The Grapes of Wrath

Of Human Kindness

Perhaps the most curious response to The Grapes of Wrath was the literary rebuttal offered by author, Ruth Comfort Mitchell. Her 1940 novel, Of Human Kindness, provides a fictional counterpoint to Steinbeck by offering the "ranchers' side" of the story.

"Mitchell's California farmers are the perfect yeomen who treat their hired help with the upmost care and respect." As Douglas Sackman notes in his book, Orange Empire: California and the Fruits of Eden (2005), both novels feature rain storms that flood the fields, a direct contrast to the droughts that produced the Dust Bowl migrations. In our book the floods set the stage for the climatic conclusion. In Mitchell's book a farmer on a tractor drives in to save the flood victims. (Compare this scene with Steinbeck's views of tractors in Chapter 5. Steinbeck's "instrument of alienation--becomes a vehicle of kindness.")

Cary McWilliams, author or the 1939 landmark study Factories in the Field: The Story of Migratory Farm Labor in California, later wrote:

Now that the briefs have been filed, so to speak, for both sides, the public should be able to render a verdict. But Of Human Kindness and The Grapes of Wrath should not be read alone. There is still another document that should be studied, the transcript of the LaFollette Committee Hearings in California....They give the facts without the fiction, and the facts support Mr. Steinbeck.

Of Human Kindness never became a best seller and is now largely forgotten. Curiously, by coincidence, both Ruth Comfort Mitchell and John Steinbeck lived in Los Gatos, California.

[Image of Ruth Comfort Mitchell is from Hooked on Los Gatos, Library and Museum History Project.]

Banning The Grapes of Wrath

 

A month after The Grapes of Wrath was published in April 1939 it stood as the No. 1 best seller in the United States and sold 429,000 copies in a year. "But the book brought controversy as well as success. Detractors accused the author of everything from harboring communist sympathies to exaggeration of the conditions in migrant camps." (See NPR's Present at the Creation.) California growers felt that Steinbeck had not accurately portrayed their efforts to help the migrant workers and denounced the book as "a damnable lie, a black infernal creation of a twisted, distorted mind." In Kern County, California, where part of the novel was set, the board of supervisors voted on August 21, 1939 to ban the book from the county's libraries and schools. A copy of the book was burned in Bakersfield, the county seat.

Author Rick Wartzman explores and analyzes these events in his book, Obscene in the Extreme: The Burning and Banning of John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath. In his review of the book, Cornell Professor of American Studies, Glenn C. Altschuler writes:

Wartzman's vivid account brings to life the cast of characters in the censorship controversy. Petitioning to rescind the ban introduced by Supervisor Stanley Abel, the "gruff, stubborn, thick-necked" Ku Klux Klan member, were his brothers, Lindley and Ralph, both of them members of the American Civil Liberties Union. Joining them was Kern County librarian Gretchen Kneif...[who] reminded board members that "Ideas don't die because a book is forbidden reading." She then offered up her inventory of 48 copies of The Grapes of Wrath to libraries throughout the state.

Despite California's relatively generous relief policies and the national exposure that Steinbeck brought to the situation, the plight of the "Okies" continued until the nation's economy recovered during World War II.

The Grapes of Wrath remained banned in Kern County until January 1941. 

April 1939

The Grapes of Wrath was first published by the Viking Press in April 1939. Here is a sampling of the comments made in its first reviews:

Charles Poore – New York Times (April 14, 1939)

"Mr. Steinbeck has created his best novel. It is far better than Of Mice and Men….Here, his counterpoint of the general and the particular—the full sweep of the migration and the personal affairs of all the Joads—has the true air of inevitability…The scenes along Route 66, the wanderer’s trail, in Hoovervilles, in the government camp—where the Joads found the humanity and courtesy almost unbelievable, after what they’d been through—are wonderfully realized. You can’t help believing in these people, in their courage and in their integrity."

Clifton Fadimon – New Yorker (April 15, 1939)

"[The book’s] power and importance do not lie in its political insight but in its intense humanity, its grasp of the spirit of an entire people traversing a wilderness, its kindliness, its humor, and its bitter indignation.  The Grapes of Wrath is the American novel of the season, probably the year, possibly the decade…."

