The Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck (1939)
NUMBER: 74
Genre: Fiction; Origin: USA; Pages: 500
Satisfaction rating: 9.5
OVERVIEW:
Although it follows the movement of thousands of men and women and the transformation of an entire nation, ‘The Grapes of Wrath’ is also the story of one Oklahoma farm family, the Joads, who are driven off their homestead and forced to travel west to the promised land of California. Out of their trials and their repeated collisons against the hard realities of an America divided into Haves and Have-Nots, Steinbeck created a drama that is intensely human yet majestic in its scale and moral vision, elemental yet plainspoken, tragic but ultimately stirring in its insistence on human dignity.
MATTHEW’S COMMENTS:
The Grapes of Wrath is without hesitation a masterpiece. While the vivid characters of the Joad clan tell a gut wrenching tale of a single family, the true beauty of this novel is in the alternate chapters – the poetry of the dust bowl’s disenfranchised, their migration, their suffering (not their triumph). So strong are these passages that I think they could stand alone as one of Steinbeck’s greatest achievements.
But of course the reason why this novel is one of the most read American works of the last century is because Steinbeck’s mastery of story telling is in his ability to make every word, sentence, paragraph and chapter count, nothing is wasted, everything thematically fits. Never is Steinbeck’s discussion of human rights, faith, punishment, desperation, death and suffering heavy handed. After all this is a book in which eats away at the reader, there is no hope, or at least no in a higher power to which salvation occurs. Instead, this is Steinbeck’s analysis of greed, the dominance of money (corporation) over community (worker). A fact compounded no only by the Joads forced removal from their property but they way in which they ultimately have to turn their back on the Utopian society of the government camp.
I have never seen the film, nor would I want to. As with Of Mice and Men I doubt if the climax could resonate as strong on screen as it down in the book. It is these final knock out blows which are Steinbeck’s trademark (or at least in his greatest works).
FURTHER REFERENCES:
Read more on Google Books
Read more on Wikipedia
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