
In Steinbeck's Pulitzer-winning masterpiece, the Joad family's desperate migration during the Great Depression became America's conscience. Banned yet beloved, this novel sparked real policy change and remains in Time's 100 Best Novels. What injustice might it awaken in you?
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The wind picks up, carrying particles that darken the sky until the sun shows red through it. A great dust storm descends, blanketing everything in its path. Men stand silent by their fences, watching their dust-covered corn wither. Women watch the men anxiously, knowing they'll endure as long as the men's resolve holds. This environmental catastrophe transforms not just the land but an entire economic system. Tenant farmers who worked these acres for generations suddenly find themselves displaced by tractors and banks. The owners speak coldly: "A bank or a company can't breathe air. They breathe profits." When families protest that their grandfathers killed Indians for this land, that they themselves bled here, the owners remain unmoved: "The bank is something more than men. It's the monster." Behind the tractors come disks and harrows, slicing the earth methodically, without passion. The connection between man and earth is severed as the land gradually dies under iron because "it was not loved or hated, it had no prayers or curses." Tom Joad returns from prison to find his family home abandoned, the door swinging open in the wind. Along the way, he encounters Jim Casy, a former preacher who baptized him years ago. Casy explains his spiritual crisis and new philosophy that perhaps all men share one big soul. When Tom finally reunites with his family, the emotional anchor is Ma Joad - a woman who has "mounted pain and suffering like steps into a high calm." She confides her fear that prison might have made Tom "poisoned mad" like Pretty Boy Floyd, whom she knew as a good boy before being hunted "like a coyote." The family prepares for their westward journey with methodical precision - slaughtering pigs, carefully selecting kitchen items, burning treasured possessions that can't be carried.