George Stevens – Saturday Review (April 15, 1939)

"What he has written about them [the “Okies”] is a narrative: colorful, dramatic, subtle, coarse, comic, and tragic. For The Grapes of Wrath is not a social novel like most social novels. It is instead what a social novel ought to be. When you read it, you are in contact not with arguments, but with people…."

Peter Monro Jack – New York Times Book Review (April 16, 1939)

"It is a very long novel, the longest that Steinbeck has written, and yet it reads as if it had been composed in a flash, ripped off the typewriter and delivered to te public as an ultimatum. It is a long and thoughtful novel as one thinks about it. It is a short and vivid scene as one feels it….All this is true enough but the real truth is that Steinbeck has written a novel from the depths of his heart with a sincerity seldom equaled. It may be an exaggeration, but it is the exaggeration of an honest and splendid writer."

Joseph Henry Jackson – New York Herald Tribune (April 16, 1939)

"It is easy to grow lyrical about The Grapes of Wrath, to become excited about it, to be stirred to the shouting-point by it. Perhaps it is too easy to lose balance in the face of such an extraordinarily moving performance. But it is also true that the effect of the book lasts….This novel of America’s new disinherited is a magnificent book. It is, I think for the first time, the whole Steinbeck, the mature novelist saying something he must say and doing it with the sure touch of the great artist."

Philip Rahv – Partisan Review (Spring 1939)

"It is an epic of misery—a prodigious, relentless, and often excruciating account of agrarian suffering….Mr. Steinbeck spares us not a single scene, not a single sensation, that could help to implicate us emotionally….But the novel is far too didactic and long-winded…."

Malcolm Cowley – New Republic (May 3, 1939)

"I can’t agree with those critics who say that The Grapes of Wrath is the greatest novel of the last ten years; for example, it doesn’t rank with the best of Hemingway or Dos Possos. But it belongs very high in the category of  the great angry books like Uncle Tom’s Cabin that have roused a people to fight against intolerable wrongs."

Working Days

On May 31, 1938 John Steinbeck wrote in his new journal: "Here is the diary of a book and it will be interesting to see how it works out. I have tried to keep diaries before but they don't work...In this however, I shall try simply to keep a record of working days and the amount done in each and the success (as far as I can know it) of the day."

Five months later on October 26, 1938 he would note: "Finished this day--and I hope to God it's good." Between these comments are 97 entries that tell the story of how this book came to be.

Collected in the book, Working Days: The Journals of The Grapes of Wrath 1938-1941, edited by Robert DeMott (who wrote the Introduction for our Cornell edition of The Grapes of Wrath), the journal entries provide a glimpse of Steinbeck's "personal intensity, dedication, investment, and drama." We see his daily routine: most mornings he would warm up by writing some letters, then his journal entry, and then pick up his lined ledger and continue with his narrative. Often he would also listen to music to put himself in a creative mood. (He was very fond of Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake.)

Here we find an author who is full of self-doubt about his writing. On June 18, 1938 he worries: "If only I could do this book properly it would be one of the really fine books and a truly American book. But I am assailed with my own ignorance and inability."

Steinbeck also knew that he was doing good work. On July 18, 1938 he muses: "But once this book is done I won't care how soon I die, because my major work will be over."

Steinbeck lived until 1968. And The Grapes of Wrath--his masterpiece--is considered one of the great American novels of the 20th century.

Big Writing

John Steinbeck wrote The Grapes of Wrath by hand on a 12 X 18 inch tablet of lined paper. Pictured above is the first page of this manuscript. Here is his "New Start." Here is the beginning of his "big book." While he had great expectations for his new project, the "Big Writing" at the top of the page is actually a reminder to himself to "keep handwriting large for typist." That typist was his wife, Carol Steinbeck, who would take each day's work and type it out, editing the text as she went.

While visiting the University of Virginia earlier this summer I had the great privilege of looking through the original manuscript. It is part of the Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature in the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library at the University of Virginia Library. I want to publicly thank the staff there for letting me work with this Steinbeck document and for all their knowledgeable assistance. (One can never know enough librarians.)

