in The Grapes of Wrath?

Preacher: Casy quit after deciding that 'there ain't no sin and there ain't no virtue', only things people do, some nice and some not.

The Joads make the journey west in what kind of vehicle?

A Hudson sedan converted into a truck: it carries the family all the way to California, but the winter floods finally leave it stalled and useless.

Which highway do the Joads follow west to California in The Grapes of Wrath?

Route 66: Steinbeck's line calling it 'the mother road, the road of flight' popularized the highway's best-known nickname.

Which Joad family member dies on the first evening of the journey west?

Grampa: the family drugged him with soothing syrup to get him to leave, and Casy said he was really 'jus' stayin' with the lan''.

Granma Joad dies while the family is crossing which desert?

The Mojave: Ma kept Granma's death secret all through the night so the family wouldn't be held up before they got across.

Which eldest son leaves the family near Needles, planning to live off fishing on the Colorado River?

Noah: Pa secretly blamed himself for Noah's strangeness, since he had delivered him alone and pulled him out with his bare hands.

Rose of Sharon's husband, who abandons her soon after they reach California, is named what?

Connie Rivers: before vanishing, he says he should have stayed home to learn tractors, the very machines pushing tenant families off the land.

How is Rose of Sharon's name pronounced in the family?

Rosasharn: heavily pregnant, she insists on going out to pick cotton, and when the rain comes she falls ill with a chill.

What lures the Joad family west to California in The Grapes of Wrath?

Handbills promising picking jobs: a returning migrant explains that a contractor wanting 800 pickers prints 5,000 of them, so crowds of jobseekers drive wages down.

Why does a local tractor driver in The Grapes of Wrath knock down tenant farmers' houses?

For three dollars a day: he has a wife and kids to feed, even though, as a tenant tells him, his wage costs whole families their homes.

What is Uncle John's private torment?

Guilt over the death of his young wife: when she complained of stomach pain, he told her she'd just eaten too much, and she died the next day.

The Joads' neighbour who refuses to leave the land even after everyone else is evicted is called what?

Muley Graves: he hides out on his old land dodging the law, and when the Joads leave, Pa asks him to look after two of their dogs.

The clean, government-run camp where the Joads find respite is named what?

Weedpatch: growers send men to start a fight at its Saturday dance so deputies can raid the camp, but the campers' own committee quietly foils the plan.

At the government camp, what startles the two youngest Joad children as they explore the washroom?

A flushing toilet: the camp's washrooms are looked after by the residents' own committee, which even tracks down who keeps using up the toilet paper.

The Joads work as strikebreakers picking which fruit when Casy is killed?

Peaches: the strikebreakers earn a nickel a box, and once the strike is broken the ranch halves the rate to two and a half cents.

With what weapon is Jim Casy killed?

A pick handle: Tom wrenches the club away and kills Casy's attacker with it, then has to go into hiding.

Which child accidentally reveals that Tom is in hiding after killing a man?

Ruthie: during a quarrel with another child, she boasts that her brother has already killed two men, so Tom must leave to avoid capture.

What happens to Rose of Sharon's baby?

It is stillborn: Uncle John sets the tiny body afloat in an apple box on the floodwater, hoping it will show people what is happening to them.

In The Grapes of Wrath's final scene, what does Rose of Sharon do for a starving stranger?

Feeds him her breast milk: after one silent look between them, Ma herds everyone else out of the barn so her daughter can save the dying man.

Which animal's journey across a highway takes up one of The Grapes of Wrath's interchapters?

A land turtle: a truck driver swerves on purpose to hit it, but it only spins off the road, rights itself and crawls on.

Who suggested the title The Grapes of Wrath?

Steinbeck's wife Carol: he credited her drive behind the whole book, dedicating it 'To Carol who willed it'.

The Grapes of Wrath takes its title from a line in which song?

The Battle Hymn of the Republic: Julia Ward Howe wrote her verses in 1861 to fit the tune of the soldiers' marching song John Brown's Body.

In The Grapes of Wrath, what insulting name do Californians call the migrants from the Dust Bowl?

Okies: a man at a roadside camp tells Tom the word once just meant someone from Oklahoma, but in California it means 'you're scum'.

Where The Grapes of Wrath uses its title phrase, what is that chapter about?

Growers destroying food to keep prices up: as the hungry watch crops destroyed, 'in the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling'.

