Reading Kristen Hannah’s modern novel The Four Winds for book club this month reminded me of one of my favorite American classics, John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. I call them Dust Bowl novels for the great national disaster that forms the setting for both stories.
The dust storms of the 1930s hit the American Great Plains just after the Great Depression had taken hold of the area and was already causing families to lose farms and livelihoods. Then a long spell of drought and record heat dried up the land where farms had been plowed in straight rows for years, leaving the dirt exposed to unusually high winds. The topsoil actually began to sail into the air as a killing dust, covering houses and roads and blocking out the sun.
With crops dying, livestock starving and employment gone, many families packed up their old farm trucks and cars and headed for California, where advertising brochures assured work for all and a new life were waiting. But when the migrants or “Okies,” so-called because so many of them came from that state, arrived they found not paradise as promised but a new hell.
Growers cut wages for pickers because they had such a huge, willing supply of labor. Housing was not available so the migrants threw up shanty towns and makeshift camps without proper facilities. State relief didn’t pay until a migrant had been in California for a year, by which time many of them had starved to death or died of disease.
Native Californians were at first indifferent to the migrants’ plight, then violently opposed to the encroachment of hoards of poor Americans into their communities, asking for food, work and education for their children.
Both novels are emotionally hard to read. Both reflect a feeling of being on a frightening downward spiral into disaster, which is exactly how millions of American families were feeling at that time. In The Grapes of Wrath, the spiral is unrelieved. In The Four Winds, the spiral is only relieved after a death and the return of the rest of the family to their home in the Texas Panhandle, where things had gotten marginally better during their absence.
Both novels tell their story through a family. Steinbeck’s family, the Joads, consists of several adult family members, all immigrating together out of desperation. Kristen Hannah’s focal characters are just a mother and her two children braving the trip west together.
Steinbeck’s story, published in 1939 while it was still reality for many, is more mythical in quality, more parable-like. He uses Christian religious imagery to move his novel into almost a propaganda piece in which we are to believe that only a shift from individuals to community, the shift from “I” to “we,” can save mankind. His narrative chapters are interspersed with prose-poem passages to de-emphasize individuals and show their place in the whole world situation at that time.
Hannah published The Four Winds in 2021, which makes her story historical fiction. The focal family is Elsa Wolcott Martinelli, her 9-year-old son and her 13-year-old daughter. Elsa comes from a middle class merchant family in Dalhart, Texas, that overlooks and undervalues her. Seeking love wherever she can find it, she throws herself at Italian-American farmer/dreamer Rafe Martinelli, becomes pregnant and is disowned by her parents. She winds up on the farm of her inlaws, in a loveless marriage to a man who deserts her. When the family is hit with the triple disasters on the Great Plains in the 1930s, Elsa decides to take her children and try to survive the trip west.
The Four Winds is less representative of a message and more descriptive of individuals than The Grapes of Wrath. Its characters are more personalized and specific than the Joads. But both novels are a testament to the strength and viability of families and to the courage of the human spirit.
A strong feature of both novels is the emphasis on the conflict between the haves and the have-nots, the powerful and the powerless in society. Communists took this crisis as an opportunity to demonstrate their support of workers against bosses. Both novels paint a rosy picture of the communist ideology, and both Hannah and Steinbeck seemed to see it as an answer to the problem without presenting its ultimately devastating effect on human rights and dignity.
Despite the unavoidable sadness and poignancy of the situation, both novels are captivating and fulfilling to take in as you sit under your reading lamp absorbing one or both pieces of fiction about America’s very real 20th century tragedy.
