Working Days Read Free

controversial classic because it is at once populist and revolutionary. It advances a belief in the essential goodness and forbearance of the “common people,” and prophesies a fundamental change to produce equitable social conditions: “There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success.... in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage” (Chapter 25). This novel—part naturalistic epic, part dissenting tract, and part romantic gospel—speaks to a multiplicity of human experiences and is squarely located in our varied national consciousness; nearly every literate person knows, or at least claims familiarity with, its impassioned story of the Joad family’s brutal migration from Oklahoma’s dying Dust Bowl to California’s corrupt Promised Land. In their ironic exodus from home to homelessness, from individualism to collective awareness, from selfishness to communal love, “from ‘I’ to ‘we’ ” (Chapter 14), Steinbeck’s cast of unsuspecting characters—Ma Joad, Tom Joad, Jim Casy, Rose of Sharon—have become permanently etched in our sensibility and serve constantly to remind us that heroism is as much a matter of choice as it is of being chosen. Similarly, Steinbeck’s rendering of the graphic enticements of Route 66—“the path of a people in flight” (Chapter 12)—from Middle America to the West defined the national urge for mobility, motion, and blind striving. The novel’s erotically subversive final scene, in which Rose of Sharon, delivered of a stillborn child, gives her milk-laden breast to a dying stranger, then looks up and smiles “mysteriously” (Chapter 30), simply will not fade from view. Wherever human beings dream of a dignified society in which they can harvest the fruits of their own labor, The Grapes of Wrath ’s radical voice of protest can still be heard. As a tale of dashed illusions, thwarted desires, inhuman suffering, and betrayed promises—all strung on the most fragile thread of hope— The Grapes of Wrath not only summed up the Depression era’s socially conscious art, but, beyond that, has few peers in American fiction.
    Steinbeck’s book has been praised by the left as a triumph of proletarian writing, nominated by critics and reviewers as “The Great American Novel,” given historical vindication by Senator Robert M. La Follette’s inquiries into California’s tyrannical farm labor conditions, and defended by Eleanor Roosevelt for its power (“The horrors of the picture ... made you dread ... to begin the next chapter, and yet you cannot lay the book down or even skip a page.”) But The Grapes of Wrath has also been attacked by academic scholars as sentimental, unconvincing, and inartistic, banned repeatedly by school boards and libraries, and denounced by right-wing ministers, corporate farmers, and politicians as immoral, degrading, and untruthful. (Oklahoma Congressman Lyle Boren, typical of the book’s early detractors, called it “a lie, a black, infernal creation of a twisted, distorted mind.”) 1 In fact, from the moment it was published on April 14, 1939, The Grapes of Wrath has been less judged as a novel than as a sociological event, a celebrated political cause, or a factual case study. If the past fifty years have seen little consensus about the exact nature of the novel’s achievement, there has been plenty of proof that it elicits widely divergent responses from its audience. Perhaps that is to be expected, considering that Steinbeck intentionally wrote the novel in “five layers,” intending to “rip” each reader’s nerves “to rags” by making him “participate in the actuality.” What each reader “gets” from The Grapes of Wrath, he claimed, “will be scaled entirely on his own depth or hollow-ness.” 2