Eighty-Five Years Later
Today in Monterey County History: Is "The Grapes of Wrath" still relevant?
The New Yorker published a rave review of John Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath,” the groundbreaking John Steinbeck novel published 85 years ago today.
Wrote Clifton Fadimon: “It’s going to be a great and deserved best-seller; it’ll be read and praised by everyone; it will almost certainly win the Pulitzer Prize; it will be filmed and dramatized and radio-acted—but, gentle reader, amid all the excitement let’s try to keep in mind what “The Grapes of Wrath” is about: to wit, the slow murder of half a million innocent and worthy American citizens.
“Its 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.”
Read the review here.
Over at The New York Times, Peter Monro Jack said 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.”
Jack declared that Steinbeck’s most famous novel is “as pitiful and angry a novel ever to be written about America.”
What do you think? Is “The Grapes of Wrath” still relevant.
Definitely still relevant and more so today because we know better and we could do better as a culture and a community. I ashamed of the inhumanity I witness every day in my own community - it's too close to home for comfort.
Maybe even more so, but the downtrodden are a different social group.