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Zusatztext "It is Steinbeck's best novel! i.e.! his toughest and tenderest! his roughest written and most mellifluous! his most realistic and! in its ending! his most melodramatic! his angriest and most idyllic. It is great in the way that Unlce Tom's Cabin was great. One of the most impassioned and exciting books of the year." — Time "One comes away moved! indignant! protesting! pitying. A fiery document of protest and compassion! as a story that had to be told! as a book that must be read." —Louis Kronenberger! The Nation Informationen zum Autor John Steinbeck (1902–1968) was born in Salinas, California, and died in New York City. He remains one of the most prolific and influential authors of his generation and won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962. Klappentext John Steinbeck's Pulitzer Prize-winning epic of the Great Depression follows the western moevement of wone family and a nation in search of work and human dignity. This completely updated Viking Critical Library Edition of The Grapes of Wrath includes the full text of the novel, corrected in 1996, as well as extensive and contextual material including: Essays placing The Grapes of Wrath in social context, including a 1942 essay by Carey McWilliams about migrant workers and working conditions and a Martin Schockley piece on the reception of The Grapes of Wrath in OklahomaEight new essays by John Ditsky, Nellie Y. McKay, MimiReisel Gladstein, Louis Owens, and othersAn essay on the background to the composition of The Grapes of Wrath by Steinbeck's biographer, Jackson J. BensonAn introduction by the editor, a chronology, a list of topics for discussion and papers, and a bibliography INTRODUCTION I The Grapes of Wrath is one of the most famous novels in America— perhaps even in the world. When John Steinbeck wrote this book he had no inkling that it would attain such widespread recognition, though he did have high hopes for its effectiveness. On June 18, 1938, a little more than three weeks after starting his unnamed new manuscript, Steinbeck confided in his daily journal (posthumously published in 1989 as Working Days ): If I could do this book properly it would be one of the really fine books and a truly American book. But I am assailed with my own ignorance and inability. I’ll just have to work from a background of these. Honesty. If I can keep an honesty it is all I can expect of my poor brain. . . . If I can do that it will be all my lack of genius can produce. For no one else knows my lack of ability the way I do. I am pushing against it all the time. Despite Steinbeck’s doubts, which were grave and constant during its composition, The Grapes of Wrath turned out to be not only a fine book, but the most renowned and celebrated of his seventeen novels. Steinbeck’s liberal mixture of native philosophy, common-sense leftist politics, blue-collar radicalism, working-class characters, homespun folk wisdom, and digressive narrative form—all set to a bold, rhythmic style and nervy, raw dialogue—qualified the novel as the “American book” he had set out to write. The novel’s title—from Julia Ward Howe’s “Battle Hymn of the Republic”—was clearly in the American grain—and Steinbeck, a loyal Rooseveltian New Deal Democrat, liked the song “because it is a march and this book is a kind of march—because it is in our own revolutionary tradition and because in reference to this book it has a large meaning,” he announced on September 10, 1938, to Elizabeth Otis, his New York literary agent. After its arduous composition from late May through late October 1938 (“Never worked so hard in my life nor so long before,” Steinbeck told Carl Wilhelmson), The Grapes of Wrath passed from his wife’s typescript to published novel (Viking’s designers set the novel in Janson type-face) in a scant four months. In March...
