The Grapes of Wrath

Steinbeck follows one Dust Bowl family the whole length of Route 66. Driven off their land near Sallisaw in eastern Oklahoma, the Joads load a truck and drive west through Oklahoma City, the panhandle and the desert, across the Colorado River at Needles, over the mountains and down into the California Central Valley, where the promised work turns out to be hunger and hostility. The map is that migration, a real highway from Oklahoma to a government camp near Bakersfield.

Tom Joad

The Joad farm near Sallisaw

Oklahoma

The book opens on the dust-choked farms near Sallisaw, where drought, the banks and the tractors have driven the tenant families off the land. Tom Joad comes home from prison to find his family packing to leave. This ruined ground is what the whole journey is a flight from.

Chapters 1-10

inferred The Joads' farm is fictional, but the novel places it in the cotton country near Sallisaw, in Sequoyah County, eastern Oklahoma. The pin marks a representative point by the real town, not a documented farm.

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