The Grapes Of Wrath Literary Analysis
Today the New York Review of Books comments on social change: the roads are clogged with "retired farmers" who "leave for Florida in their fancy campers." John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath records an earlier time, depression days of Dust Bowl farmers, their farms blown away, heading in jalopies for California's golden groves. If modern America has any idea of Okies and hard times, it is largely due to Steinbeck's greatest work.
In it, Steinbeck's "voice over" and vivid episodes create a kind of newsreel of a period when times got tough and the tough got going, westward as ever in their very American and indomitable flight to something better. It is that courage and determination "in the presence of this continent" that has made the book a classic of our literature, that gained it in its own day a great success despite its ignorant Okies (with their accents and even their customs all wrong), and its nasty union men (either venal or fanatic), and its sordid …show more content…
What distinguishes this one novel is not only its greater authenticity of detail but also the genius of its author, who, avoiding mere propaganda, was able to raise those details and themes to the level of lasting art, while muting none of the passionate human cry against injustice.... In fact, the response of students leaves no doubt that as literature The Grapes of Wrath is generally experienced more completely today than it was in 1939, when it was much more difficult to dissociate the novel from current events or to see Steinbeck's bold technical experiments as something more than what one critic called "calculated
In it, Steinbeck's "voice over" and vivid episodes create a kind of newsreel of a period when times got tough and the tough got going, westward as ever in their very American and indomitable flight to something better. It is that courage and determination "in the presence of this continent" that has made the book a classic of our literature, that gained it in its own day a great success despite its ignorant Okies (with their accents and even their customs all wrong), and its nasty union men (either venal or fanatic), and its sordid …show more content…
What distinguishes this one novel is not only its greater authenticity of detail but also the genius of its author, who, avoiding mere propaganda, was able to raise those details and themes to the level of lasting art, while muting none of the passionate human cry against injustice.... In fact, the response of students leaves no doubt that as literature The Grapes of Wrath is generally experienced more completely today than it was in 1939, when it was much more difficult to dissociate the novel from current events or to see Steinbeck's bold technical experiments as something more than what one critic called "calculated