Steinbeck: America’s Most Vulnerable Trampled In The Vineyards Where “The Grapes of Wrath” Are Stored.

Ask which is THE single greatest American novel, and you can count on the usual meritorious suspects:

“Moby Dick” by Herman Melville is the usual favorite. Some might go for “Tom Sawyer” or “Huckleberry Finn” by Mark Twain, or else “Babbit” by Sinclair Lewis, “The Red Badge of Courage” by Stephen Crane, or for those who can understand Southern, “As I Lay Dying” or, more likely, "Absalom, Absalom" by William Faulkner.

Iconoclasts might pick “The Invisible Man” by Ralph Ellison (thanks for the reminder, Sloucho), “Look Homeward, Angel” or “You Can’t Go Home Again” by Thomas Wolfe, or any of a number of works by Thornton Wilder, Booker T. Washington, and F. Scott Fitzgerald to name but a few more.

Not me. I see America as a contradictory social construct wherein freedom sometimes is, as songwriter Kris Kristofferson once wrote, “another word for nothing left to lose.” Created to emancipate its citizens from social and religious repression, America has provided a rich canvas for artists to express the internal forces that drive men to do both great and cruel things under the cover of freedom. Over time the American Dream has evolved into a perfect literary metaphor because the ideal is so gloriously fallible in its reality. Viewed that way John Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath,” his Pulitzer Prize-winning 1939 novel of dignity and unshakable faith in the face of long odds and cruel fate, should arguably be at the top of that list.

Most of Steinbeck’s best work – including “East of Eden,” “Tortilla Flat,” “Of Mice and Men,” and “Cannery Row,” dealt with the seamy side of rural poverty and working class aspirations, mostly set in his native Salinas Valley, California. But in “The Grapes of Wrath,” Steinbeck put together a once-in-a-lifetime tome that is a sweeping tale of class warfare brought to a boiling point by fate and nature. The story is epic in scope, intimate in its humanity, and true to the American spirit of never giving up at any cost. Driven from their plots of land by debt, by the Dustbowl drought, and by greedy Depression-era corporate landowners bent on replacing manual labor with machines, throngs of hardscrabble Farm Belt families headed Westward. Like lemmings to the sea they chased unfulfilled promises of a Xanadu in California’s lush orchards and vineyards as promoted in handbills intended to drive them from their land in great numbers so labor rates in California would come down. Steinbeck describes the exodus in a passage of Biblical proportions in ”The Grapes of Wrath”::

“ [T]hey scampered about, looking for work; and the highways were streams of people, and the ditch banks were lines of people. Behind them more were coming. The great highways streamed with moving people. There in the Middle- and Southwest had lived a simple agrarian folk who had not changed with industry, who had not farmed with machines or known the power and danger of machines in private hands. They had not grown up in the paradoxes of industry. Their senses were still sharp to the ridiculousness of the industrial life.

“And then suddenly the machines pushed them out and they swarmed on the highways. The movement changed them; the highways, the camps along the road, the fear of hunger and the hunger itself, changed them. The children without dinner changed them, the endless moving changed them. They were migrants. And the hostility changed them, welded them, united them – hostility that made towns group and arm as though to repel an invader, squads with pick handles. Clerks and storekeepers with shotguns guarding the world against their own people.”

Contrary to popular opinion, Steinbeck was not a socialist. Biographer Jay Parini’s “John Steinbeck: A Biography” quotes Steinbeck as saying socialism was “simply another form of religion, and thus delusional.” Yet after publication of “The Grapes of Wrath” he was treated by federal authorities and corporate interests as a dangerous revolutionary because of the book’s “whose side are you on?” challenge to the privileged:

“Men of property were terrified for their property. Men who had never been hungry saw the eyes of the hungry. Men who had never wanted anything very much saw the flare of want in the eyes of the migrants. And the men of the towns and the soft suburban county gathered to defend themselves; and they reassured themselves that they were good and the invaders bad, as a man must do before he fights…. And the companies, the banks worked at their own doom and they did not know it. The fields were fruitful, and starving men moved on the roads….The great companies did not know that the line between hunger and anger is a thin line….On the highways people moved like ants and searched for work, for food. And the anger began to ferment.”

