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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 May 2010
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.
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