The Pridi Banomyong Library Rare Book Room, Thammasat University, Tha Prachan campus, owns a number of rare and useful items of potential interest to students and researchers, especially those interested in history, literature, education, political science, Asian studies, and related subjects.

Among them is the novel The Grapes of Wrath

by the American author John Steinbeck.

The TU Library collection includes several other books by and about Steinbeck.

The Grapes of Wrath is set during the Great Depression and describes how an impoverished family of tenant farmers is driven from their Oklahoma home by drought, economic hardship, agricultural industry changes, and bank foreclosures.

They travel to California, looking for work, land, dignity, and a future, but they encounter more problems.

The Grapes of Wrath is a useful reminded for international readers that although America is considered a rich country, its capitalist society ensures that many people are starving.

According to statistics, in 2023, more than 47 million people in the US face hunger, including 20 percent of all US children.

Millions of people in the US do not have enough food to eat or lack access to healthy food.

During an economic crisis such as the Great Depression, described in Grapes of Wrath, these problems become even more serious.

The novel remains famous because a moving film version was made, directed by John Ford.

The title of the novel refers to the Book of Revelations in the Bible, which is quoted in the Civil War and song The Battle Hymn of the Republic.

In both sources, grapes are crushed by the anger or wrath of God.

This symbolizes that justice will be delivered, sooner or later.

In the novel, the grapes symbolize the migrant workers fighting back against the capitalist systems that oppress them.

The Grapes of Wrath is a critique of capitalism that gives a voice to the Americans affected by the Dust Bowl.

Steinbeck based the novel on his visits to migrant camps and tent cities, and the book was widely welcomed by working-class readers.

More generally, the phrase grapes of wrath may refer to an unjust situation, an oppressive action, policy, or situation that can lead to a desire for vengeance.

It may also mean a response to oppression, where rightness and justice will prevail.

Steinbeck told his literary agent that he liked the title because it is a march, and this book is a kind of march – because it is in our own revolutionary tradition.

Here is an excerpt from The Grapes of Wrath, as posted online:

The cars of the migrant people crawled out of the side roads onto the great cross-country highway, and they took the migrant way to the West. In the daylight they scuttled like bugs to the westward; and as the dark caught them, they clustered like bugs near to shelter and to water. And because they were lonely and perplexed, because they had all come from a place of sadness and worry and defeat, and because they were all going to a new mysterious place, they huddled together; they talked together; they shared their lives, their food, and the things they hoped for in the new country.

Thus it might be that one family camped near a spring, and another camped for the spring and for company, and a third because two families had pioneered the place and found it good. And when the sun went down, perhaps twenty families and twenty cars were there. In the evening a strange thing happened: the twenty families became one family, the children were the children of all. The loss of home became one loss, and the golden time in the West was one dream. And it might be that a sick child threw despair into the hearts of twenty families, of a hundred people; that a birth there in a tent kept a hundred people quiet and awestruck through the night and filled a hundred people with the birth-joy in the morning.

A family which the night before had been lost and fearful might search its goods to find a present for a new baby. In the evening, sitting about the fires, the twenty were one. They grew to be units of the camps, units of the evenings and the nights. A guitar unwrapped from a blanket and tuned—and the songs, which were all of the people, were sung in the nights. Men sang the words, and women hummed the tunes. Every night a world created, complete with furniture—friends made and enemies established; a world complete with braggarts and with cowards, with quiet men, with humble men, with kindly men. Every night relationships that make a world, established; and every morning the world torn down like a circus.

At first the families were timid in the building and tumbling worlds, but gradually the technique of building worlds became their technique. Then leaders emerged, then laws were made, then codes came into being. And as the worlds moved westward they were more complete and better furnished, for their builders were more experienced in building them. The families learned what rights must be observed—the right of privacy in the tent; the right to keep the past black hidden in the heart; the right to talk and to listen; the right to refuse help or to accept, to offer help or to decline it; the right of son to court and daughter to be courted; the right of the hungry to be fed; the rights of the pregnant and the sick to transcend all other rights.

 […] There grew up government in the worlds, with leaders, with elders. A man who was wise found that his wisdom was needed in every camp; a man who was a fool could not change his folly with his world. And a kind of insurance developed in these nights. A man with food fed a hungry man, and thus insured himself against hunger. And when a baby died a pile of silver coins grew at the door flap, for a baby must be well buried, since it has had nothing else of life. An old man may be left in a potter’s field, but not a baby.

A certain physical pattern is needed for the building of a world—water, a river bank, a stream, a spring, or even a faucet unguarded. And there is needed enough flat land to pitch the tents, a little brush or wood to build the fires. If there is a garbage dump not too far off, all the better; for there can be found equipment—stove tops, a curved fender to shelter the fire, and cans to cook in and to eat from. And the worlds were built in the evening. The people, moving in from the highways, made them with their tents and their hearts and their brains. In the morning the tents came down, the canvas was folded, the tent poles tied along the running board, the beds put in place on the cars, the pots in their places.

(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)