The Grapes of Wrath grew out of The Harvest Gypsies, seven 1936 articles Steinbeck wrote for which paper?

The San Francisco News: reporting for it, Steinbeck toured the camps with camp manager Tom Collins, to whom he later dedicated the novel in part.

Which writer, whose own migrant novel went unpublished until 2004, reportedly had 1938 field notes passed to Steinbeck?

Sanora Babb: once The Grapes of Wrath became a hit, her publisher shelved her novel, fearing the market couldn't bear two books on one subject.

Steinbeck said that with The Grapes of Wrath he had tried to rip what 'to rags'?

A reader's nerves: he also said he wanted to put 'a tag of shame' on the greedy men he blamed for the migrants' plight.

Which two prizes did the novel win in 1940?

It was later cited prominently when Steinbeck won the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Which California county's supervisors banned The Grapes of Wrath from its libraries and schools in August 1939?

Kern: it was the end point of the Joads' fictional journey, and county officials felt the novel portrayed their efforts to help migrants unfairly.

Which growers' group denounced The Grapes of Wrath as 'a pack of lies' and 'communist propaganda'?

The Associated Farmers of California: local leader Bill Camp presided over a public burning of the book, declaring it 'obscene in the extreme'.

Early attempts to suppress The Grapes of Wrath helped inspire American librarians to issue what?

The Library Bill of Rights: meanwhile county librarian Gretchen Knief wrote to her supervisors urging them to reverse the novel's ban.

What does Tom Joad vow when he says goodbye to Ma?

Fight for the hungry and oppressed: he has come to believe, as Casy did, that each person owns only a piece of one big soul.

Why do the Joads leave the government camp?

There's no work nearby: in a month there Tom gets only five days' work, so with food nearly gone Ma pushes the family to move on.

Who directed the 1940 film of The Grapes of Wrath?

John Ford: he had to fight for his own choice to play Tom Joad, as the studio reportedly first considered its contract star Tyrone Power.

Who played Tom Joad in the 1940 film of The Grapes of Wrath?

Henry Fonda: to land the part, he had to give up his freelance status and sign a long-term contract with 20th Century-Fox.

Which actress played Ma Joad in the 1940 film of The Grapes of Wrath?

Jane Darwell: Beulah Bondi had been tested for the part first, yet it was Darwell who went on to win an Oscar as Ma.

Who wrote the screenplay for the 1940 film of The Grapes of Wrath?

Nunnally Johnson: he married Dorris Bowdon, the actress who played Rose of Sharon in the film.

How does the 1940 Grapes of Wrath film end?

It ends with Ma's "We're the people" speech: the film moves the government camp to the end, so the story closes on hope instead of the novel's flood.

In 1989, the 1940 movie of The Grapes of Wrath was among the first 25 titles chosen for what?

The National Film Registry: Congress created it after an outcry over broadcasters colorizing and cutting classic black-and-white films.

Which folk singer retold Tom Joad's story in a two-part 1940 song called 'Tom Joad'?

Woody Guthrie: he wrote it after seeing the film version several times, lifting lines from Tom's farewell speech.

Which rock star released the 1995 album The Ghost of Tom Joad?

Bruce Springsteen: Rage Against the Machine later turned the album's quiet folk title song into a full-band cover in 1997.

Which actor played Tom Joad for all 188 Broadway performances of the Steppenwolf stage adaptation in 1990?

Frank Galati adapted it; one performance was filmed and shown on PBS.

At the Hooverville, what does Ma Joad do when starving children crowd around her cooking?

Leaves them the leftovers: but one boy's mother then storms over and scolds Ma for giving her son a taste of stew his own family can't afford.

In which California town was John Steinbeck born in 1902?

Salinas: he later left Stanford without a degree and moved to New York, taking odd jobs while he tried to write.

Why does Tom Joad put a note in a roadside family grave?

So no one assumes a murder: too poor to pay for a funeral, the family buries the body themselves and leaves a note explaining the death.

Which cinematographer shot the 1940 film of The Grapes of Wrath?

Gregg Toland: he shot many scenes in near darkness, lit by a single lamp or candle, giving the film its documentary gloom.

Alfred Newman's score for the 1940 film is based on which traditional song?

