Why a Booktrail?
1930s: A journey of salvation along route 66
The Grapes of Wrath
What you need to know before your trail
Tom Joad is paroled from McAlester prison, where he had been imprisoned after being convicted of murder.He returns home to Sallisaw, Oklahoma, and meets former preacher Jim Casy, whom he remembers from his childhood, and the two travel together. When they arrive at Tom’s childhood farm home, they find it deserted. The family has gone to stay at Uncle John Joad’s home nearby as the banks have evicted all the farmers.
However Tom finds his family loading their remaining possessions into a truck and preparing to head to California for work.
Traveling west on Route 66, the Joad family find the road crowded with other migrants. Will they ever reach the promised land and what will they find that they have left devastation and poverty and have found something else instead?
Locations
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From Oklahoma to California – along Route 66
The Grapes of Wrath vividly portrays life during the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl in America. It follows a family of Oklahoma tenant farmers traveling west to California along Route 66 and it captures the lives of these migrant farm workers during the Depression.
Despite the gruesome, truly dismal circumstances that they face, the novel explores the strength and goodness of the human spirit.
The novel has, over the years, been banned and burned and then banned again – but bought by many peopleover and over again. It’s true to say that it changed the face of American labour laws and labour in general.
This is a text which continues to be studied in many schools but it is a story of a journey of desperation but one of hope and that iconic Route 66 which means so much to so many people. As well as Los Angeles in California, they head to Bakersfield, Hooverville and Weedpatch
Booktrail Boarding Pass: The Grapes of Wrath
Author/Guide: John Steinbeck Destination: Oklahoma, Route 66, California Departure Time: 1930s
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