The Grapes of Wrath

The Grapes of Wrath is the title of John Steinbeck's 1939 novel, drawn from Julia Ward Howe's "Battle Hymn of the Republic." The phrase "grapes of wrath" functions as the novel's central symbol, representing the growing anger of dispossessed migrant workers that will eventually be harvested in a reckoning against the oppressive economic system. The title was chosen by Steinbeck's first wife, Carol, on September 2, 1938, and Steinbeck immediately recognized it as "a wonderful title," believing it gave the book "being at last." The novel's title page reproduces the first verse of Howe's song, which includes the line "He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored." Within the novel's text, the phrase is explicitly invoked in chapter 25, where Steinbeck writes that "in the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage." This climactic usage transforms the biblical and martial imagery into a prophecy of social upheaval, making the title not merely a label but a thematic summation of the novel's political and emotional arc.

Origin and Selection of the Title

The title was not Steinbeck's original choice. His wife, Carol Henning Steinbeck, discovered the phrase on September 2, 1938, while the novel was still untitled. Steinbeck recorded in his daily journal (later published as Working Days: The Journals of The Grapes of Wrath, 1938-1941) that he thought it "a wonderful title." He considered it "Carol's best title so far," and his drama agent, Annie Laurie Williams, exulted, "Tell Carol she is a whiz at picking titles and she has done it again with the new one." The title derives from the second verse of Julia Ward Howe's abolition song "The Battle Hymn of the Republic," first published in The Atlantic Monthly in February 1862: "Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord; / He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored." Steinbeck, a loyal Rooseveltian New Deal Democrat, liked the song "because it is a march and this book is a kind of march—because it is in our own revolutionary tradition and because in reference to this book it has a large meaning," he announced on September 10, 1938, to Elizabeth Otis, his New York literary agent. The novel's dedication reads "To CAROL who willed it," permanently recording her role as the title's originator. Steinbeck insisted that the novel be "keyed into the American scene from the beginning" by reproducing all the verses of "Battle Hymn," though Viking Press compromised by printing only the first page of Howe's sheet music on the book's endpapers.

Biblical and Literary Roots

The phrase "grapes of wrath" has deep biblical antecedents. It echoes Deuteronomy 32:32-33, where the grapes of the wicked are described as "grapes of gall, their clusters are bitter; their wine is the poison of serpents, and the cruel venom of asps." More directly, it alludes to Revelation 14:18-20, where an angel gathers the vine of the earth and casts it into "the great winepress of the wrath of God." Steinbeck's use of the phrase thus connects the contemporary suffering of Dust Bowl migrants to an apocalyptic tradition of divine judgment. The novel's structure itself mirrors this biblical arc: the Joad family's journey from Oklahoma to California parallels the Exodus of the Israelites, and the promised land of California becomes a place of exploitation rather than deliverance. The title's power lies in its fusion of agricultural imagery (grapes, vintage, harvest) with moral outrage (wrath), suggesting that the oppression of the poor will inevitably produce a violent reckoning.

The Title's Thematic Function in the Novel

The phrase "grapes of wrath" appears explicitly only once in the novel's text, in chapter 25, one of the intercalary chapters that provide a broader social and economic context for the Joads' personal story. In this chapter, Steinbeck describes the deliberate destruction of food to maintain prices—oranges sprayed with kerosene, potatoes dumped in rivers, pigs slaughtered and buried—while starving people watch. The passage builds to a crescendo: "There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success." Then comes the climactic sentence: "In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage." This is the novel's most direct statement of its political thesis: that systemic injustice, when it reaches a certain threshold, will generate an inevitable backlash. The "grapes of wrath" are not merely individual anger but a collective, organic force that ripens over time, much like the fruit that is being wasted. The image suggests that the harvest of this wrath is not a matter of choice but of natural law—when the grapes are full, they must be pressed.

The Title as a Reader-Response Mechanism

Steinbeck designed the novel to have a maximum affective impact on its audience, and the title is a key part of that strategy. He told his editor, Pascal Covici, on January 16, 1939: "I've done my damndest to rip a reader's nerves to rags, I don't want him satisfied." The title primes the reader for an experience that is not comfortable or reassuring but confrontational and unsettling. Steinbeck's participatory aesthetic—what he called his "new method" of fictional technique—linked writer, text, and reader to ensure that the audience would be emotionally and politically engaged. The title's martial and biblical resonance prepares the reader for a story that is both a specific family chronicle and a universal allegory of injustice and resistance. As Louis Owens has noted, the novel operates on at least four simultaneous levels: "On one level it is the story of a family's struggle for survival in the Promised Land. On another level it is the story of a people's struggle, the migrants. On a third level it is the story of a nation, America. On still another level, through the allusions to Christ and those to the Israelites and Exodus, it becomes the story of mankind's quest for profound comprehension of his commitment to his fellow man and to the earth he inhabits." The title "The Grapes of Wrath" encompasses all these levels, functioning as a lens through which the personal becomes political and the historical becomes mythic.

The Title's Cultural Legacy

The phrase "grapes of wrath" has entered the American lexicon as a shorthand for the anger of the dispossessed. It has been invoked in contexts ranging from labor movements to environmental activism, and it continues to resonate in discussions of economic inequality and social justice. The novel's title has also inspired numerous adaptations and homages, including Woody Guthrie's song "The Ballad of Tom Joad," Bruce Springsteen's album The Ghost of Tom Joad, and Ken Kesey's novel Sailor Song, whose hero prizes the book among his collection of classic American works. The title's enduring power lies in its ability to condense a complex social critique into a single, unforgettable image—one that combines the natural cycle of growth and harvest with the human capacity for moral outrage. As Steinbeck wrote in chapter 14, in a passage that could serve as a gloss on the title: "This you may say of man—when theories change and crash, when schools, philosophies, when narrow dark alleys of thought, national, religious, economic, grow and disintegrate, man reaches, stumbles forward, painfully, mistakenly sometimes. Having stepped forward, he may slip back, but only half a step, never the full step back." The "grapes of wrath" represent that forward movement, however painful, however slow—the inexorable ripening of justice that, in Steinbeck's vision, is the ultimate function of humanity.