John Steinbeck called Route 66 “the mother road, the road of flight” in The Grapes of Wrath, and the phrase lodged itself so deep in American consciousness that it still shows up on roadside signage today, nearly ninety years after the book was published. But there’s something worth knowing about how Steinbeck came to write that line.
He drove the route himself in 1937, traveling from Oklahoma to California in an old bakery truck he’d bought for the trip. He wanted to see the Dust Bowl migration firsthand — the families who’d been pushed off their land by drought and bank foreclosures and were heading west with everything they owned piled on the car roof.
What he saw was more brutal than anything he’d imagined. Families camped in roadside ditches. Children with cracked lips and dusty shoes. Men standing at gas station pumps with their wallets turned inside out. The diners that would give a family a free meal. The ones that wouldn’t.
The novel he wrote from that trip was published in 1939 and immediately caused controversy. California landowners called it communist propaganda. Oklahoma officials tried to ban it. Steinbeck received death threats. None of it slowed the book down — it won the Pulitzer Prize in 1940 and helped shape Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal agricultural policies.
Route 66 appears in the novel as the only road the Joads can take, the one road out of a dying landscape. Steinbeck understood that roads aren’t just infrastructure. They’re decisions made at the point of maximum desperation. People don’t choose the mother road. The mother road chooses them.
Some stories are born from a bakery truck and a notebook and the willingness to look at hard things straight on.
We are offering licences for ROUTE 66® Beer in specific territories. An invitation to others to become part of this story. To carry a piece of the road with them and to contribute to the story. We will share a percentage of royalties with Route 66 associations to keep the story alive.
The journey continues. This story is brought to you by ROUTE 66® BEER. Find us at ROUTE66BEER.COM
BY ENTERING THIS WEBSITE YOU MUST BE AND CONFIRM THAT YOU ARE OF LEGAL DRINKING AGE IN THE COUNTRY THAT YOU ARE IN AND LEGALLY PERMITTED TO VIEW THESE PAGES.
This info is all part of our commitment to responsible drinking.
