This is the story of the Joads, a family of Oklahoma sharecroppers. Unless you've spent a good deal of time in the rural South and Southwest, you've probably never met anybody like them. They have strong feelings, and when you see all they have to endure, you end up admiring them.
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As the story begins, Tom Joad, a young man of about thirty, is hitch-hiking home to his parents" farm in Oklahoma. He is dressed in cheap new clothes, for he has just been released from prison, on parole, after serving four yeas of a seven years" sentence for homicide. During a drunken brawl at a community dance, Tom, in retaliation for being knifed, had killed his assailant with a blow from a shovel. Not far from his destination, however, he is forced to rest in the shade of a willow tree; the heat is intense, the drought fierce, and thick dust powders the wilting corn and spurts up beneath his feet. There he meets a man who remembers him as a boy, who had, in fact, baptized him. Jim Casy, for years a preacher, has left his vocation, he tells Tom, because he has had grave misgivings about his motives and because, during the time he has been thinking things over, he has become convinced that all men have one great soul of which each individual has a small bit for himself. .
Casy accompanies Tom to his parents" farm, but when the two men reach the Joad place they find it deserted, the house falling down and cotton planted in the dooryard. From a neighbour, Muley Graves, they learn that the Joads (Tom's family) have been thrown off their farm by the bank that owns the land. And that the long drought has made farming unprofitable. Also that they are temporarily boarding at his Uncle John's farm, from which he too is being evicted and that they are all planning to migrate westward to find a new home and a new livelihood. The drought has become worse, the crops are failing, and the banks are not only evicting families from their farms, but bringing in tractors that can do the work of fifteen families apiece.
