"Cliff Notes - Grapes of Wrath, The" - читать интересную книгу автора (Cliff Notes)

MOJAVE The California desert traversed by Route 66. Granma Joad died on the truck while the Joads were crossing it.

NEEDLES A town on the California state line. It's where state troopers "welcomed" the migrants to California.

OKIES A less-than-affectionate term for migrants. Basically, it means you're a son of a bitch and I hate your guts.

PURTY BOY FLOYD A notorious killer of the 1930s. Ma knew his mother. Ma hopes that imprisonment didn't turn Tom bitter, as it did Pretty Boy.

ROUTE 66 The main highway west out of the Dust Bowl to California. In the 30s it was called the Migrant Road.

SALLISAW The town nearest the Joads' Oklahoma home.

SAM BROWNE The name of a broad leather belt worn by troopers. To the migrants it became a symbol of oppression.

SANDRY The deranged, Jesus-loving woman who scares the daylights out of Rose of Sharon at the government camp. Mrs. Sandry makes the poor girl think her baby will burn in hell.

THOMAS The farmer who's forced to pay workers less than they're worth. He informs Tom and the Wallaces that local hoodlums intend to disrupt the dance on Saturday night.

TULARE COUNTY Fruit-growing region in California. The Hooper Ranch is located there.

TURNBULL The man Tom Joad killed in a drunken brawl. Afterward Tom went to prison for four years.

WAINWRIGHT Family residing with the Joads in the same boxcar. Mrs. Wainwright assists Rose of Sharon in childbirth. Al Joad is engaged to Aggie Wainwright.

WALLACE Name of father and son who invite Tom Joad to work with them on a pipe-laying job near the government camp.

WEEDPATCH Nearest town to the government camp.

WILSON Sairy and Ivy Wilson join the Joad entourage for part of the trip from Oklahoma. Grampa dies in the Wilsons' tent; Tom and Al repair the Wilsons' old Dodge.


When The Grapes of Wrath was published in 1939, questions were raised about the accuracy of Steinbeck's portrayal of the migrants in California. What follows are two excerpts from articles written at the time.

The first appeared in Fortune magazine during the same month that The Grapes of Wrath was published.

The migrants are familiar enough to anyone who has traveled much through California's interior.... They have become California's sorest social problem. More, they are one of the major social problems of the U.S. ...

Many of the migrants live in dirty roadside tourist camps, labor contractors' camps, or privately run tenting grounds, where the rents may be as high or higher but the equipment is more primitive. Some live in squatter camps. Conditions in these shelters are notoriously squalid, particularly in the Imperial Valley, which offers the absolute low for the entire state...

Many of the families camping along the irrigation ditches were using dishwater for drinking purposes as well as using the side of the ditch as a toilet. In February a child from one of these families was taken to the County Hospital with spinal meningitis. There had been no quarantine and the other members of the family were mixing with their neighbors. Children dressed in rags, their hands encrusted with dirt, complexions pasty white, their teeth quite rotted, were observed in these camps.

"'I Wonder Where We Can Go Now'," Fortune (April 1939)

The next excerpt was written by a newspaperman from San Francisco.

The experiences of the Joad family, whose misfortunes in their trek from Oklahoma to California Steinbeck portrays so graphically, are not typical of the of the real migrants I found in the course of two reportorial tours of the agricultural valleys. I made one inquiry during the winter of 1937-38, following the flood which Steinbeck describes; I made another at the height of the harvest this year.

Along three thousand miles of highways and byways, I was unable to find a single counterpart of the Joad family. Nor have I discovered one during fifteen years of residence in the Santa Clara Valley (the same valley where John Steinbeck now lives), which is crowded each summer with transient workers harvesting the fruit crops. The lot of the "fruit tramp" is admittedly no bed of roses, but neither is it the bitter fate described in The Grapes of Wrath.