By dramatizing the direness of extreme conditions he was able to save lives.įor Steinbeck to have given the story a happy ending just to make people feel good would have been entirely inappropriate. By showing them in dire straits he hoped to galvanize people into action to come to their aid. People were dying and nobody seemed to care. Steinbeck was in a fury over the neglect of the farm workers. I believe it was Life Magazine who sent him to do the reporting. My recollection is that as he was finishing the novel John had just visited some flooded areas where farm workers had perished due to their shanty towns being flooded from torrential rains. The ending was a clarion call for action by highlighting desperation.

(I'm responding without having read the other responses, so forgive me if I say something redundant.) Jonathan wrote: 'Instead of a positive climax where Tom and the Joad family's future is looking bright, Steinbeck has chosen to end on a tragic note with family struggling and member's missing.Why? ' People, even the poorest and misery stricken among us, are capable of great acts of kindness and selflessness, as evidenced by the sharing of a childless mother's milk with an elderly man. Steinbeck knew exactly what he was doing.Īnd the breast feeding is utterly powerful. The Joad's story continues, and nobody knows how it ends, because the same story is happening right now to millions of people across the planet. Families just get along the best that they can, and most of them live out their lives in humble obscurity, out of sight and out of the public mind. Sure, we get no Hollywood style 'closure' on the plight of the Joads, but that's the point: the Joads are symbolic of many families of the era, even of struggling working folks throughout history, and the ending to that saga is nowhere in sight.

The grapes of wrath goodreads