Levels of Reading John Steinbeck's the Grapes of Wrath
The Grapes of Wrath, p.ane
John Steinbeck 
PENGUIN BOOKS
The Grapes of Wrath
Built-in in Salinas, California, in 1902, John Steinbeck grew up in a fertile agronomical valley about twenty-five miles from the Pacific Coast - and both valley and declension would serve equally settings for some of his best fiction. In 1919 he went to Stanford University, where he intermittently enrolled in literature and writing courses until he left in 1925 without taking a degree. During the next five years he supported himself every bit a labourer and journalist in New York City, all the time working on his first novel, Cup of Golden (1929). Subsequently marriage and a move to Pacific Grove, he published two Californian fictions, The Pastures of Sky (1932) and To a God Unknown (1933), and worked on short stories later collected in The Long Valley (1938). Popular success and fiscal security came but with Tortilla Flat (1935), stories almost Monterey'due south paisanos. A ceaseless experimenter throughout his career, Steinbeck changed class regularly. Three powerful novels of the late 1930s focused on the Californian labouring class: In Dubious Battle (1936), Of Mice and Men (1937) and the book considered past many his finest, The Grapes of Wrath (1939). Early in the 1940s, Steinbeck became a filmmaker with The Forgotten Village (1941) and a serious pupil of marine biological science with Sea of Cortez (1941). He devoted his services to the war, writing Bombs Abroad (1942) and the controversial play-novelette The Moon is Downwardly (1942). Cannery Row (1945), The Wayward Motorbus (1947), The Pearl (1947), A Russian Periodical (1948), another experimental drama, Burning Vivid (1950), and The Log from the Body of water of Cortez (1951) preceded publication of the awe-inspiring East of Eden (1952), an ambitious saga of the Salinas Valley and his own family'south history. The final decades of his life were spent in New York Metropolis and Sag Harbor with his third wife, with whom he travelled widely. Later books include Sweetness Thursday (1954), The Brusk Reign of Pippin 4: A Fabrication (1957), Once There was a War (1958), The Winter of Our Discontent (1961), Travels with Charley in Search of America (1962), America and Americans (1966) and the posthumously published Journal of a Novel: The 'Eastward of Eden' Letters (1969), Viva Zapata! (1975), The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights (1976) and Working Days: The Journals of 'The Grapes of Wrath' (1989). He died in 1968, having won a Nobel Prize in 1962.
Robert DeMott is Edwin and Ruth Kennedy Distinguished Professor at Ohio University, where he has received numerous undergraduate and graduate teaching awards, including the Jeanette G. Grasselli Kinesthesia Teaching Honor in 1997. He is a former director of the Center for Steinbeck Studies at San Jose State University, and is currently on the Editorial Board of the Center'due south Steinbeck Newsletter. He is Editor (with Elaine Steinbeck as Special Consultant) of the Library of America's three-volume edition of John Steinbeck's writings, of which Novels and Stories, 1932-1937 (1994) and The Grapes of Wrath and Other Writings, 1936-1942 (1996) take so far appeared. His annotated edition of John Steinbeck's Working Days: The Journals of 'The Grapes of Wrath' was chosen every bit a New York Times Notable Book in 1989, and his Steinbeck'south Typewriter: Essays on His Fine art (1996) received the Nancy Dasher Book Award from the College English Association of Ohio in 1998.
JOHN STEINBECK
The Grapes of Wrath
With an Introduction by Robert DeMott
PENGUIN BOOKS
PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England
Start published in the U.s.a. by The Viking Press Inc. 1939
Get-go published in U.k. by William Heinemann Ltd 1939
Published in Penguin Books 1976
This edition published in the USA in Penguin Books 1992
Published in Great britain in Penguin Classics 2000
1
Copyright 1939 past John Steinbeck
Copyright renewed John Steinbeck, 1967
Introduction copyright (c) Penguin Putnam Inc., 1992
All rights reserved
The moral right of the author of the introduction has been asserted
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject
to the condition that it shall not, past way of merchandise or otherwise, be lent,
re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's
prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in
which information technology is published and without a like condition including this
condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
To CAROL who willed it.
To TOM who lived it.