I was struck by how few changes there are in the text. You can see that there are only two changes to his wording on page 1. Note, too, that he saved space by not putting in paragraph breaks, instead inserting paragraph symbols to indicate to his wife where he wanted them placed.

The notebook is filled with over 150 front and back pages of handwritten text. These became a 751 page typescript. (The page for the beginning of Chapter 3 has been digitized for public viewing by the Library of Congress.) This typescript was revised and edited and then typeset for printing. The "uncorrected galley proofs" of The Grapes of Wrath are also held by the University of Virginia Library, and I got to examine them as well.  A descriptive note mentions: "Cursory comparison with the published text reveals intermittent textual changes of the sort that suggests Steinbeck went through these galleys one last time before publication, tightening and polishing the novel into its final superb form."

Superb form, indeed.

Reading The Grapes of Wrath Together

 

The artist, Thomas Hart Benton, was commissioned by 20th Century Fox to create this painting, The Departure of the Joads to promote their 1940 film based on our book. He would also create a series of lithographs for a special limited edition of the novel.

The Grapes of Wrath is not just a great book. It is a compelling story that has been retold many times in many ways. As we can see there is the artwork. There is the Academy Award winning movie by John Ford. (See A.O. Scott's recent NY Times review of this classic film.) There is a Grapes of Wrath play and also a Grapes of Wrath opera. The story has inspired musicians like Woody Guthrie and Bruce Springsteen, to name a few. There is even a Grapes of Wrath rap song.

And now we have a Grapes of Wrath tweet.

Yes, the whole novel reduced to just 140 characters, but WARNING to first time readers: This message reveals details of the plot that you may not want to know until you have read about it in the book.

I hope the Grapes of Wrath will get you thinking, too. 

Starting on Monday, July 6th, we will be posting daily Monday through Friday updates to this blog throughout the summer. My guest authors and I will be offering you our thoughts and opinions of the book as well as supplying some background and cultural and historic context.

Come along and read this book with us.

Leaving home

The Grapes of Wrath is a novel about a journey. We will read about the Joad family and what happens to them after they are forced to leave their home in Oklahoma. For our new students coming to Cornell in August, our theme of departure is an immediate one. You will soon be leaving your family, friends, and community to come live and learn with us in our small city in upstate New York. What will your journeys be like? What state lines and international borders will you cross in your odysseys to Ithaca? 

Reading a long book is also a journey, an expedition of words launched by an author into our imaginations. Page by page. It is a journey that often changes us. We are different after reading a good book. In this journey we will be given glimpses of America in the 1930s. This is John Steinbeck's fictional America, but it is a portrait of a real America that speaks of that time during the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl.

During the summer my guest authors and I will be reading our way through the book with you. This is a "community" reading. We are reading this together. We would very much like to hear from you as you read the book. Send us your comments and questions. Blog with us. Follow our way through the book on Twitter. Read and react. 

Let us leave home together as you find your way in the world. 

[State Line. Texas--Oklahoma. Photograph by Arthur Rothstein, March 1940. Farm Security Administration - Office of War Information Photograph Collection, Prints and Photographs Division. Reproduction Number: LC-USF34-024265-D.]

A Great American Novel

John Steinbeck wrote The Grapes of Wrath 70 years ago. A best-seller when it was first published, the novel was also a critical success, winning the 1940 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and serving as the cornerstone for Steinbeck's 1962 Nobel Prize for Literature. Back on the April anniversary of the publication date, the BBC asked, is the Grapes of Wrath, a classic for today?

The novel has been controversial from the start and has a history of being banned. But the book has only gained in stature over time. It was selected by the National Endowment for the Arts to be a part of The Big Read.

Over the summer we will explore what makes this book "great" and examine it from multiple perspectives to see why it so popular and so controversial. We will be providing historical context and our observations and opinions.

The image here is of the dust jacket for the first hardcover edition, showing the Joad family arriving in California's "pastures of plenty." Our Cornell edition of the book uses the same text that was printed in the 1939 first edition.  New Cornell students--your copy of the book should be arriving sometime in the next couple of weeks.