Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Series Editor's Preface
- Introduction
- 1 Cup of Gold (1929)
- 2 The Pastures of Heaven (1932)
- 3 To a God Unknown (1933)
- 4 Tortilla Flat (1935)
- 5 In Dubious Battle (1936)
- 6 Of Mice and Men (the novel, 1937)
- 7 The Red Pony (1937)
- 8 Of Mice and Men (the play, 1937)
- 9 The Long Valley (1938)
- 10 The Grapes of Wrath (1939)
- 11 The Forgotten Village (1941)
- 12 Sea of Cortez (1941)
- 13 The Moon Is Down (the novel, 1942)
- 14 The Moon Is Down (the play, 1942)
- 15 Bombs Away (1942)
- 16 Cannery Row (1945)
- 17 The Wayward Bus (1947)
- 18 The Pearl (1947)
- 19 A Russian Journal (1948)
- 20 Burning Bright (the novel, 1950)
- 21 Burning Bright (the play, 1950)
- 22 The Log from the Sea of Cortez (1951)
- 23 East of Eden (1952)
- 24 Sweet Thursday (1954)
- 25 The Short Reign of Pippin IV (1957)
- 26 Once There Was a War (1958)
- 27 The Winter of Our Discontent (1961)
- 28 Travels with Charley in Search of America (1962)
- 29 America and Americans (1966)
- 30 Journal of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters (1969)
- 31 The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights (1976)
- 32 Working Days: The Journals of The Grapes of Wrath 1938–1941 (1989)
- Index
10 - The Grapes of Wrath (1939)
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 May 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Series Editor's Preface
- Introduction
- 1 Cup of Gold (1929)
- 2 The Pastures of Heaven (1932)
- 3 To a God Unknown (1933)
- 4 Tortilla Flat (1935)
- 5 In Dubious Battle (1936)
- 6 Of Mice and Men (the novel, 1937)
- 7 The Red Pony (1937)
- 8 Of Mice and Men (the play, 1937)
- 9 The Long Valley (1938)
- 10 The Grapes of Wrath (1939)
- 11 The Forgotten Village (1941)
- 12 Sea of Cortez (1941)
- 13 The Moon Is Down (the novel, 1942)
- 14 The Moon Is Down (the play, 1942)
- 15 Bombs Away (1942)
- 16 Cannery Row (1945)
- 17 The Wayward Bus (1947)
- 18 The Pearl (1947)
- 19 A Russian Journal (1948)
- 20 Burning Bright (the novel, 1950)
- 21 Burning Bright (the play, 1950)
- 22 The Log from the Sea of Cortez (1951)
- 23 East of Eden (1952)
- 24 Sweet Thursday (1954)
- 25 The Short Reign of Pippin IV (1957)
- 26 Once There Was a War (1958)
- 27 The Winter of Our Discontent (1961)
- 28 Travels with Charley in Search of America (1962)
- 29 America and Americans (1966)
- 30 Journal of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters (1969)
- 31 The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights (1976)
- 32 Working Days: The Journals of The Grapes of Wrath 1938–1941 (1989)
- Index
Summary
Charles Poore.
“Books of the Times.”
New York Times,
14 April 1939, p. 27.
Their covered wagons are antique jalopies and the gold of their Eldorado hangs on trees in California orchards. If they lived a hundred years ago—these salty, brave and enormously human wanderers of John Steinbeck's magnificent new novel, The Grapes of Wrath—we should call them heroic pioneers. We should admire their courageous will to survive in spite of nature's elements and man's inhumanity. We should relish their Rabelaisian candor, their shrewdness and their humor. We should undoubtedly say their spirit made this country great.
Well, we can admire those greathearted qualities all the more, knowing that they belong to contemporary Americans, and that novelists need not go to the past to find them.
For within recent years thousands upon thousands of people like the Joads in The Grapes of Wrath have been rolling westward, carrying all they own in perilous cars of strange vintages, hungry, restless, the children riding on top of the tents and the blankets and the cooking pots, their desperate elders hanging on wherever they can.…
Out of the dramatic elementals of this great American migration (there is, by the way, an excellently illustrated article about it in this month's Fortune) Mr. Steinbeck has created his best novel. It is far better than Of Mice and Men, where the overmeticulously orchestrated theme of loneliness gave certain artificiality to the story's course. Here, his counterpoint of the general and the particular—the full sweep of the migration and the personal affairs of all the Joads—has the true air of inevitability.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- John SteinbeckThe Contemporary Reviews, pp. 151 - 192Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1996