First published in 1939, Steinbeck’s Pulitzer Prize winning epic of the Great Depression chronicles the Dust Bowl migration of the 1930s and tells the story of one Oklahoma farm family, the Joads, driven from their homestead and forced to travel west to the promised land of California. Out of their trials and their repeated collisions against the hard realities of an America divided into haves and have-nots evolves a drama that is intensely human yet majestic in its scale and moral vision, elemental yet plainspoken, tragic but ultimately stirring in its human dignity.
Now that we’ve changed the focus of our site from climate change fiction to the broader category of ecological fiction, we feel this book should be included. The Daily Targum recently posted about how scholars met for a Grapes of Wrath conference to celebrate the novel’s 75th anniversary. Lawrence Buell, emeritus professor of American literature at Harvard University, and keynote speak for the event, described the novel as a landmark of ecological fiction. Though not without criticism, the novel (one of my long-time favorites) also, according to Buell, “nailed the industrialization of agricultural, the shift from small farms to factory farms.”
Priscilla Wald, professor of English and women’s studies from Duke University, also spoke at the conference, introducing her work, “Insane Awakenings: Vegetal Violence in the Anthropocene.” She said:
The emergency of climate change, and the unimaginable threat of a world without us, calls of a rethinking of the postcolonial critique of the universal enlightenment subject within the discipline of history, [and that] in her study of “The Grapes of Wrath,” the power of the literary arts — namely, story, poetry and myth — converts the violence of capitalism against nature in its other meaning: embryonic counter-violence.
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ISBN-10: 067001690X
ISBN-13: 9780670016907
Goodreads: 18114322
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Published: //
The Pulitzer Prize-winning epic of the Great Depression, a book that galvanized—and sometimes outraged—millions of readers.
First published in 1939, Steinbeck’s Pulitzer Prize-winning epic of the Great Depression chronicles the Dust Bowl migration of the 1930s and tells the story of one Oklahoma farm family, the Joads—driven from their homestead and forced to travel west to the promised land of California. Out of their trials and their repeated collisions against the hard realities of an America divided into Haves and Have-Nots evolves a drama that is intensely human yet majestic in its scale and moral vision, elemental yet plainspoken, tragic but ultimately stirring in its human dignity. A portrait of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless, of one man’s fierce reaction to injustice, and of one woman’s stoical strength, the novel captures the horrors of the Great Depression and probes into the very nature of equality and justice in America. At once a naturalistic epic, captivity narrative, road novel, and transcendental gospel, Steinbeck’s powerful landmark novel is perhaps the most American of American Classics.
