[JoeProBono]

Seventy years ago, on April 14, 1939, The Viking Press in New York officially published John Steinbeck's searing novel The Grapes of Wrath. It was released on the fourth anniversary of Black Sunday, when the worst dust storm in recent American history had rolled across the Great Plains blotting out the sun and later depositing airborne topsoil 1,000 miles east in Washington DC.

Steinbeck thought his novel was too raw for wide general appeal: "I've done my damndest to rip a reader's nerves to rags," he told his editor in early 1939. But despite its unflinching detail, gritty language, and controversial reception (the American Library Association includes it among the 100 most frequently banned and/or challenged books), the Grapes of Wrath has attained classic status and appears on many best novels lists.

Dustbowl farm - in the middle of the 1930s lives were blighted by economic and environmental disaster

[JoeProBono]

[yarddog]

I haven’t read the book tho I have seen the movie a few times. It was pretty good but it is always a good idea to keep in mind that Steinbeck was a commie.

[ConservativeTerrapin]

Grapes of Wrath is awful. It had an entire chapter dedicated to a turtle walking down a road. I guess Steinbeck succeeds in ripping High School students nerves to shreds easily.

[trisham]

I read the book years ago. Steinbeck was one of the best ever.

I haven't seen the movie.

[Snickering Hound]

[cartoonistx]

[DieHard the Hunter]

I read “The Grapes of Wrath” first when I was fifteen as a History assignment. That and “For Whom the Bell Tolls” and “The Great Gatsby”. Absolutely unforgettable: captured the 1920’s and 1930’s for me perfectly.

Americans often butcher the English language in a manner that is nearly unforgivable, but when they decide to put pen to paper properly they can write like a house on fire. These three novels hover somewhere in my top ten favorites of all time.

[Sawdring]

It is impossible to know how Steinbeck would have reacted to our current malaise, fuelled in part by unbridled financial speculation and lax governmental oversight, but it is tempting to think, given the outcome, he might have said, "I told you so."

He would have taken his earnings from the book and bought the NASDAQ at 5,000, The DOW at 14,000, Realestate in 2007, and Light Sweet Crude at $140.00.

[DemforBush]

One of my favorite novels of all time.

Nostalgic and starry-eyed lefties should be required to read Grapes...if only for Steinbeck’s slap against FDR and the Agricultural Adjustment Acts (AAA) Roosevelt oversaw the destruction of countless tons of produce and hundreds of thousands of livestock animals at a time when millions of people were going hungry. It also had the effect of putting thousands of cotton sharecropper types like the Joads on the street because the landowners could make more money from letting the fields lie fallow (government subsidies) than from collecting rents on the sharecroppers.

Remembering the Forgotten Man, my a$$.

[bert]

This time the Calli’s will be migrating as refugees from California to Oklahoma.

[zaphod3000]

Yours for a mere $3000.

[Clemenza]

Socialist horsesh-t, and boring to boot.

BTW: Henry Fonda was the most overrated actor of his generation. He was about as convincing as an Okie as I am as a Chinese redhead.

[Revolting cat!]

John Gardner recognized Grapes of Wrath for what it was: an exercise in socrealist propaganda, with simplistic portrayals and propagandistic aims. It was a communist inspired trash, the novel and the movie.

[Harmless Teddy Bear]

Grapes of Wrath, a classic for today?

No. But then I have never been impressed with Commie writers.

[Kickass Conservative]

My Parent’s retired in the late Eighties, sold their house and rented an Apartment in Southern California for a while.

Their landlord was the actress that played the preteen daughter in the movie. Nice lady. She had many other movie roles, but that was her most famous one.

It is a small world.

[GOPJ]

Well, we're not being thrown off our farms - and California's not going to be a destination for anyone. Other than that...