Route 66 from Chicago to Los Angeles became a symbol of prosperity and the new-found freedoms of the rock’n’roll era. But in the 1930s it played host to years of misery as families, some on the brink of starvation, struggled along it in search of workPhotograph: David LeveneThe Route 66 Diner, Route 66 museum, Clinton. "Highway 66 is the main migrant road," wrote Steinbeck in the Grapes of Wrath Photograph: David LeveneRoute 66, near Calumet. Steinbeck wrote: "66 - the long concrete path across the country, waving gently up and down on the map, from the Mississippi [river] to Bakersfield - over the red lands and the gray lands, twisting up into the mountains, crossing the Divide and down into the bright and terrible desert to the mountains again and into the rich California valleys."Photograph: David LeveneRoute 66, Wellston. "66 is the path of a people in flight," Steinbeck wrote. "Refugees from dust and shrinking land, from the thunder of tractors and shrinking ownership, from the desert’s slow, northward invasion, from the twisting winds that howl up out of Texas, from the floods that bring no richness to the land, and steal what little richness is there."Photograph: David LeveneCows along Route 66, near BristowPhotograph: David LeveneRoute 66, Erick. To travel the old road today — stumbling across crumbling ghost towns and half abandoned communities, across the sprawling native American desert reservations, through cities where people work all the hours they aren’t sleeping and still cannot afford to go to the doctor - is to encounter a new despairPhotograph: David LeveneOnce prosperous communites have become little more than ghost towns, illustrated here by the shell of Junction Cafe on Route 66 near BridgeportPhotograph: David LeveneThe old Texaco garage in Davenport, between Tulsa and Oklahoma City, still bears the signs of more prosperous timesPhotograph: David LeveneIn scenes eerily reminiscent of Steinbeck's novel, many families can barely afford to clothe themselves. This picture shows a clothing and shoes donation box on the roadside near Bristow, on Route 66/I-44 between Tulsa and Oklahoma CityPhotograph: David LeveneThe Good Samaritans mobile medical truck, here stationed at the Parkland Baptist Church, Tulsa, perpetually makes the rounds of the city's churches in run-down neighbourhoods, providing for the working poor, struggling pensioners and, increasingly, newly unemployed Americans, when their health becomes one more burden on top of the daily trial to pay the rent and put food on the table Photograph: David LeveneThe economic downturn stripped Johnnie Levy of her job as a seamstress and she found herself queuing for the truck at the Friendship church hall in the black end of TulsaPhotograph: David LeveneNurse Lynn Hersey of the Good Samaritans attends to a patient in a mobile medical truck, stationed here at the Parkland Baptist Church, TulsaPhotograph: David Levene