Steinbeck emphasized the point in his 1962 speech accepting the Nobel Prize for Literature:

“The writer is charged with exposing our many grievous faults and failures for the purpose of improvement….Furthermore, the writer is delegated to declare and celebrate Man’s proven capacity for greatness of heart and spirit – for gallantry in defeat, courage, compassion and love. In the endless war against weakness and despair, these are the bright rally flags of hope and emulation. I hold that a writer who does not passionately believe in the perfectability of man has no dedication nor any membership in literature.”

This novel stands out because Steinbeck seamlessly blends the blind trust of society’s most vulnerable with the pathos of a spirit that stands tall despite being trampled by two forces at once -- Mother Nature’s power to destroy, and human nature’s fear of the weak who, in the end, are possessed of an almost superhuman strength. As family matriarch Ma Joad says to her son Tom of those who would deny them:

“You got to have patience. Why Tom – us people will go on livin’ when all them people is gone. Why, Tom, we’re the people that live. They ain’t gonna wipe us out. Why, we’re the people – we go on.”

And Ma Joad again during a brief respite in an oasis of fleeting hope so welcome that it literally fills the reader’s heart with relief -- a friendly federally-funded hobo encampment full of helpful Okie refugees – not knowing yet they’ll crash in flames again because in this America, tragedy inexorably awaits them yet again and forever:

“We’re the Joads. We don’t look up to nobody. Grampa’s grampa, he fit in the Revolution. We was farm people ‘til the debt. And then – them people. They done somepin to us. Ever’ time they come seemed like was a whipping me – all of us. An in Needles, that police. He done somepin to me, made me feel mean. Made me feel ashamed. An’ now I ain’t ashamed. These folks is our folks – is our folks.”

It is impossible in so short a space to do justice to the power of “The Grapes of Wrath.” I have read it cover-to-cover twice as an adult since tackling it for the first time as a high school senior. To this day I get goose bumps every time I try and come to terms with the invisible forces that insist on denying the Joads the slightest break again, again and, almost unbearably, again. Besides the book’s thematic power, Steinbeck’s writing style is evocative to the point of tears and rage. The unforgettable, spine-tingling final scene is a poignant, quintessentially American Renaissance fresco frozen in time – “Rosasharn” (Rose of Sharon) Joad with a starving old man cradled against her breast, huddled against elements that the reader hopes will finally end their suffering and carry them away from this cruel world. Surely if Jesus died for our sins, the Joads suffered for our ignorance.

“The Grapes of Wrath” can lay claim to being THE great American novel because of the protagonists’ simplistic individual faith and dignity in the face of injustices that are ironically the same as those that drove colonists to these shores to begin with. Today we have what we have because of that spirit. And what we have loses its value if we don’t at least recognize what we owe to so many who have nothing else but that spirit – whoever and wherever they are -- much less do something about it in our own small way.

You can’t celebrate John Steinbeck -- and American literature --without reading, thinking about, and treasuring this book, regardless of your political or social beliefs.

My bet with you: by half way through reading it you’ll have your significant other running out of the room the moment you walk in with the book open in your hands, because all you’ll be doing is reading him/or her another passage or two out loud (again, again, and again!), saying, “Just ONE more, honey. You’ve GOT to hear this. Last one. I promise!”
If you get past the first three chapters and don't put it down, you'll be hooked and this bet is one I KNOW I’ll win. What a deal. Great literature and the start of your own family oral tradition all in one.

This review is part of write-off organized by Stephen Murray on the occasion of what would have been John Steinbeck’s 99th birthday. Participants, in order of the publication date of the book they are reviewing, are:
In Dubious Battle (1936) - Caravan70 and Macresarf1 ; Of Mice and Men (1937) Stephen_Murray and (movie) Skygirl; The Red Pony (1937) - Stephen_Murray; The Grapes of Wrath (1939) - Murasaki and (movie) Ladydagney1 and Howard Creech; The Moon is Down (1942) - Gabriella ; Cannery Row (1945) - GraceF and Kchowell; The Pearl (1947) - Isinga ; East of Eden (1952) - Ed_Grover ; Sweet Thursday (1965) - Stephen_Murray; The Short Reign of Pippin IV (1954) – Gabriella; Once There Was a War (1958) Jiahong; Travels with Charley (1962) - Eplovejoy and Hadassahchana; and reviews by Frazelledspice and Nathanael73.