When was The Grapes of Wrath published

How can you frighten a man whose hunger is not only in his own cramped stomach but in the wretched bellies of his children?

The Grapes of Wrath won John Steinbeck both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, firmly engraving his name on the stone tablet featuring the canon of Great American Writers. Published in 1939, it is arguably Steinbeck's best known work and is still widely read today. Admirers praised Steinbeck for writing an epic tale of Biblical proportions, singing songs of

How can you frighten a man whose hunger is not only in his own cramped stomach but in the wretched bellies of his children?

The Grapes of Wrath won John Steinbeck both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, firmly engraving his name on the stone tablet featuring the canon of Great American Writers. Published in 1939, it is arguably Steinbeck's best known work and is still widely read today. Admirers praised Steinbeck for writing an epic tale of Biblical proportions, singing songs of the common men and women and their struggle against exploitation by the rich and powerful, the strength of a family and the endurance human spirit in the Great Depression and the tragedy of the Dust Bowl, which forced many families to abandon land which was their livelihood for generations. Detractors accuse Steinbeck of being sentimental and one-sided, of greatly exaggerating the effect that the period and the surrounding had on the people he describes, of being a socialist, a Marxist, a communist and a propagandist (sometimes not all at once). Associated Farmers of California called the book "a pack of lies" and "communist propaganda", while Burton Rascoe writing for Newsweek added that The Grapes of Wrath was nothing more than superficial observation, careless infidelity to the proper use of idiom, tasteless pornographical and scatagorical talk.

Criticism didn't stop at negative reviews. The book was banned across the country and sometimes publicly burned by enraged citizens; Steinbeck received hate mail and death threats. The book made him a lot of powerful enemies. The Associated Farmers have begun an hysterical personal attack on me both in the papers and a whispering campaign, he said, I’m a Jew,a pervert, a drunk, a dope fiend. A whispering smear campaign against Steinbeck was set in motion by his new enemies, aiming to defame him and turn him from a celebrated author into a figure of hatred: they accused him of being a Jew, who wanted to deliberately undermine the economy and acted in Zionist-communist interest. The Associated Farmers are really working up a campaign, he wrote to his agent, I have made powerful enemies with the Grapes. They will not kill me, I think, but they will destroy me if and when they can. He was right. When Lewis Milestone, author of the screenplay for Mice and Men came to central California to explore possible locations for the movie, Steinbeck never stopped at any ranches in fear that they might get physically assaulted by their residents. The undersheriff of Santa Clara County was a friend of Steinbeck, and warned him to never stay in a hotel room alone: the boys got a rape case set for you. You get alone in a hotel and a dame will come in, tear off her clothes, scratch her face and scream and you try to talk yourself out of that one. They won’t touch your book but there’s easier ways. Steinbeck found himself under enormous stress and strain as he realized that Associated Farmers controlled the sheriff's office in California, and were "capable of anything"; he was also investigated by the FBI under president Hoover, which saw him as a dangerous subversive. He had to adopt an alias while visiting Los Angeles and keep secret files. He was aware that most of the people who hated him have themselves been victims of propaganda used precisely by those who accused him of being a propagandist; he told his agent that The articles written against me are all by people who admit they haven’t read Grapes, indeed wouldn't dirty their minds with it.

Still, at the same time, many other readers found The Grapes of Wrath to be enthralling and necessary - a book which attracted attention to the plight of poor migrant farm workers to the West, showed the brutality and harshness of their condition and challenged the nation to do better for those people. Earle Birney called the book a deed - the act of a man out of the pity and wrath of his heart, and it was read and loved as such. It captured the turbulent period of American history and provoked a reaction. It made an impact, a real and lasting one - which is its greatest achievement. Interestingly enough, within months of its publication journalist Carey McWilliams published his own work on treatment of migrant workers in California. Factories in the Field: The Story of Migratory Farm Labor in California was a landmark study which exposed the social and environmental damage inflicted by the growth of corporate agriculture in California, and a condemnation of both the politics and consequences of large-scale agribusiness. McWilliams documented the social and economic trends which led to establishment of huge land holdings in California and the constant need for cheap migrant labor; he found that the "Okies" were only the latest group to be exploited by the invisible owners of California's first industry. The previous groups included Native Americans and immigrants from China, Japan, Mexico, India, Armenia and the Philippines. Shortly before the publication of Factories in the Field, McWilliams became the head of California's Division of Immigration and Housing where he focused on improving wages for agricultural workers and their living conditions; he increased inspections of labor camps owned by the growers, as he felt that on-farm housing made the workers more dependent on their employers, and changed the formula which was used to deny relief to workers who refused to accept farm work at prevailing piece wages, effectively forcing some of the growers to increase their piece rates. Understandably, McWilliams and his work were also not well received by California growers; they called him an Agricultural Pest Number One, worse than pear blight or boll weevils, and accused of conspiring together with Steinbeck to ruin their reputation. Funnily enough the two never met, and did not arrange the release dates of their work in any way.

