The Role Of Slavery In The Grapes Of Wrath By John Steinbeck

One of the main unintended consequences of employing one man to drive the tractor was a loss of contact to the land. The land owners became completely separated from their land. The people who farmed in the same way as the Joads lived for the land, and they lived because of the land. This relationship between farmer and land was destroyed due to the introduction of the tractor to the land. Land owners no longer knew when they needed to give the land a break, and for this reason many pieces of land became totally dust and truly became unformidable to any type of farming.

The Grapes of Wrath John Steinbeck was an author whose stories often showed the suffering and oppression that certain groups such as migrant workers were forced to endure. It was during the Modernist Period of English literature, that he wrote The Grapes of Wrath, one of his most famous novels. It was published in 1939, and became one of his most popular works despite all the criticism it generated and is regarded as one the most important books about the Great Depression (Routledge). The Grapes of Wrath begins with the protagonist Tom Joad on his way home after being released from prison where he was serving his sentence for manslaughter. Since he is only on parole, he is not allowed to leave the state.

In the beginning of 1919, Steinbeck was accepted to the University of Stanford. Later, in 1925, he left without a degree. He wrote lots of short stories and articles for the College's newspaper. Steinbeck moved to New York to write, but had to support himself by being a construction worker. He started writing for the New York American, but didn't make enough, so had to keep his construction job.

During a summer vacation he took a year and half off from his studies, where he worked as a labourer. This is where he got his first experience as a migrant worker. He went back to Stanford University and in 1925 he dropped out without a degree and went to New York. His parents wanted him to have a respectable job as a lawyer; but with no degree it was inevitable that he would fail. He grasped a job as a construction worker, but was laid off.

Berry does prove his thesis by showing that modernization has a hand in the destruction in the farming culture. He stated that as the society’s technology improves their way of life we seem to forget the significance of the common knowledge about the land. Also he looks down of the competition within the culture who are competing with one another. He despises the fact that some small farmer cannot compete with the bigger farms because small farms lack money, resources and manpower to keep up. All of this replaces the distraction of the farming culture today.

Passing on a love of reading and writing to her son, from the age of 14 Steinbeck wanted to be a writer. After graduating high school, Steinbeck enrolled at Stanford in 1919; however, by 1925 he left college without receiving a degree. After a brief stay in New York, Steinbeck returned to California where he released his first novel Cup of Gold (1929). Many more novels were published including his first real success Tortilla Flats (1935), followed by Of Mice and Men (1937), and his most renowned work The Grapes of Wrath (1939). Written only a few years after the height of the Great Depression, the novel won Steinbeck a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1940, for portraying the hardships faced by migrant workers in California.

F. Scott Fitzgerald once said, “You don’t write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say” (qtd. in Goodreads). In Fitzgerald's life he overcame many obstacles such as alcoholism and his wife going to an insane asylum, but tragedy often creates the most spectacular writers. His skill is seen in almost every piece he produced,which in turn created a legend. F. Scott Fitzgerald revolutionized American literature through his accurate portrayal of the 1920’s.

Around the late 19th century displeasurable and unfair actions have been acted toward farmers, working men, and minorities. The Industrialist took advantage of their lack of power, and bribed government officials and pursed corruption actions towards laborers. However, the loudest voice of the group was the Agrarian workers and American Farmers. Ask yourself, was the farmers outcry's pure pointless complaints towards Industrialist malicious actions or potential abuse that impedes an unbalanced industrialized society? Farmers were falling into unprofitable production and debt using all the profit innovating machines the government encouraged them to use.

The peasants of the middle ages were farmers, servants, and carpenters. They would work all jobs to provide for their family. According to Dianne Zarlengo “Their class formed the economic back bone for the society” (10). Peasants were not able to choose the life they wanted to live. “Even though the burdened peasant class largely accepted their harsh life as a way to cleanse their souls and help pave the way to eternal salvation, peasants revolted occasionally” (Zarlengo 13).

A sharecropper had “no entitlement to the land that he cultivated,” and was forced “to work under any conditions” that his landowner enforced (Wilson 798). Many landowners viewed sharecropping as a way to elude the now barred possession of slaves while still maintaining field hands for labor in an inexpensive and ample manner. The landowners watched over the sharecroppers and their every move diligently, with harsh supervision, and pressed the sharecroppers to their limits, both mentally and physically. Not only were the sharecroppers just given an average of one-fourth of their harvest, they had “one of the most inadequate incomes in the United States, rarely surpassing more than a few hundred dollars” annually (Wilson 30). Under such trying conditions, it is not hard to see why the sharecroppers struggled to maintain a healthy and happy life, if that could even be achieved.