Authors values and attitudes - The Grapes of Wrath

After reading The Grapes of Wrath, there were certain things in the writing that revealed values of the writer, John Steinbeck.  One thing that the author values is poor people and families.  The whole book is about the families struggling to earn a descent living for themselves.  He often criticizes the wealthy landowners, for not paying the poor workers enough money.  When the Joads go to work at the peach farm, they get paid five cents an hour.  I have no idea what that would be like now, but I guarantee that it would be way under minimum wage.  I believe that he values these people because, he may have been classified as the low class, in his society.  That is unfortunate for him, but it gives us an idea of what life would have been like in the 1930's for the low class.
He also has a strong value towards family and the jobs that come with that family.  No matter how hard the situation got, the family stayed together.  Sure Ma Joad was a big reason for this, but in the end you were better off with each other and not yourself.  When you think of family jobs, you think of the males going out and working and the women staying at home.  This would be most people's opinion of the matter.  The girls do the cleaning, cooking, and house caring, and the guys make the money.  This is portrayed when they get to the weedpatch camp.  "The women washed dresses, pink gighams and flowered cottons, and they hung them in the sun and stretched the cloth to smooth it." (Steinbeck, 330).  Here the women washed clothes, and the men, specifically Tom found work.  I hope I did not come come of too sexist in this topic.  I believe that both jobs are just as important and it does not matter who does what.  This book is written in third person, because it uses, "he, she, it".

Bibliography

Steinbeck, John. The Grapes of Wrath. New York: Penguin, 2002. Print.