The World of John Steinbeck's Joads

Steinbeck is so closely identified with Oklahoma
that for years even scholars believed, apparently from
internal evidence in the novel, that he had come to
Oklahoma to travel west with the Okies. Jackson R.
Benson, his first real biographer, actually traced his
movements and discovered that he had driven across
the state on U.S. 66, well north of the Joads' route
until Oklahoma City, but did no special research.
Steinbeck did travel with migrant Okies, but only in
California.

Some Oklahomans were aware that Steinbeck
knew absolutely nothing about the Sallisaw area, but
even they concentrated on the general picture of the
collapse of tenant and small farming and the destruc-
tion of a whole class of people and a way of life. Those
who did notice seem, from Martin Shockley's account
in "The Reception of The Grapes of Wrath in Oklaho-
ma," ¹ to have used his errors in description as an
excuse for rejecting the real point. In fact, the official
position in Oklahoma was that big capital was benev-
olent, Oklahoma's agricultural workers were among
the most fortunate in the country, there were no
Joads, and all was for the best -- considering.

Since no Steinbeck critic seems to have bothered
to check on the site of the first two hundred pages of
the novel, I decided to make the journey to eastern
Oklahoma to see what Steinbeck had missed and to
get a sense of what he had been able to infer about
the land and the people from the Oklahomans he had
met in the California fields. What I found, not on any
map or in any photograph I took, but there, between
the lines of the novel where even Steinbeck could not
have suspected it, was a piece of my own past and the
past I share with my forebears and some of my
contemporaries but not with my children. In fact, I
am part of the last generation likely to read or read
about the novel for whom it is not purely historical
and scarcely credible.

Granted, my parents were not migrants, though
they were certainly mobile during the Depression
years; but I was born in the middle of the Dust Bowl.
My family lived for a while in Coffeyville, Kansas,

about sixty miles west of Galena, starting point for
the Wilsons who accompany the Joads from Bethany,
Oklahoma, to Needles, California. My grandparents
and later my parents hid out from the Depression on
hardscrabble farms in Morgan County, Missouri,
back far enough in the woods that, like Winthrop and
Ruthie Joad, I encountered my first flush toilet with
deep suspicion. My father, moreover, had a good
deal in common with Tom Joad, including his distrust
of government and his attachment to family, besides
their age.

Furthermore, although I am not, to Oklahomans,
an Oklahoman, having lived here only twenty-two
years, my roots are in the region, and to bicoastal
types and Yankees of all descriptions, including my
colleagues, I apparently sound, look, and act like
their stylized conception of an Okie. So I had some
idea how it feels -- and an even clearer idea after my
journey through the countryside and through the
novel.

At the beginning of the trip, however, I was only
interested in tracing the route of the Joads. In out-
line, the geography of the first part of the novel is
fairly simple: the narrative begins with Tom Joad
near the end of his journey from McAlester State
Prison northeast to the farm where his family live as
tenants. The land is so flat that a truck travels a mile
to the first turn and the "distance, toward the hori-
zon, was tan to invisibility." ² The dirt and dust are
red; the land is under intense cultivation except
where it is "going back to sparse brush" (37).

Uncle John's farm is near a highway (U.S. ...