Contents
Introduction past Robert DeMott
Suggestions for Further Reading
A Notation on the Text
The Grapes of Wrath
Introduction
"What some people discover in religion a author may find in his arts and crafts... a
kind of breaking through to glory."
--Steinbeck in a 1965 interview
I
On June 18, 1938, a little more than three weeks after starting The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck confided in his daily periodical (posthumously published as Working Days):
If I could practise this book properly it would be one of the really fine books and a truly American book. Only I am assailed with my own ignorance and inability. I'll just have to work from a groundwork of these. Honesty. If I can keep an honesty it is all I tin can expect of my poor encephalon.... If I can practise that it will be all my lack of genius tin can produce. For no one else knows my lack of ability the way I do. I am pushing confronting information technology all the time.
Despite Steinbeck's doubts, which were constant during its tumultuous process of composition, The Grapes of Wrath turned out to exist not simply a "fine" book, but the greatest of his seventeen novels. Steinbeck's agressive mixture of native philosophy, mutual-sense politics, blue-collar radicalism, working-class characters, folk wisdom, and home-spun literary form--all set to a assuming, rhythmic style and nervy, raw dialogue--qualified the novel as the "American book" he had set out to write. The novel's title--from Julia Ward Howe'southward "Battle Hymn of the Republic"--was clearly in the American grain: "I like it because it is a march and this book is a kind of march--because it is in our own revolutionary tradition and considering in reference to this book it has a large pregnant," Steinbeck announced on September 10, 1938, to Elizabeth Otis, his literary agent.
Later on his arduous march of composition from late May through late October 1938("Never worked so hard in my life nor then long before," Steinbeck told Carl Wilhelmson), The Grapes of Wrath passed from his married woman's typescript to published novel in a scant 4 months. In March 1939, when Steinbeck received copies from ane of three advance printings, he told Pascal Covici, his editor at The Viking Press, that he was "immensely pleased with them." The novel's impressive physical and aesthetic advent was the upshot of its imposing length (619 pages) and Elmer Hader'south hit dustjacket illustration (which pictured the exiled Joads looking out on a lush California valley). And true to Steinbeck's insistence that The Grapes of Wrath be "keyed into the American scene from the outset," Covici had insured that Viking Press printed words and music from the "Battle Hymn" on the book'south endpapers in an attempt (unsuccessfully, it turned out) to deflect accusations of communism confronting the novel.
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Given the drastic plight of the migrant labor situation in California, Steinbeck refused to write a pop book or court commercial success. It was ironic, then, that presently after its official publication engagement on April 14, 1939, fueled past the nearly ninety reviews--by and large positive--that appeared in newspapers, magazines, and literary journals between April and June, The Grapes of Wrath climbed to the meridian of the all-time-seller lists for most of the year, selling 428,900 copies in hardcover at $ii. 75 each. (In 1941, when the Sun Dial Printing issued a cloth reprint for a dollar, the publisher appear that more than than 543,000 copies of Grapes had already been sold.) The Grapes of Wrath won the 1940 Pulitzer Prize (Steinbeck gave the $ m prize to writer Ritch Lovejoy), somewhen became the cornerstone of his 1962 Nobel Prize accolade, and proved itself to be among the virtually enduring works of fiction past any American author, past or nowadays. In spite of the flaws its critics perceive (frequent sentimentality, flat characterizations, heavy-handed symbolism, unconvincing dialogue)--or maybe considering of them (general readers tend to embrace the volume'southward mystic soul and are less troubled by its imperfect body)--The Grapes of Wrath has resolutely entered both the American consciousness and its censor. If a literary archetype tin exist divers as a book that speaks directly to readers' concerns in successive historical eras, then surely The Grapes of Wrath is such a work.
