ugh it all happened somewhere else, in a place having nothing to do with California, and certainly not with its myths, either California's own or those of others.
Indeed, The Grapes of Wrath is not, strictly speaking, about California. In the Penguin edition, the text begins on page 3, and the Joad family does not cross the Colorado River bridge at Needles to enter California until page 260, nearly halfway through the book. The most vivid single image in the book is two-thirds of a continent east of California, in the Oklahoma of the dust-bowl years, where
In the morning the dust hung like fog, and the sun was
red as ripe new blood. All day the dust sifted down
from the sky, and the next day it sifted down. An even blanket covered the earth. It settled on the corn,
piled up on the tops of the fence posts, piled up on the wires; it settled on roofs, blanketed the weeds and
None the less, California is central to The Grapes of Wrath. All the 257 pages that take us from Oklahoma to that bridge at Needles are in the nature of
...