(McWilliams was also involved in the committee led by senator Robert La Follette Jr., which became known as La Follette Civil Liberties Committee and which has performed the most extensive investigation in American history into employer violations of the rights or workers to organize and bargain collectively. Between 1936 and 1941, the committee conducted extensive hearings and collected a vast number of testimonies. These hearings exposed the tactics used by America's leading corporations to prevent their workers from forming unions: employment of extensive industrial espionage and strikebreaking services, stockpiling munitions such as submachine guns, rifles and tear gas, and even subverting local law by hiring their own police forces. The committee closed its hearings in late 1939 and early 1940, when it traveled up and down the California coast and collected testimonies of more than four hundred labor organizers, growers and farm workers. McWilliams ghostwrote the committee's report, a stern indictment of California's agricultural factory system, but it was not presented to Congress until October 1942, without much impact: no one was listening and no one cared, for we were at war.

McWilliams felt that the War enabled both growers and state officials from implementing a reform which they would almost certainly would have been forced to implement otherwise, and that the whole country went to sleep until a young black girl named Rosa Parks refused to go to the back of the bus in Montgomery, Alabama in 1955. He, however, did not stay silent and stop working. On the contrary, failure to implement recommended reforms seemed to give him more strength to combat injustice: he published Prejudice: Japanese Americans, Symbol of Racial Intolerance, a sharp critique and a chronicle of internment of Japanese-Americans during the War, and was active in opposing McCarthyism. In 1960 Carey McWilliams became the first American reporter to reveal that the CIA was training a group of Cuban exiles in Guatemala to serve as guerrillas in the Bay of Pigs Invasion. His article appeared in October, five months before the invasion happened. He died in 1980.)

The copy of The Grapes of Wrath that I read had a great introduction by Robert DeMott, who provided plenty of excerpts from Steinbeck's journal and revealed his ambitions and doubts as he was composing the book. Steinbeck was convinced that if he could "do the book properly", it would be a truly American book and "one of the really fine books". At the same time, he was constantly thinking about what he perceived to be his own lack of ability and limitations as a writer, which greatly troubled him. Honesty was what he saw as the answer and the way to write the book - if he could keep the honesty in, everything would be fine.

Steibeck had plenty of opportunity to do exactly that. While his initial writings have not been successful, he struck a chord with 1935's Tortilla Flat which tells the story of Danny and his friends, a group of paisanos who live in post-war Monterey. But real success came with a series of California novels, stories of common people trying to make it during the Great Depression - In Dubious Battle, Of Mice and Men and the most important one, The Grapes of Wrath.

In 1936 Steinbeck was hired by the San Francisco News, which commissioned him to write a series of articles on the Dust Bowl migration. To write the seven articles, published as The Harvest Gypsies, Steinbeck traveled to California and visited local labor camps, shantytowns and Hoovervilles - migrant settlements named so after President Herbert Hoover, who was widely blamed for the Depression. There he met Tom Collins, manager of the Weedpatch Camp who became a major source of information and a travelling companion. Collins collected statistics on camp life which Steinbeck used as primary material for his articles, and both traveled together on three trips through California. They visited the settlements, went to meetings, stayed on camps and ranches, worked in the fields. After the publication Steinbeck and his wife drove west along Route 66, from Oklahoma to California, like countless migrants before them.

These experiences provided Steinbeck with more than enough material to depict the lives of poor farmers forced to migrate west. He set out to write a novel, conscious of the importance of what he saw and experienced. I am not writing a satisfying story, he told his editor, Pascal Covici. I've done my damnedest to rip a reader's nerves to rags, I don't want him satisfied...I tried to write this book the way lives are being lived not the way books are written.

All through the process, Steinbeck remained aware of the fact that he was creating a literary work. DeMott describes The Grapes of Wrath as an engaged novel with a partisan posture, many complex voices, and passionate prose styles. Steinbeck saw the composition process of the novel similar to the composition of a symphony - he wanted his chapters, voices and styles speak to each other, resonate with recurring themes, the total impression far more powerful than its individual parts.

