The Grapes of Wrath
This is an excerpt from the paper...
John Steinbeck's novel, The Grapes of Wrath, is arguably the most important single work in the literature of California. Other major writers have lived in California, or written about California, but Steinbeck was at once a native Californian, and a writer who chose California settings for much of his work. Whether or not The Grapes of Wrath is his greatest book is a matter for literary critics, but it is certainly his best-known work. If we were to perform a word-association test, it is probable that more people would associate Steinbeck's name with this book than with any other single work--perhaps more than would name all the rest of his work together. The following discussion considers The Grapes of Wrath not as a work of literature, but as a work of history, specifically of California history. The Joad family is a fictional creation, but the dust bowl was historical, the Okie migration was historical, and the action of the novel represents and takes place against historical events in the California of the 1930s. These events have in turn continued to resonate in California history from that time to the present. Yet the California that appears in The Grapes of Wrath is not one that readily fits the image of California, either as that image is presented to the world or indeed as it is held by most Californians themselves. The Grapes of Wrath is, in an odd way, almost disconnected from California, even though much of the book takes place there. The city of Sal
. . .
kdrop events from California history, and gives the reader a view of those events from the Okies' human perspective, it offers no hint of why conditions in the fields of California were the way they were, or how those conditions in the 1930s might relate to conditions before and since. We must go to other sources to learn about the nature and conditions of agriculture in California.
California is, among its other economic attributes, the leading agricultural producer in the United States. This is a fact often repeated in a list of the state's superlatives, sometimes in recent years with the wry comment that marijuana may in dollar value be a leading cash crop. But images of agriculture play little part in the visual imagery of California, with the possible exception of vinyards on wine bottles. (At one time, orange groves were a common image, but this faded as the orange groves of Southern California were plowed under and replanted as suburbs.)
One reason for this cultural disinterest in agriculture may be that it lacks glamour; California does not care to assert its supremacy over Kansas or Iowa, or think it needs to; such a thought would be rather demeaning. Nor do many urban Californians have ancestral ties to the l
. . .
Some common words found in the essay are:
Grapes Wrath, California California, Glass Cleland, California Okies, Anglo- Saxon, Instead California's, Colorado River, George Wallace, Wrath Okies, Little Oklahomas, grapes wrath, western california, california california, california history, okie migration, eastern california, farm workers, orange groves, farm labor, white trash, little white houses, cross colorado river, colorado river bridge, publication grapes wrath,
Approximate Word count = 3909
Approximate Pages = 16 (250 words per page)
More Essays on The Grapes of Wrath
|
Customer Service
to Over
32,000 Professionally Written Papers!!!