Although Steinbeck could not have predicted this success (and was nearly ruined by the notoriety it achieved), the fact is that, in the past half century, The Grapes of Wrath has sold more than 14 one thousand thousand copies. Many of them end up in the hands of students at schools and colleges where the novel is taught in literature and history classes at every level from junior high to doctoral seminars. The volume has also had a overjoyed life on screen and stage. Steinbeck sold the novel's picture show rights for $75,000 to producer Darryl F. Zanuck. Then Nunnally Johnson scripted a truncated film version, which was nonetheless memorably paced, photographed, and acted (especially by Henry Fonda equally Tom Joad, Jane Darwell as Ma, and John Carradine every bit Jim Casy) nether the direction of John Ford in 1940. (A "hard, straight motion picture... that looks and feels like a documentary moving picture and... has a hard, true ring," Steinbeck reported after seeing its Hollywood preview.) Recently, Frank Galati faithfully adapted the novel for his Chicago-based Steppenwolf Visitor, whose Broadway production won a Tony Honour as Best Play in 1990. The Grapes of Wrath has also been translated into nearly thirty languages. It seems that Steinbeck'southward words go along, in Warren French'south apt phrase, "the education of the centre."
Every strong novel redefines our formulation of the genre's dimensions and reorders our awareness of its possibilities. Similar other products of rough-hewn American genius--Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom'south Cabin, Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and Alice Walker'due south The Color Purple (three other "flawed" novels that also humanize America's downtrodden by exposing social ills)--The Grapes of Wrath has a home-grown quality: role naturalistic epic, role jeremiad, part captivity narrative, role route novel, part transcendental gospel.
Many American authors, often with little in the fashion of a shared novelistic tradition to emulate, or finding that established fictional models don't suit their sensibilities, manage to forge their own style by synthesizing their personal vision and experience with a diversity of cultural forms and literary styles. Steinbeck was no exception. To execute The Grapes of Wrath he drew on the jump-cut technique of John Dos Passos'due south The states trilogy (1937), the narrative tempo of Pare Lorentz's radio drama Ecce Homo! and the sequential quality of such Lorentz films as The Plow That Bankrupt the Plains (1936) and The River (1937), the stark visual effects of Dorothea Lange'due south photographs of Dust Bowl Oklahoma and California migrant life, the timbre of the Greek epics, the rhythms of the King James Bible, the refrains of American folk music, and the biological impetus of his and Edward F. Ricketts's ecological phalanx, or group-human, theory. Steinbeck's imagination transformed these resources (particularly biblical themes, parallels, analogies, and allusions) into his own holistic structure, his own private signature. Malcolm Cowley's claim that a "whole literature is summarized in this book and much of it is carried to a new level of excellence" is especially accurate.
In early July 1938, Steinbeck told literary critic Harry T. Moore that he was improvising what was for him a "new method" of fictional technique: ane which combined a suitably elastic form and elevated fashion to express the far-reaching tragedy of the migrant drama. In The Grapes of Wrath he devised a contrapuntal structure, which alternates short lyrical chapters of exposition and background pertinent to the migrants every bit a group (Chapters one, 3, 5, 7, 9, 11, 12, fourteen, 15, 17, 19, 21, 23, 25, 27, 29) with the long narrative chapters of the Joad family unit's dramatic exodus to California (Chapters two, 4, six, viii, ten, 13, sixteen, eighteen, xx, 22, 24, 26, 28, 30). But as in Moby-Dick Melville created intensity and prolonged suspense by alternating betwixt the temporal chapters of Ahab'southward driven quest for the white whale and Ishmael's numinous chapters on cetology, so Steinbeck structured his novel by juxtaposition. His "item" chapters are the slow-paced and lengthy narrative chapters that embody traditional characterization and accelerate the dramatic plot, while his jazzy, rapid-fire "interchapters" work at some other level of recognition by expressing an atemporal, universal, synoptic view of the migrant condition. Every bit he wrote Capacity 5 and half dozen, for instance, Steinbeck reminded himself that for maximum effect, "I want the reader to exist able to keep [the general and item chapters] separate in his mind." In fact, his "general" or intercalary chapters ("pace changers," Steinbeck called them) were expressly designed to "hitting the reader beneath the belt. With the rhythms and symbols of verse ane tin can get into a reader--open him up and while he is open up introduce things on a [sic] intellectual level which he would not or could non receive unless he were opened up," Steinbeck revealed to Columbia undergraduate Herbert Sturz in 1953.
