The Grapes of Wrath By John Steinbeck enotes

The Grapes of Wrath By John Steinbeck enotes. com. The Grapes of Wrath. Summary and Study Guide, enotes. com, Inc. , n. d. Web. 21 Feb. 2010.

Introduction • Written during the Great Depression and about it • Everywhere people lost their savings, homes, and means of earning a living. • Especially hard hit were the farming areas of the Midwest. • Poor farming practices had depleted the soil, and it became less capable of supporting the individual families who farmed their small sections of it.

• Agriculture changed drastically because markets and prices for crops declined. • Small farms were consolidated into larger, and more profitable units. • Tractors, other machines, and day laborers replaced mules and family labor. • Independent farm life, which had developed the area and dominated it during the 1800 s, dwindled.

• In the mid-1930 s there were severe droughts and erosion of the dry soil by strong winds. • This created a “Dust Bowl” in the states of Oklahoma, Texas, Kansas, and Colorado. • The small farmers, now tenants and sharecroppers, were uprooted from the homes and farms which had belonged to their families for many years.

• By the tens of thousands these victims of depression, drought, and dust headed west to seek a better life in the fertile fields of California. • They found themselves as much victims there. • Work was scarce, wages were low, and they were resented, resisted, and repressed by the residents. • Their attempts to better their lives were branded as Communism, a system much disliked and feared by many Americans of the time.

• Reaction to The Grapes of Wrath was immediate, and ran to extremes of praise and condemnation. • The novel strongly exposed social injustice and called for social redress; but many people denounced it as Communist propaganda.

• People in California and Oklahoma charged it was full of exaggerated lies about the conditions and treatment of the migrants in their respective states. • A Congressman from Oklahoma denounced the book, on behalf of the people of his state, on the floor of the House of Representatives as “a dirty, lying, filthy manuscript-a lie, a damnable lie, a black, infernal creation of a twisted, distorted mind. ”

• Copies of the book were symbolically burned in a town in Illinois by order of the Library Board. • Ironically, the waiting list for the book at this library was longer than for any other book in history. • The burning order came in the same week the book had its largest sales in seven months.

• The general public embraced The Grapes of Wrath. • It became a best-seller shortly after publication and has been in print and widely read continuously since that time. • The story was also made into a successful major motion picture starring Henry Fonda. • A crowning accolade for the novel was the award of the 1940 Pulitzer Prize for fiction to Steinbeck.