THE GRAPES

The Grapes of Wrath



The Grapes of Wrath

Introduction

The Grapes of Wrath It is significant that Steinbeck conceived of The Grapes of Wrath as just such a documentary book. In March, 1938, Steinbeck went into the California valleys with a Life magazine photographer to record. The reality he encountered seemed too significant for nonfiction, however, and Steinbeck began to reshape this material as a novel, an epic novel.

Although his first tentative attempts at fictionalizing the situation in the cultivated valleys were heavily satiric, as indicated by the initial title L'Affaire Lettuceberg, Steinbeck soon realized that the Okie migration was the stuff of an American epic. Reworking his material, adding to it by research in a government agency files and more journeys into the camps and along the migrant routes, Steinbeck evolved his vision. A comprehensive design emerged; he would follow one family from the Oklahoma Dust Bowl to California (Steinbeck, 2009). Perhaps this methodology suggested by the sociological case histories of the day, perhaps by the haunted faces of individual families that stared back at him as he researched in FSA files.

Discussion

In The Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck made one family representative of general conditions. The larger groups and problems he treated in short interchapters that generalized the issues particularized in the Joad family. The Grapes of Wrath a sensational best seller from the beginning. Published to generally favorable reviews in March, 1939, it was selling at the rate of more than twenty-five hundred copies a day two months later. Controversy helped spur sales. As part documentary, its factual basis was subject to scrutiny, and many critics challenged Steinbeck's material (Pells, 2009). Oklahomans resented the presentation of the Joads as typical of the state, while Californians disapproved of the depiction of their state's leading industry. The book attacked, banned, burned — but everywhere it was read. Even in the migrant camps, considered an accurate picture of the conditions experienced there. Some 430,000 copies sold in a year; in 1940, the novel received the Pulitzer Prize and the Award of the American Booksellers Association (ibid).

Thousands of American families, evicted from their land by the greed of banks, migrate from Oklahoma and Texas to California, the Promised Land where they hope to find work as day laborers picking grapes and peaches. They travel in rickety cars that lose the pieces down the road, crammed in makeshift sleeping on filthy mattresses, and survive on ...