Pete Seeger recalled the night of 1940 in which woody guthiere wrote "Tom joad". He suggested that Seeger to write a song on the character of Tom joad that appeared in the grapes of wrath, John Steinbeck - Novela had just been published in the previous year.
When the night came, stimulated by a pitcher half a liter of wine, guthiere was over his masterpiece. modeled the melody from the song classic folk "John Henry"
In 1936 John Steinbeck, wrote a series of articles on migration at the time of dust bowl, which was to ravage then California. a combination of poverty, drought and unpaid mortgage made many people, basically farmers, leave their dry homes and travel to the Pastos presumably more green - the promised land - California in search of work.
from 1935 until 1938, 300,000 and 500,000 "okies".

That summer of 1936, Steinbeck began to travel at California in an old truck bread.
Roads of the state were over-crowded "car desvencijados loaded with children and with bed linen dirty, with kitchen utensils blackened by fire." Next, trucks and near the rivers, immigrants living in mugrientos camps squatters, in a land from dirty rags and scrap and home made with paper acartonado soils dirty.
Tom joad became almost a mythical iconography American, representing the dignity and inner strength of man worker