Wow what a powerful read this book is.
I confess I very seldom read any classic literature,
I disliked most of the books I was made to read at school many many moons ago, and my way of thinking has always been if its been around for more than 50 years and I haven’t got round to reading it yet, it’s probably not worth trying. and a lot of books written in the first half of the 20th century are really hard going, I like an easy read and I read purely for pleasure so if its seems somehow worthy or clever it puts me right off.
But something about the reviews I read for The Grapes of Wrath made me think it might be worth a try. I really didn’t expect to like it or to even finish it, let alone to fall completely in love with it.
The writing is absolutely superb, the characters are sublime and the story is as relevant today as it was to when it was written back in the 1930s. I travelled back to dustbowl America and felt every misfortune and slight personally. I revelled in the descriptive prose.
I feel bereft now I’ve finished it and I ache to know what happened to the Joad family afterwards.
It was wonderful, and an absolute surprise.
My only difficulty now is quite what to read now to follow this up. Suggestions welcome.
Blurb
The Pulitzer Prize-winning epic of the Great Depression, a book that galvanized—and sometimes outraged—millions of readers.
First published in 1939, Steinbeck’s Pulitzer Prize-winning epic of the Great Depression chronicles the Dust Bowl migration of the 1930s and tells the story of one Oklahoma farm family, the Joads—driven from their homestead and forced to travel west to the promised land of California. Out of their trials and their repeated collisions against the hard realities of an America divided into Haves and Have-Nots evolves a drama that is intensely human yet majestic in its scale and moral vision, elemental yet plainspoken, tragic but ultimately stirring in its human dignity. A portrait of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless, of one man’s fierce reaction to injustice, and of one woman’s stoical strength, the novel captures the horrors of the Great Depression and probes into the very nature of equality and justice in America. At once a naturalistic epic, captivity narrative, road novel, and transcendental gospel, Steinbeck’s powerful landmark novel is perhaps the most American of American Classics.
First published in 1939, Steinbeck’s Pulitzer Prize-winning epic of the Great Depression chronicles the Dust Bowl migration of the 1930s and tells the story of one Oklahoma farm family, the Joads—driven from their homestead and forced to travel west to the promised land of California. Out of their trials and their repeated collisions against the hard realities of an America divided into Haves and Have-Nots evolves a drama that is intensely human yet majestic in its scale and moral vision, elemental yet plainspoken, tragic but ultimately stirring in its human dignity. A portrait of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless, of one man’s fierce reaction to injustice, and of one woman’s stoical strength, the novel captures the horrors of the Great Depression and probes into the very nature of equality and justice in America. At once a naturalistic epic, captivity narrative, road novel, and transcendental gospel, Steinbeck’s powerful landmark novel is perhaps the most American of American Classics.
