Gillian’s Reviews > The Grapes of Wrath > Status Update

This feels like a highly important work to read for anyone working in the agricultural space; I learned that Steinbeck wrote this work originally as a series of articles for the San Francisco news about the plight of migrant farm workers.
It’s insane to me how current this story still feels, how little has changed in the almost 100 years since it’s publishing. Quintessentially American.

I was getting bored with some of this car trouble when BOOM exactly what I suspected and hoped not to hear: that California isnt all its cracked up to be.
and so we perceive the shadow of exploitative labor practices in agriculture
And also I love these chapters that break up the main plot.

The themes Steinbeck deploys—the tenuous, competitive yet necessarily interdependent coexistence between humans and the rest of the natural world and the consequences of this tension in agriculture, cycles of poverty—shine through his prose.
“The bank isn’t like a man.
Yes but the bank is only made of men.
No, you’re quite wrong there…it’s the monster. Men made it, but they can’t control it.”