Henry Fonda performs it in the film, and 'Goin' Down the Road Feelin' Bad' is sung at a New Mexico roadside camp.

What did Darryl Zanuck do to defend the Grapes of Wrath film from pro-Communist charges?

Sent private investigators to Oklahoma: they found conditions as bad as the novel described, so Zanuck felt ready to face the red-baiters.

Soviet authorities reportedly pulled The Grapes of Wrath from audiences after noticing what?

Even poor Americans owned cars: Stalin's regime had hoped the story would expose capitalism's misery, but that detail backfired.

Which actor played Jim Casy in the 1940 film of The Grapes of Wrath?

John Carradine played Casy, and off screen he was said to stroll Hollywood Boulevard reciting Shakespeare to anyone who would listen.

Which Alfred Hitchcock film beat The Grapes of Wrath to the Best Picture Oscar for 1940?

Rebecca won, but the Best Picture statuette went to its producer, David O. Selznick, rather than to Hitchcock himself.

Which young man at the Hooverville stands up to a labour contractor, leading to Casy's arrest?

Floyd Knowles presses the contractor for a firm wage, and when a deputy chases him, Casy kicks the deputy unconscious and takes the blame.

Which magazine named The Grapes of Wrath among the 100 best English-language novels published since its own founding?

Time: its critics went back only to 1923, the year the magazine began, so James Joyce's Ulysses, published in 1922, missed the cut.

Which band's song 'Dust Bowl Dance', from the album Sigh No More, is based on The Grapes of Wrath?

Mumford & Sons won British Album of the Year at the 2011 Brit Awards for Sigh No More, and the album's UK sales soared afterwards.

What does Ma Joad tell California's crop inspectors in The Grapes of Wrath to get waved through?

Granma is very sick, Ma insists, and the officers let the loaded vehicle pass unsearched; only at dawn does she admit the old woman had died before the checkpoint, and that she lay beside the body all night.

How do the Joads in The Grapes of Wrath get their oldest man aboard when he refuses to leave?

They drug him to sleep with a dose of soothing syrup and lift him onto the load, after he vows to stay behind and live off the land like a neighbour.

In The Grapes of Wrath, what did Tom Joad use to kill the man who knifed him in a drunken brawl?

A shovel, grabbed after he was stabbed, earned Tom a seven-year sentence for homicide; he served four and insists he would do the same again.

Oklahoma historians link The Grapes of Wrath to a 1946 bid to restore state pride through which sport?

Football was university president George Cross's remedy for the state's battered image: he hired a new coach whose assistant, Bud Wilkinson, took over the team a year later.

What did Steinbeck buy for protection after The Grapes of Wrath brought him a stream of threats?

A handgun was his answer to a backlash that reached his own hometown, where copies of the novel were burned on two occasions.

Which public figure toured migrant camps in 1940 and said The Grapes of Wrath was not exaggerated?

Eleanor Roosevelt also defended the novel in her syndicated column, My Day, admitting that its horrors made her dread each new chapter even though she could not put it down.

Which tale of two ranch hands did Steinbeck publish between In Dubious Battle and The Grapes of Wrath?

Of Mice and Men is the middle book of what is often called his labor trilogy: a strike novel, a ranch tragedy, then the Joads' story, drafted within a single year.

Which rock band recorded a 1997 cover of 'The Ghost of Tom Joad', named for The Grapes of Wrath's hero?

Rage Against the Machine first gave the cover away as a free single packed with a home video, and guitarist Tom Morello later re-recorded the song with its writer.

Which abolitionist poet wrote the 1861 song lyric that gave The Grapes of Wrath its title?

Julia Ward Howe wrote the verses in a Washington hotel in November 1861, and The Atlantic Monthly printed them on its front page the following February.

In The Grapes of Wrath, the Wilsons who team up with the Joads on the way west hail from which state?

Kansas is home to Ivy and Sairy Wilson, who help bury a Joad and then split the loads between the two vehicles so that both can make it over the hills.

When the Wilsons' car breaks down in The Grapes of Wrath, which plan makes Ma Joad threaten the men?

Splitting the family up, even for a day, is the one thing she will not allow: she grabs the jack's steel bar and dares Pa to make her go, and the men back down.

What happens to the Joads' dog at the first fuel stop on the drive west in The Grapes of Wrath?

It is run over on the highway while the family buys gas, the first loss of the journey; they had set out with one dog and left two more with a neighbour.

