In the epic tale of the Joad family's migration from the terror floating in the midst of the Oklahoma Dust Bowl to the "Eden of California", John Steinbeck depicts the lives of ordinary people striving to preserve their humanity in the face of social and economic desperation. When the Joads lose their tenant farm in Oklahoma, they join thousands of others, traveling the narrow concrete highways toward California and the dream of a piece of land to call their own. Each night on the road, they and their fellow migrants recreate the past, and rather, faraway society where leaders are chosen, silent standards of privacy and generosity evolve, and passion, violence, and malicious rage erupt (Bender, 20-25).

Published in 1939, John Steinbeck's novel The Grapes of Wrath drew attention to the hardships faced by the "Okies": poor farmers who

determination and interminable hope for a better life. In The Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck eloquently uses imagery and metaphors to depict the life of the lower class as a struggle. (Noble, 2). Steinbeck views the life of the Joads as both admirable and rough. They, as a lower class family, always keep their eyes on their goal of reaching a better life. This elucidates the true determination and hope that we all have inside for a better life.

Moral, nonetheless, bellowed during the "Roaring Twenties." Most of the American people were living a great life and were able to afford luxury items. It was a time of hope, growth and idealism. In the twenties, industry took one of its longest leaps- technological capabilities nearly doubled. Not only did industry grow, but so did a deeper of science, law, philosophy, and arts. Socially, the world was a one always anticipated (Jones, 4). Nevertheless, in the long run, the country had set itself up to enter the depression, and did so in a way that caused only a vicious circle. The country was in an endless furrow and held itself there. During the depression, the many family farms were foreclosed, which forced them to be driven from their land. The depression caused all to live in extremely poor conditions. The migration would have been significantly easier to trek, had the Depression been avoided. Almost all driven families were faced with dark the underside of capitalism and its uncontrolled poverty, its inhuman greed and human cost, and sense a fractured trust between government and people (Goldston, 4). The book therefore is designed to inform the public of the migrants' plight. It revels even the details of their hardship- how they were starved, in every sense, by California landowners and banks- in order to turn the migrant's only form of sustenance into mere profit. The migrants were cheated out of money and kept from organizing unions (Dellebeke, 4). Steinbeck tried to capture an average family's clash with the powerful and relentless forces of the depression. In his search for the "perfect" family, he found The Joads.

To structure the novel as a journey has many advantages. Characters develop as the settings adjust to the present atmosphere. Readers are exposed to this arrangement in order to gain a more comprehensive view of the impact of these satanic economic forces that truly did contribute to the turbulent American psyche of the 1930's. The reader moves from place to place and scene to scene observing their nationwide effects. As she moves from intercalary chapter to its subsequent application in the Joads' lives and vice versa, a reader can readily transfer meanings from the general to the specific. Readers are able to build up a general picture of the fraying nation out of the jigsaw pieces that are the Joads' journey. The journey structure also serves point of view: what the Joads experience, we experience. They meet good and bad, rumors and certainties, and desert and lush valleys. Journeys also offer readings at deeper levels. In reading, not only do we journey with the Joads, we move with all migrants and even stagger along with humanity (Steinbeck, 50-61).

The camp's history began in 1935 and lasted until 1940, when over one million people left their homes in Oklahoma, Texas, Arkansas and Missouri to escape the wind, dust, and drought caused by the monstrous Dust Bowl (Fanslow, 2). They quickly set out for California on what was referred to then as the "Mother road", Route 66. Route 66 linked Chicago to Los Angeles and rapidly became a heavily traveled channel that connected cities and small towns throughout the Midwest, Southwest and southern California. It was not the first transcontinental highway, nor the most traveled, but it is presently the best known (Fanslow, 3). It was the site of the great migration taken place in The Grapes of Wrath, and came to represent personal freedom and the promise of a better life in the escape from the

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Approximate Word count = 2856
Approximate Pages = 11 (250 words per page double spaced)