The Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck [23]
The Grapes of Wrath is arguably among the most significant indictments ever made of the privileged myths of American exceptionalism, westering, and of California as a Promised Land/Garden of Eden. Once Steinbeck’s name became inseparably linked with the title of his most famous work, he could never escape the influence of his earlier life, but thankfully neither can we, because in the broadest sense, his novel continues to perform meaningful cultural work in shaping perceptions toward social justice, compassion, and understanding, perhaps more important than ever in the unstable global climate of this new century. Wherever human beings dream of a dignified and free society in which they can live in right relationship with the environment and other humans, and harvest the fruits of their own labor, The Grapes of Wrath’s insistent message is still applicable. Even though, ironically, some Oklahoma migrant families believed the novel demeaned their image, as James Gregory notes in American Exodus, nevertheless as a fabular tale of dashed illusions, thwarted desires, inhuman suffering, and betrayed promises—all strung on the slenderest thread of hope—The Grapes of Wrath summed up the Depression era’s socially conscious art. “Steinbeck shaped a geography of conscience” in The Grapes of Wrath, novelist Don DeLillo claims in his centennial reflection, “for it is a novel in which there is something at stake in every sentence. ” And beyond that—for emotional urgency, evocative power, sensational design, sustained impact, prophetic reach, and continued controversy—The Grapes of Wrath still has few peers in American fiction.
Suggestions for Further Reading
PRIMARY WORKS BY JOHN STEINBECK
Note: John Steinbeck’s San Francisco News investigative reports, “The Harvest Gypsies,” published October 5-12, 1936, and “Starvation Under the Orange Trees,” published April 15, 1938, in The Monterey Trader (both later collected as Their Blood Is Strong, a pamphlet published by San Francisco’s Simon J. Lubin Society in 1938), are reprinted in Robert DeMott and Elaine Steinbeck, eds., The Grapes of Wrath and Other Writings 1936-1941 (New York: Library of America, 1996), pp. 990-1027. The News pieces are also reprinted in Charles Wollenberg’s The Harvest Gypsies: On the Road to The Grapes of Wrath (Berkeley, CA: Heyday Books, 1988). The Trader piece, Steinbeck’s 1936 Nation piece, “Dubious Battle in California, ” and 1937 statement for Writers Take Sides, are also available in Susan Shillinglaw and Jackson J. Benson’s edition of Steinbeck’s America and Americans and Selected Nonfiction (New York: Viking Penguin, 2002), pp. 71-77; 83-88. Steinbeck’s handwritten manuscript of his work diary/writing “day book” (composed as he was writing the novel) was unsealed to the public in the early 1990s by the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York City. The typed version, included in the archive of Pascal Covici’s papers, is housed at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas, Austin. The typescript, differing in some minor points from the handwritten journal, formed the basis of Robert DeMott, ed., Working Days: The Journals of The Grapes of Wrath, 1938-1941 (New York: The
Viking Press, 1989). Sample pages of his autograph journal are published in Robert DeMott, Steinbeck’s Typewriter: Essays on His Art (Troy, NY: Whitston Publishing, 1996), p. 147. Steinbeck’s autograph manuscript of The Grapes of Wrath is in the Clifton Waller Barrett Library, Manuscripts Division, Special Collections Department, University of Virginia Library, Charlottesville, Virginia. The 751-page typescript is in the Library of Congress Manuscripts Division, Washington, D.C. To view a sample page in Memory Garden C: American Treasures of the Library of Congress, log on at