Current economy draws readers to Steinbeck’s ‘The Grapes of Wrath’

(Current fiction and quality fiction of the past.)

Classic contemporary literature doesn’t get much better than “The Grapes of Wrath” (Penguin Classics) by John Steinbeck. 

Examiner suggests that the current economic situation should lead readers to “The Grapes of Wrath” once again and, if the reader has yet to taste it, that reader better get cracking or else bask in literary ignorance. 

When preparing to write the novel, Steinbeck wrote: "I want to put a tag of shame on the greedy bastards who are responsible for this [the Great Depression and its effects]." 

Google Books puts it this way: “Today, 43 years after his death, Nobel Prize winner John Steinbeck remains one of America’s greatest writers and cultural figures .[edited for time] . . His many works are now published as black-spine Penguin Classics for the first time and feature eye-catching, newly commissioned art. ‘The Grapes of Wrath’ is a landmark of American literature. 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. Although it follows the movement of thousands of men and women and the transformation of an entire nation, ‘The Grapes of Wrath’ is also the story of one Oklahoma family, the Joads, who are driven off 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.”

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