The Mother Road
by Marjory Hall
Greetings from the Oklahoma Panhandle! I’m Marjory Hall with a BookByte for HPPR’s Spring 2026 Read, a celebration of the centennial of Route 66. At first, the idea of commemorating the establishment of a road might seem odd. After all, there are roads nearly everywhere a person looks that have no significance beyond their obvious usefulness. Why is Route 66 special? Why is Route 66 so special that John Steinbeck, one of America’s most respected authors, treated the thoroughfare as more than scenery, more like a character in The Grapes of Wrath, one of his most beloved books? It becomes clear upon examination that Steinbeck’s designation of Route 66 as “The Mother Road” conveys a great deal of Steinbeck’s theme in the book.
By personifying Route 66 as a mother, Steinbeck suggests the road as a source of nurture for the people in the rural areas it served. An important point in considering Route 66 is that it was not created as part of any government project. The road was cobbled together, no pun intended, by Tulsa entrepreneur Cyrus Avery. He found himself in need of a convenient route by which to access the many oil leases he had acquired, so he forged his own trail. Drivers of all types, especially truckers, made good use of the road until, in 1926, it was formally adopted into the United States Numbered Highway System. Avery, a private businessman, had solved a personal problem while unintentionally providing service to countless other people.
A decade later, during the disaster of the Great Depression, Franklin Delanoe Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration included the improvement of Route 66 as a project. The federal agency behind the construction of countless public facilities, many of them still in use today, the WPA was an unusual government program. For people left unemployed after the stock market crash, the program provided meaningful work and significant civic contribution, supporting people through difficult times without the taint of government handouts or welfare. More than just a relief project, the WPA nurtured workers’ self-respect, allowed them to take pride in their contribution to durable American infrastructure.
Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath is set during another unforeseeable disaster – the storm of natural and man-made circumstances that transformed so much productive farmland of the High Plains into the Great Dustbowl. The early 20th century was the time of the mighty so-called robber barons, businessmen made incalculably wealthy by luck, cleverness, daring, and willingness to ignore the obligation of charity when profit might be at stake. Because the dust bowl did not directly affect these giants of industry, their entrepreneurial talents were not called into service. The destitute had only their own determination to see them through. The Mother Road and one another were the only resources on which they could draw.
Route 66 enters the narrative at the beginning of Chapter 3, described in terms of inhospitable heat and natural ruggedness. A brief account of a terrapin’s navigation of the road, struggling against natural obstacles as well as senseless human malice, can be seen as a foreshadowing of the whole novel. The Joad family is no different from the land turtle; they have no alternative but to drag themselves along toward their destiny. Humanity is the family’s only asset in the dangerous and unwelcoming world. The family contains, however, a symbol of human goodness that represents vibrant life in the desolation of the dust bowl environment.
Rose of Sharon Joad Rivers, the eldest Joad daughter, develops from youthful arrogance into an image of compassion and human strength. Her name derives from the Song of Solomon 2:1 in which the beloved declares herself “the rose of Sharon and the lily of the valleys.” Geographically, Sharon is a fertile coastal plain in Israel, a place of abundant life. Prophetically, in Isaiah, Sharon represents restoration and fertility. It is this character, more clearly than any other, who demonstrates the power of humanity over impersonal evil. Despite the losses she has suffered, Rose of Sharon responds compassionately when she alone possesses the means of saving a starving man from death. The man had gone without eating so that his son could live, and Roseasharon, in an act of maternal integrity, provides nourishment for the stranger. Although her baby was stillborn, Roseasharon is undeniably a mother.
This final scene of the book is immediately preceded by a conversation between Mrs. Joad and Mrs. Ruthie Wainwright. The women discuss the times in which they live as being so difficult that all good people recognize the imperative of mutual care. Mrs. Wainwright, whose first name means pity, is happy to step into the task of mothering Rose of Sharon in her illness so that Mrs. Joad can finally rest. Steinbeck allows Mrs. Joad to sum up the situation when she says that, “‘Use’ to be fambly was fust. It ain’t so now. Worse off [people] get, the more [they] got to do’” (606).
In the end, people exercising their ingenuity and supporting one another’s human dignity has been and will be the way problems are overcome. The moral imperative of cherishing humanity as the appropriate worldview is the substance of this book. Family responsibility extends to the whole human race, not just a household.
I’m Marjory Hall from Goodwell, Oklahoma, with a BookByte for Spring 2026.
Work Cited
Steinbeck, John. The Grapes of Wrath. Penguin, 1992, (1939).
