On his travels home, Tom meets a onetime preacher, Jim Casy, a talkative man gripped by doubts over religious teachings and the presence of sin. Steinbeck follows this exchange with an interlude describing a turtle crossing the road, which serves as a metaphor for the struggles of the working class. He hitches a ride with a truck driver, who presses Tom for information until Tom finally reveals that he was just released from McAlester prison, where he served four years for murdering a man during a fight. Tom Joad, a man not yet thirty, approaches a diner dressed in spotless, somewhat formal clothing. No specific characters emerge initially this is a technique that Steinbeck will employ several times in the book, posing descriptions of events in a large social context against descriptions of events more particular to the Joad family. The novel begins with a description of the conditions in Dust Bowl Oklahoma that ruined crops and instigated massive foreclosures on farmland. In taking this social stance, Steinbeck's novel criticizes shortsighted self-interest and chastises corporate and banking elites for profit-maximizing policies that ultimately forced farmers into destitution and even starvation. It is an explicitly political piece of writing, one that champions collective action by the lower classes. John Steinbeck's novel The Grapes of Wrath tells the specific story of the Joad family, and thus illustrates the hardships and oppression suffered by migrant laborers during the Great Depression.
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