Steinbeck, Race, and Route 66 in The Grapes of Wrath

Abstract:Despite its advocacy for tenant farmers, laborers, Okies, and other poor migrants across the United States, John Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath seemingly ignores the Black Americans among them and effectively erases the history of African Americans even as it elevates Route 66 and the overlooked and forgotten trials and tribulations of White, rural, faming families who lived along it. This article surveys the state of scholarship on Steinbeck’s relation to racism and racial issues, and sets the novel’s depiction of African Americans in historical and well as critical contexts. In its bulk, the article examines one crucial historical fact that Steinbeck omits from his epic tale of the Joad family emigrating from Oklahoma: the many all-Black towns situated along Route 66 and its “tributary side roads” featured in the novel. Ultimately, readers of Steinbeck learn about the contexts that Steinbeck ignores but that nonetheless provide an opportunity to highlight with the fame he’s brought to the so-called “Mother Road.”