Tom Joad

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Tom Joad is a fictional character from John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath. He embodies the politicalization of the common man when faced with injustice.

Tom Joad, the protagonist, is recently released from prison (having been imprisoned for manslaughter) and, breaking parole, journeys from Oklahoma to California with his family in search of a better life following the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl. The family's hopes for a better life are slowly crushed by the harsh journey they must undertake and the exploitation, corruption and oppression that the 'Okies' face in California, which affects Tom Joad in particular, since it goes directly against his personality for him to let someone treat him (or others) so terribly and not do anything about it. He is unable to control his violent side any longer when he witnesses his good friend, the former preacher Casy, brutally murdered just for demanding wages possible to live on, and kills Casy's murderer, a policeman. Tom must then become a fugitive, but promises as he leaves that no matter where he runs, he will carry on Casy's legacy, being a tireless advocate for the common man against the powerful.

[edit] In popular culture

• Woody Guthrie wrote The Ballad of Tom Joad the night he saw the film based on the book. He described the film in a column:

"Shows the dam bankers men that broke us and the dust that choked us, and comes right out in plain old English and says what to do about it.

"It says you got to get together and have some meetins, and stick together, and raise old billy hell till you get youre job, and get your farm back, and your house and your chickens and your groceries and your clothes, and your money back" (reprinted in Woody Sez [New York, 1975], p. 133).

• In 1995 Bruce Springsteen released an album entitled The Ghost of Tom Joad featuring a song of the same name. The song was later covered by Rage Against the Machine in 2001 on their last album Renegades, and most recently covered by José González band Junip on their Black Refuge EP in 2006.

• Joad also appears as a background figure in the short story "Tom Joad" by Kim Newman and Eugene Byrne, in part of the short story collection Back in the USSA. Set in an alternate history where the United States embraced a Communist revolution and where Al Capone rules the United States as a Stalin-like dictator, the story follows FBI agents Eliot Ness and Melvin Purvis as they attempt to find and arrest Joad, an anti-communist labour agitator and underground folk hero.

• Country Joe McDonald has "The Ballad of Tom Joad" on his album "Thinking of Woodie Guthrie".