Steinbeck wrote of events and people he himself experienced and knew, and his concern was humanitarian: to do justice to the migrant men and women, their desire to work and their efforts to retain their dignity and settle in the Promised Land, be an advocate for the common working people whose abuse by their corporate employers was largely a silent tragedy. Men willing to work were hungry and starved in the land of plenty, which for Steinbeck (and any moral human being) was unacceptable; He sided with David rather than Goliath, and set out to write an epic which would surpass all of his other work. This must be a good book, he wrote in his journal, it simply must. I haven't any choice. It must be far and away the best thing I have ever attempted - slow but sure, piling detail on detail until a picture and an experience emerge. Until the whole throbbing thing emerges.

Steinbeck was aware of his ambition and consciously employed imagery from and parallels to the single best read epic text in the US - the Bible. The exodus of the Joad family to California was written with the attention and momentum of the Biblical Exodus of the Isrealites, led by Moses out of Egypt. California is the Promised Land, a good and spacious land, a land flowing with milk and honey (Exodus 3:7-9). The Okies arriving at the border of California are stopped by the border patrol guards, who refuse to let them enter (except for when the labor is needed) - much like the Israelites faced persecution and cruelty from the Amonites, Moabites and Edomites when they were trying to enter Caanan. Tom Joad can be seen as Moses - he killed a man who spoke bad about Jim Casy, like Moses killed an Egyptian who was beating a Hebrew slave, and both served as leader figures for their people. Jim Casy is a Christ figure, down to the same initials - a preacher who questioned the established religion and fought the temptations of flesh, and lead the twelve Joads like Christ lead his twelve disciples. Like Jesus, he disappeared and wandered alone; He taught the gospel of social and spiritual unity: love for all men, sympathy for the poor and oppressed. (view spoiler)[Casy believed in his mission to save the suffering workers so much that he was willing to give his life for it, and his death is exactly like that of Christ - he dies a martyr, killed because of his beliefs, murdered by an agent of power with a piece of wood. (hide spoiler)].

It is also interesting to see from the perspective of a contemporary reader how the novel reads like a perfect example of a dystopian novel: large banks took hold over the land of the Joads and evicted them from it, forcing them to leave their native land of Oklahoma where society has collapsed and migrate towards a new, better world. The theme of large corporations and financial institutions effectively assuming control over lives of individual people is a classic dystopian theme, and so is the journey of a group of those who survived the collapse of society - classic example being The Stand, more recent being the Pulizer winning The Road. Steinbeck's landscape is bleak and hostile, his protagonists experience real life-threatening risks and deprivations which forces them to cross many boundaries.

The Grapes of Wrath became the most successful social protest novel of the 20th century, and its message remains fresh and accurate even today, especially today. We live in a period characterized by growing income inequality and the widening gap between the richest and the poorest, where certain institutions of the financial sector have been deemed "too big to fail" effectively making them more dangerous than ever. Corporations lobby the politicians to ensure that their own interests are met, and enjoy a wide range of big government subsidies and tax breaks, sponsored by ordinary citizens. While the big corporations enjoy all the benefits guaranteed by a big, nanny state ordinary citizens are being told that they don't deserve it and that they have to help themselves and pull themselves up by their own bootstraps; politicians and pundits use the words "welfare" in pejorative context when it comes to their own viewers and constituents, as if it was something shameful instead of an extended hand, which helps the ordinary working people stay afloat. A welfare state is inconsiderable if it could actually benefit those who need it most - the poor and struggling ordinary citizens, who are left to walk on their own and slowly cross to the other side. In this vision of society all that I regard as a vice is turned into a virtue: greed, selfishness and no care for the weaker, a world where people push forward with sharp elbows and know the price of everything and the value of nothing.

"One of the legacies of the Reagan-Thatcher era -- which is very much still with us -- was to denigrate the very idea of the "public good." Anything preceded by the adjective "public" -- public schools, public transportation, public parks, public libraries, public welfare -- was (and is) suspect. The private sector, it was assumed, could do it better; competition and the profit motive would generate savings and efficiencies; citizens would be better served if they were treated as "customers" and "clients." Well, we now have three decades to assess the results. What happened? "Privatization" has meant more profits for the private sector, better services for those wealthy enough to pay more for them, and poorer services and higher taxes for almost everyone else. The rich have seceded into their own private schools, private jets, private health clubs, and privatized communities; most Americans must now pay individually for what previous generations paid for collectively, through their taxes. Certain public goods, like higher education, have morphed into private investments. But the biggest loss, I think, has been our sense of the common good itself: out understanding that we are all in it together, that we are bound together by an implicit social contract involving obligations to one another that define a decent society, and that much of what we have and enjoy in life depends on what we achieve in common with others."