John Steinbeck's "The Grapes of Wrath": A Timeless Classic Novel

Gaylin Goodson: Great book

United States on Dec 05, 2023

PW: if you ever feel you want to criticise people for wanting to migrate for work, read this and you might just understand what many of them will go through- then count yourself lucky you live in Britain.

United Kingdom on Nov 12, 2023

Max Taverna: Riletto in lingua originale dopo che non ero riuscito a finirlo quasi 60 anni fa in versione tradotta.
La storia di disperazione e speranza di questa famiglia che va a Ovest oggi è tragicamente attuale vedendo un intero continente che cerca un futuro a Nord.
Si fa fatica a finirlo, la disperazione non finisce mai. Poi il colpo di genio, nelle ultime righe. Da leggere, come tutti i libri di Steinbeck, d'altra parte.

Italy on Sep 11, 2023

J. Edgar Mihelic, MA, MA, MBA: With the COVID-19 pandemic in the background, I have been trying to think of how all the social orders have been upset and what the post pandemic world will look like. In parallel, I have been revisiting some fiction I read when I was younger. The whole thing has made me more distractible and narrowed my bandwidth, but I started Piketty’s new book the week it came out, but the problem was that it coincided with the rise of the pandemic into full blow consciousness of something that was happening here. All of the pre-pandemic economic texts will also have to be evaluated with the lens of the pandemic. And we still are in the process of whatever it might be. It looked initially that there might be a sense of solidarity that grew out of this, but it soon has devolved that the best we can do is survive in spite of all those who would want us to not survive. We have to hope that the institutions are not too degraded.

It has made me more melancholy, and this is most likely not helped by my choices of fiction to get through all time at home. I started with Camus’s the Plague and have been reading the Grapes of Wrath. Camus brought to mind the need for survival, and how...

United States on May 18, 2020

John E. Pepper: This novel takes its place among the five finest novels I have ever read: the others being "Crossing to Safety"by Wallace Stegner, Tolstoy's "War and Peace", "Gilead" by Marilynne Robinson and Towles"A Gentleman in Moscow".

It is shame that it was not until my 81st year that I picked it up.

I was moved to do this by my recent reading and great admiration of Steinbeck's "East of Eden" and Steinbeck's letters which constitute a virtual biography of his life.

Of all these five novels, however, "Grapes of Wrath" is the one that has most deeply penetrated my life. For many reasons. But above all because I came to know and feel the characters more intimately and viscerally and emotionally than inany other book I have ever read.

I understand what Norman Mailer meant in writing of "Steinbeck's marvelous and ironic sense of compassion…daring all the time to go up to the very abyss of offering more feeling than the reader can accept."

Again and again, that is how I felt, hanging on every word and phrase, wondering, worrying about what comes next.

It did not happen by accident. Steinbeck records this in the midst of writing the book: "Yesterday it...

United States on Sep 02, 2019

Lady Fancifull: John Steinbeck's Pulitzer prize-winning novel was both a colossus of a book, an infinitely worthy winner, and a far-from perfect book, a flawed book.

On the front of the paperback version I started to read (before downloading from Kindle, as there was just too much I needed to underline) was the following quote from Steinbeck:

"I've done my damndest to rip a reader's nerves to rags, I don't want him satisfied"

The Grapes of Wrath was published in 1939 when the machinery of war was providing a terrible solution to the stock market crash and depression of the 30s, which is the subject of this book. It is a book written out of white hot, red hot rage, disgust and righteous polemic against an indifferent, blinkered and self-obsessed capitalism.

The book follows the fortunes of one small family, the Joads, Oklahoma small farmers, homesteaders, and how the move from small family farming to larger and larger conglomerates, changed and destroyed our connections to the land itself, and to each other.

The Joads stand for the thousands of other, unnamed, the small men and women.

Like thousands of other homesteaders, losing their land and their...

United Kingdom on Jul 01, 2015

FictionFan: When Tom Joad returns to his parents' farm after serving a prison sentence for murder, he finds it deserted. In the four years he has been gone, the land has turned to dust through a combination of drought and poor farming practices. The onset of the Great Depression has meant that the banks have taken over ownership of vast tracts of the land and, in pursuit of profit, are expelling the small tenant farmers to create massive one-crop farms, worked by machines rather than men. Driven by poverty and lack of work, many of the farmers are uprooting their families to go to California, their own promised land, where, they are told, the country is filled with fruit ripe for picking, and there is work for all. Tom and his family join the exodus.

First published in 1939, this is a fairly contemporaneous account of the devastation wrought on Oklahoma farming communities during the Depression, and Steinbeck's anger and disgust come through loudly in the power of his prose. A starkly political novel, it's interesting that there is little or no reference to either the politicians or policies of the period. This adds to the feeling of the farmers being isolated, abandoned by their...

United Kingdom on Jun 15, 2015

MR M H NUTT: In this epic book, Steinbeck tells the story of the Oklahoma Dust Bowl in simple terms through the eyes of one family of share-croppers caught up in events beyond their control, as the land they have farmed for generations blows away on the wind and whatever remains is razed by the landowner's tractors. Steinbeck shows how the American Dream turns into the American Nightmare, as the lives of its citizens are cast aside in a corporate land grab that seeks short-term profit from their misfortunes. The novel was a labour of love fired by the author's own experiences in California among its migrant workers, and his efforts to alleviate their suffering in flooded, disease-ridden camps. It is widely regarded as the pinnacle of his writing, and rightly takes its place as one of the great works of American literature.

The story's opening chapter gives us a long description of the changing landscape of the state of Oklahoma in the 1930s as the Dust Bowl is created by the drought and wind and the intensive crop farming of the land. Into this land comes Tom Joad, recently released on parole from the State Penitentiary at McAlester and aiming to return to his father's crop-sharing farm...

United Kingdom on Aug 23, 2014