The Grapes of Wrath is an engaged novel with a partisan posture, many circuitous voices, and passionate prose styles. ("No other American novel has succeeded in forging and making instrumental then many prose styles," Peter Lisca believes.) Except for its unflinching treatment of the Peachy Depression's climatic, social, and economical weather, and those interchapters that serve to halt the emotional slide toward sentimentality, there is zippo cynically distanced about information technology, naught coolly modernist, in the way we have come to empathize the elite literary implications of that term in the past seventy-five years. (The Grapes of Wrath is in some means an old-fashioned novel, fifty-fifty downwardly to its curious avoidance of homo sexuality.) It is not narrated from the beginning-person signal of view, yet the linguistic communication has a consistently catchy eyewitness quality about it, and its vivid biblical, empirical, poetical, cinematic, and folk styles demonstrate the remarkable tonal and visual acuity of Steinbeck's ear and heart.
Steinbeck told Merle Armitage on February 17, 1939, that in "composition, in movement, in tone and in scope," The Grapes of Wrath was "symphonic." Indeed, his fusion of intimate narrative and panoramic editorial chapters enforces this dialogic concert. Capacity, styles, voices all speak to each other, set upward resonances, send echoes back and forth--point and counterpoint, strophe and antistrophe--as in a huge symphony whose total impression far surpasses the sum of its detached and sometimes dissonant parts. Steinbeck'south novel belongs to that vital class of fictions whose shape issues not from an ideal design of artful propriety but from the generative urgency of its writer'due south feel. ("It had to be written," Stanley Kunitz said in 1939.) Steinbeck'south directly involvement with the plight of America'south Dust Bowl migrants in the latter one-half of the 1930s created his obsessive urge to tell their story honestly but also movingly. "This must be a good volume," he wrote in Working Days on June 10, 1938. "It but must. I haven't any selection. It must be far and away the all-time matter I take e'er attempted--ho-hum but sure, piling particular on item until a picture show and an experience emerge. Until the whole throbbing thing emerges."
Making his audience see and experience that living picture was paramount. "I am not writing a satisfying story," he claimed to Pascal Covici on January 16, 1939:
I've
done my damndest to rip a reader'southward fretfulness to rags, I don't want him satisfied.... I tried to write this book the way lives are being lived not the fashion books are written.... Throughout I've tried to brand the reader participate in the authenticity, what he takes from information technology will be scaled entirely on his own depth or hollowness. At that place are five layers in this book, a reader will notice every bit many equally he can and he won't find more he has in himself.Steinbeck'south participatory aesthetic was based on a circle of complicity that linked "the trinity" of writer, text, and reader to ensure maximum affective impact. On June seven, 1938, every bit he completed Chapter 5, for instance, he kept his eye steadily on target: "Today'southward piece of work is the overtone of the tractors, the men who run them, the men they displace, the sound of them, the smell of them. I've got to go this over. Got to because this one's tone is very important--this is the eviction audio and the tonal reason for move. Must do it well."
Steinbeck conceived his novel on simultaneous levels of existence, ranging from socio-economic determinism to transcendent spirituality. Louis Owens explains how, for example, biblical parallels in The Grapes of Wrath illuminate four of Steinbeck's layers:
On one level it is the story of a family unit'south struggle for survival in the Promised State.... On some other level information technology is the story of a people's struggle, the migrants'. On a third level it is the story of a nation, America. On still another level, through... the allusions to Christ and those to the Israelites and Exodus, it becomes the story of mankind's quest for profound comprehension of his delivery to his fellow man and to the earth he inhabits.
Thus Steinbeck pushed back the accustomed boundaries of traditional mimetic fiction and redefined the proletarian grade. Like all truly significant American novels, The Grapes of Wrath does not offer codified solutions. Even though it treats with privilege a particular section of the migrant labor scene (Steinbeck ignores the problems of nonwhite migrant workers--Filipinos, Chinese, Japanese, and Mexicans--who made up a meaning percent of California'southward agricultural labor strength, according to Carey McWilliams), his book withal speaks to the universal experience of human disenfranchisement, withal holds out hope for homo advancement. At every level The Grapes of Wrath enacts the process of its author'south belief and embodies the shape of his religion, as in this ringing synthesis from Chapter 14.
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