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    The Grapes of Wrath (MAXNotes Literature Guides)
    The Grapes of Wrath (MAXNotes Literature Guides)
    The Grapes of Wrath (MAXNotes Literature Guides)
    Ebook118 pages1 hour

    The Grapes of Wrath (MAXNotes Literature Guides)

    By Lee Cusick

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    About this ebook

    REA's MAXnotes for John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath MAXnotes offer a fresh look at masterpieces of literature, presented in a lively and interesting fashion. Written by literary experts who currently teach the subject, MAXnotes will enhance your understanding and enjoyment of the work. MAXnotes are designed to stimulate independent thought about the literary work by raising various issues and thought-provoking ideas and questions. MAXnotes cover the essentials of what one should know about each work, including an overall summary, character lists, an explanation and discussion of the plot, the work's historical context, illustrations to convey the mood of the work, and a biography of the author. Each chapter is individually summarized and analyzed, and has study questions and answers.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherResearch & Education Association
    Release dateJan 1, 2013
    ISBN9780738672861
    The Grapes of Wrath (MAXNotes Literature Guides)

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      The Grapes of Wrath (MAXNotes Literature Guides) - Lee Cusick

      Bibliography

      SECTION ONE

      Introduction

      The Life and Work of John Steinbeck

      John Steinbeck was born on February 27, 1902, in Salinas, California. In the course of his life he was a common laborer, store clerk, ranch hand, surveyor, world traveler, journalist, short story writer, essayist, and playwright, as well as the author of 18 novels. His novels about the common people and the troubles that beset them earned him his reputation as one of America’s greatest writers.

      He attended Stanford University sporadically between 1919 and 1925, but earned very few credits in his major field, marine biology, often taking one term off to work and earn enough to pay for the next. During this period he began writing fiction in the form of short stories. No doubt he was inspired to be a writer at an early age by having many famous pieces of literature read to him by his mother, a former school teacher.

      A short attempt at freelance writing in New York City in 1925 proved futile. Returning to California proved to be his salvation, and most of his writings used places and subjects from this area. He had grown up in the Salinas Valley, worked on farms and ranches while attending Stanford, and later took much of the material used in the creation of several of his novels from his experiences and surroundings.

      Steinbeck never lost his desire to write and finally achieved popularity and success with his novel Tortilla Flat in 1935. With the publication of his novel Of Mice and Men, in 1937, he became a national figure. Perhaps his most popular and greatest work, however, was The Grapes of Wrath. Published in 1939, it reached the top of the best-seller list within two months, and Steinbeck was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for it in 1940. It has been hailed as a masterpiece and a landmark in American literature. However, following his great success with this novel, his reputation declined with the appearance of lesser works such as The Winter of Our Discontent.

      Steinbeck seemed to lose interest in writing fiction in the early 1960s, and in his last years he was more active as a traveler and journalist and writer of nonfiction. Two of the notable examples of this phase of his life were Travels with Charley in Search of America and America and Americans.

      Steinbeck wrote about ordinary people doing battle against dehumanizing social forces or struggling against their own inhumane tendencies and trying to forge lives of meaning and worth. In his writing, he did not attempt to entertain but rather to present the raw and bitter moments of the true life situations he observed around him, often living and working with people who later served as the models for his characters. He actually traveled the road from Oklahoma to California along with Dust Bowl migrants as research for The Grapes of Wrath.

      Steinbeck was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962, in recognition of the entire body of his work. He died on December 20, 1968 in New York City.

      Historical Background

      When Steinbeck wrote The Grapes of Wrath, the United States was suffering through a severe economic depression. Everywhere people lost their savings, homes, and means of earning a living. Especially hard hit were the farming areas of the Midwest. Poor farming practices had depleted the soil, and it became less capable of supporting the individual families who farmed their small sections of it. Also, the markets and prices for the crops declined. Agriculture markedly changed in the area as a result. Small farms were consolidated into larger, and more profitable units. Tractors, other machines, and day laborers replaced mules and family labor. Independent farm life, which had developed the area and dominated it during the 1800s, dwindled. In the mid-1930s there were severe droughts and erosion of the dry soil by strong winds. This created a Dust Bowl in the states of Oklahoma, Texas, Kansas, and Colorado. The small farmers, now tenants and sharecroppers, were uprooted from the homes and farms which had belonged to their families for many years. By the tens of thousands these victims of depression, drought, and dust headed west to seek a better life in the fertile fields of California. They found themselves as much victims there. Work was scarce, wages were low, and they were resented, resisted, and repressed by the residents. Their attempts to better their lives were branded as Communism, a system much disliked and feared by many Americans of the time.

      Reaction to The Grapes of Wrath was immediate, and ran to extremes of praise and condemnation. One noted critic said the book might do for its time what Uncle Tom’s Cabin did for its, because it so strongly exposed social injustice and called for social redress; but many people denounced it as Communist propaganda. People in California and Oklahoma charged it was full of exaggerated lies about the conditions and treatment of the migrants in their respective states. In California, one writer refuted point-by-point what he labeled the book’s inaccuracies. A Congressman from Oklahoma denounced it, on behalf of the people of his state, on the floor of the House of Representatives as a dirty, lying, filthy manuscript-a lie, a damnable lie, a black, infernal creation of a twisted, distorted mind.

      Copies of the book were symbolically burned in a town in Illinois by order of the Library Board, even as the librarian noted that the waiting list for it was longer than for any other book in history. The burning order came in the same week the book had its largest sales in seven months. Indeed, the general public embraced The Grapes of Wrath. It became a best-seller shortly after publication and has been in print and widely read continuously since that time.

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