The Grapes of Wrath question 1

After reading The Grapes of Wrath I have come to a few conclusions about the author John Steinbeck. It is easy to tell that he values hard work, as the Joads are all hard workers. It leads me to believe that Steinbeck is also a hard worker, as he is certainly a good author. He also seems to find value in determination. The Joads show their determination throughout the entirety of the book. They want nothing more than to go west and find work, and not even the death and abandonment of several family members was enough to stop them. Then when they got to their destination, they were horrendously harassed by the locals who thought they were going to be replaced by the Okies. "The clerk thought, I get fifteen dollars a week. S'pose a goddamn Okie would work for twelve? And the little storekeeper thought, How could I compete with a debtless man?" (Steinbeck 283) Even after facing all this discrimination, the Joads were still determined to make a living in California. They relentlessly looked for work, unfortunately there wasn't enough work to go around. The only one who managed to get a job was Tom and that didn't last long, but they kept at it and got jobs picking peaches, then someone got killed, and then they got a job picking cotton. Thus showing that they used their unending determination to acquire jobs which they worked hard at. Steinbeck also seems to have a good attitude for the concept of all the poor people joining together to survive. Which is strange because I would have expected an every man for himself kind of situation in the given circumstances, but that doesn't happen. In fact the opposite happens. "In the evening a strange thing happened: the twenty families became one family, the children were the children of all." (Steinbeck 193) This is obviously some strange optimistic misplaced faith in humanity that I doubt would actually happen, but perhaps things were different back then.

Steinbeck, John, and Robert J. DeMott. The Grapes of Wrath. New York: Penguin, 2006. Print.