Which animals do the Joads butcher for the journey just before leaving home in The Grapes of Wrath?

Their pigs are killed and packed as meat for the drive, while Ma sorts through a box of old letters and clippings and burns what she cannot carry.

In The Grapes of Wrath, what does Rose of Sharon's husband plan to study by mail to win a town job?

Radio is the plan, by correspondence course at home after a day job in a store or factory, so the couple can live in town instead of the fields.

In The Grapes of Wrath, what does Tom Joad do to a deputy in pursuit before Casy takes the blame?

Trips him as he gives chase, and when the fallen deputy fires wildly and wounds a woman, Casy kicks him unconscious and waits to be arrested in Tom's place.

In The Grapes of Wrath, why do the Joads flee the squatters' camp the night Casy is arrested?

It is about to be burned: word spreads that the shacks will be torched after dark, so the family loads up and drives out, only to meet armed men at a roadblock.

In The Grapes of Wrath, how does Tom Joad get his drunk Uncle John back before the family flees camp?

Knocks him out cold and carries him back to the others; Uncle John had slipped away to drink up cash he had kept hidden from the family.

Who keeps order inside the clean federal camp where the Joads stay for a month in The Grapes of Wrath?

Committees of residents, elected by the campers themselves, make the rules and keep the peace, and as federal ground the camp is off limits to harassing local deputies.

In The Grapes of Wrath, hired men try to start a riot at which weekly event in the federal camp?

The Saturday night dance is the target: the men are meant to start a fight so that deputies waiting outside can storm in, but the campers spot them and quietly walk them out.

What disaster drives the Joads from their last home in the final chapters of The Grapes of Wrath?

A flood, brought on by days of winter rain, swamps the camp after a falling tree tears open the earth dam the men had built to hold the creek back.

In The Grapes of Wrath's last scene, why has the starving stranger eaten nothing for days?

He gave his son the food, the boy explains, and by the time the child found him some bread his father was too weak to keep it down.

Late in The Grapes of Wrath, the cotton-picking Joads share what kind of home with the Wainwrights?

A railroad boxcar, one half each for two families, is the best home the Joads find in California after the federal camp; for once they can afford proper food and new clothes.

What do Al Joad and Aggie Wainwright announce to both families late in The Grapes of Wrath?

They plan to marry, and when the Joads move on Al stays behind with Aggie's family, one more departure from the household Ma has fought to hold together.

The quarrel that exposes Tom Joad's secret in The Grapes of Wrath starts over a box of which snack?

Cracker Jack, eaten slowly in front of other children, starts the fight; Ma refuses to punish the child, saying she did not know what she was doing, then goes out in the dark to warn Tom.

How is the injured Tom Joad smuggled out of the fruit ranch past the guards in The Grapes of Wrath?

Between two mattresses in the back of the loaded vehicle, he lies hidden as the family drives out at dusk, his broken nose marking him as the man the guards are hunting.

In The Grapes of Wrath's diner chapter, what does waitress Mae sell two migrant boys below price?

Candy sticks go to the boys for a fraction of their price, moments after the cook makes her sell their father a loaf of bread.

In The Grapes of Wrath, what must cotton pickers buy from the grower before they can earn a cent?

A picking sack comes first, charged against the day's pay so that the worker starts in debt, and then the men at the scales are said to rig the weights.

Which songwriter's 'Here Comes That Rainbow Again' retells a diner scene from The Grapes of Wrath?

Kris Kristofferson wrote it from the scene of a waitress's small kindness to a migrant family, and Johnny Cash later made the song the centrepiece of his 1985 album Rainbow.

In 2007 The Grapes of Wrath premiered in Minnesota in which new form, with music by Ricky Ian Gordon?

An opera in three acts, it was commissioned by Minnesota Opera, and a shorter concert version reached Carnegie Hall three years later.

The Joads' journey west in The Grapes of Wrath is often read as a retelling of which biblical book?

Exodus supplies the pattern critics trace through the chapters: bondage and plagues in Oklahoma, a wilderness crossing in which the old die, then a promised land whose people turn hostile.

Oklahoma historians rank The Grapes of Wrath second only to which other best seller of the 1930s?

Gone with the Wind is the one best seller the state's own history encyclopedia puts ahead of it, while early reactions to Steinbeck's novel attacked its decency, accuracy and politics.

