Steinbeck's novel offers a message about the importance of community. People need to stick together and help each other if they want to survive and prosper. The Great Depression is the backdrop to this novel, a time when the conomy had collapsed due to the 1929 stock market crash, and millions of people were unemployed. During the 1930s, debates raged about how to solve this crisis. Steinbeck saw the answer in ordinary people coming together to organize and work on behalf of one other.
The rich, he believed, would do their best to keep ordinary people divided. The rich benefited when they kept average workers at each other's throats and competing for lower and lower wages.
An example of two ideologies, cooperation and competition, coming into conflict emerges early in the novel, in chapter two. A trucker is forbidden by his company to pick up hitchhikers. The trucker, however, reluctantly stops for a hitchhiker, though he fears he will get in trouble for it, because to help another person is to be a "good guy." That, in a nutshell, illustrates the novel's message: good guys stick together and help each other out. Steinbeck hoped people would unite in bigger way, but stresses in his novel that every act in which people lend each other a hand, no matter how small, is valuable.
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