She got "grapes of wrath" from Revelation in the Bible. In choosing the title, Steinbeck was emphasizing that the book was American, not Communist propaganda, as he knew it would be called.
The novel was critically acclaimed and a bestseller—some , copies had been printed by February But it was also controversial. The Associated Farmers of California was angered by the book, which implied that they used the migrants for cheap labor.
They called the book a " pack of lies " and launched an attack against it, publicly burning the work and calling it Communist. Other institutions banned the book because of profanity and because of the ending, when a woman breastfeeds a starving man.
Steinbeck encountered so much hostility after The Grapes of Wrath came out that he considered giving up writing altogether. Articles in the press, buoyed by the Associated Farmers of California, launched a "hysterical personal attack" on Steinbeck. For a time, the FBI put him under surveillance. In Salinas, people he knew his entire life became unfriendly toward him. He received death threats and was advised by the Monterey County Sheriff to carry a gun. Steinbeck complied. His son, Thomas Steinbeck, said , "My father was the best-armed man I knew, and went most places armed.
But now the torture is escalating. Furthermore, Steinbeck got the Okies historically wrong, probably because he himself hailed from an upper-middle-class family in Salinas and his experience with Okies consisted of interviewing a few of them for some newspaper articles.
Second, as University of Washington historian James N. They were actually part of the huge demographic migration of people from the Southwestern United States to California during the first half of the 20th century in search of better jobs and a better life. Only about half of the Depression-era Okies hailed from rural areas, Gregory pointed out, with the rest coming from towns and cities. Many were white-collar and industrial workers.
Most Okies found a better standard of living. Many of them also quickly moved out of farm work into better-paying jobs in the oil industry and, when World War II broke out, in the burgeoning Southern California defense plants. By , most Okies had secured comfortable working-class and lower-middle-class lifestyles, and some had downright prospered. Instead of fomenting a workers revolution, they led the Reagan Revolution.
In fact, their Pentecostal and Baptist churches were a source of moral cohesion. Like some of the greatest novels in this series, the book was written in a white heat. The Grapes of Wrath was rushed into print, going from typescript to page proof in four months, and published on 14 April by the Viking Press in New York.
The novel at once became a national sensation, possibly the most reviewed and publicised, and even the most controversial, American novel of the 20th century — discussed on the radio, denounced by angry readers, and even banned in some libraries.
Joining battle from the other side, both Pearl Buck, author of The Good Earth , and the First Lady, Eleanor Roosevelt, who said she never thought the novel was exaggerated, supported Steinbeck. As did the US Senate, which judged that, if anything, the novelist had underestimated the violation of human rights on the west coast.
In , the novel also won the Pulitzer prize for fiction, and would subsequently be taught in schools and colleges across the United States. In that year, John Ford directed a hastily put-together movie of the same name starring Henry Fonda, a rare case of an opportunistic movie equalling its fictional source. Not everyone was a Steinbeck fan. Posterity has taken a different view. Informal estimates suggest that it has sold about 15 million copies in the 75 years since its publication.
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