Which university did Steinbeck, author of The Grapes of Wrath, leave in 1925 without taking a degree?

Stanford had him for six years of English literature; he then tried New York, failed to get published and came home to California, working as a caretaker at Lake Tahoe.

Whose photos fill 'Their Blood Is Strong', a 1938 pamphlet of reporting behind The Grapes of Wrath?

Dorothea Lange's pictures of migrant families illustrated the pamphlet, which sold ten thousand copies at a quarter each for a society that campaigned for farm workers.

Which marine biologist friend of Steinbeck is said to be the model for Jim Casy in The Grapes of Wrath?

Ed Ricketts, who sold sea specimens to schools from a laboratory in Monterey, also became Doc in Cannery Row, a portrait he is said to have read with exasperation.

Which real camp manager, a dedicatee of The Grapes of Wrath, inspired its character Jim Rawley?

Tom Collins was the first administrator of the federal camp at Arvin, and his reports on its residents were among Steinbeck's chief sources for the novel.

The song line behind The Grapes of Wrath's title draws its winepress image from which book of the Bible?

Revelation pictures an angel gathering the earth's vine into the great winepress of God's wrath, an image of final judgment and of deliverance from oppression.

What did Steinbeck do with 'L'Affaire Lettuceberg', the satire he wrote before The Grapes of Wrath?

Destroyed it, then started over in a more realistic and objective vein, keeping a daily diary of the new book's progress as he wrote.

Under what title was Steinbeck's daily diary of writing The Grapes of Wrath published in 1989?

Working Days, edited by Robert DeMott, came out two decades after Steinbeck's death; he had tracked the novel's progress in its pages day by day as he wrote.

Which New York publisher issued The Grapes of Wrath, soon after editor Pascal Covici joined the firm?

Viking Press signed Steinbeck when Pascal Covici moved there in 1938, after Covici's own firm, which had published Tortilla Flat, failed.

Jim Casy's best-known idea in The Grapes of Wrath is that each person holds a piece of one great what?

Soul is the word: Casy returns from the wilderness believing that all people share a single spirit, and Tom repeats the idea to Ma in the dark before he leaves.

In The Grapes of Wrath's eviction chapter, which institution is called a monster no man can control?

The bank is cast as a creature apart from the men who serve it, which leaves the furious tenants with nobody they can usefully shoot.

At the company store in The Grapes of Wrath, who does Ma Joad say are the only ones that help the needy?

Poor people, she tells the clerk, after he quietly lends her ten cents of his own so she can afford sugar at the store's inflated prices.

When Tom Joad meets Jim Casy again in The Grapes of Wrath, what has Casy decided does not really exist?

Sin and virtue, he has concluded after a spell alone in the wilderness, are only names people give to the things they do.

Late in The Grapes of Wrath, Ma Joad tells Pa that which group bears change more easily?

Women, Ma argues, because they carry their lives in their arms while men carry theirs in their heads, so to a woman change seems only natural.

Chapter 14 of The Grapes of Wrath warns owners to fear the migrants' shift between which two words?

From 'I' to 'we' is the change the narrator warns of: one evicted man is merely bewildered, but two who camp together and share their loss have begun something.

In The Grapes of Wrath, why do growers say federal camp residents will be hard to handle?

They are treated like people there, a small grower admits to Tom, and men who have known clean showers and a little dignity will not go back quietly to the squatters' camps.

In The Grapes of Wrath, one landowner's definition of a 'red' is any worker who asks for what?

Thirty cents an hour, when the growers have just cut the rate to twenty-five: by that test, Tom is told, every picker in the fields is a red.

Which poet's idea that all life is holy does Jim Casy cite over a roadside grave in The Grapes of Wrath?

William Blake put the thought into The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, and Casy, who only half remembers it from a stranger, builds his few words over the dead man around it.

At a junkyard in The Grapes of Wrath, Tom Joad scolds a worker for blaming all his troubles on what?

His missing eye is an excuse Tom refuses to accept, even though the man has just helped him find the engine part that gets the Wilsons moving again.

Jim Casy's initials in The Grapes of Wrath are widely read as a deliberate nod to which figure?

Jesus Christ is the model: Casy goes into the wilderness to think, goes to jail in another man's place and dies standing up for the workers.