Which 1939 novel helped give U.S. Route 66 its famous nickname, the “Mother Road”?

John Steinbeck’s 1939 novel The Grapes of Wrath helped give U.S. Route 66 its famous nickname, the “Mother Road.”

The novel follows the Joad family as they leave Oklahoma for California during the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl. Their westward journey uses Route 66, which Steinbeck presents as a major migration corridor for displaced families seeking work and a new start.

Steinbeck called the highway the “Mother Road” because it carried migrants west and connected communities across the American interior. The phrase became one of the road’s most enduring descriptions, although Route 66 had already existed for more than a decade when the novel appeared.

The book is sometimes confused with Steinbeck’s later novel East of Eden, but that title does not provide Route 66’s nickname. The Grapes of Wrath won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1940 and helped make the highway a cultural symbol beyond its practical role as a transportation route.