Browse Exhibits (3 total)

John Steinbeck’s 1939 novel, The Grapes of Wrath, focuses on the Dust Bowl era of 1930s America. A fictional family of Oklahoma farmers, the Joads, are driven from their farm by the overwhelming problems of drought, dust, and debt. The Joads lose everything that they can’t carry with them on one ramshackle truck and they attempt a westward trip of thousands of miles to California with just a few hundred dollars. Everything from their core identity to their very survival is at stake. Yet in a world where so much seems to have turned against them, and where even their own family starts to crumble apart, there’s one important factor providing them with a relatively affordable means of escape, survival, and perhaps ultimate salvation: roads. The Joads’ quest for a brighter future in the western state of California is facilitated by the fact that Highway 66 provides them with a nearly direct path all of the way there. As Steinbeck describes it in The Grapes of Wrath:

"Highway 66 is the main migrant road. 66 – the long concrete path across the country, waving gently up and down on the map from Mississippi to Bakersfield – over the red lands and the gray lands, twisting up into the mountains, crossing the Divide and down into the bright and terrible desert, and across the desert to the mountains again, and into the rich California Valleys" (118).