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Literary Families

Few if any fictional American families are as well-known as the Joad family, created by John Steinbeck in The Grapes of Wrath. We may not immediately remember the names of individual members of the family, such as Tom or Rose of Sharon, but the name Joad is instantly recognized, even by many who have never read the book or seen the John Ford movie based on it, and it is name that carries instant connotations of "dust bowl," "Okies," and "Depression."

In contrast, the name of the Rudkus family, about whom Upton Sinclair wrote in The Jungle, has been almost entirely forgotten. The book itself is remembered primarily for its famous indictment of the Chicago meat-packing industry, an indictment that won national attention and led directly to the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act in 1906. In fact, however, the passages describing abuses in the packing industry are only one relatively small portion of the novel. Sinclair's own enduring reputation is that of journalist--the most noted of the "muckrakers"--not that of novelist.

The different fates of these books testify to the different emphasis and level of literary craft of their authors. Upton Sinclair was a journalist, first and foremost. His fictional characters never quite transcend his purpose in creating them. As a result, their story did not quite achieve the goals that Sinclair intended, even as journalism. The indictment of the packing industry was remembered; the broader indictment of the conditions imposed upon industrial workers in early twentieth-century Chicago was forgotten. In contrast, while The Grapes of Wrath was effective enough in its day as an indictment of migrant-labor conditions (and was cited for that reason by Cesar Chavez and other farmworker activists in the 1960s), it is the qualities of the Joads themselves, and above their stoic courage and humanity, that are most remembered. Unlike The Jungle, The Grapes of Wrath was a great novel,...

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Literary Families. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 18:27, March 28, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1681588.html