The Grapes of Wrath as Fiction

PMLA ◽  
1957 ◽  
Vol 72 (1) ◽  
pp. 296-309 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Lisca
Keyword(s):  
Great Depression ◽  
Case Histories ◽  
High Class ◽  
Grapes Of Wrath ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
Dorothea Lange

When The Grapes of Wrath was published in April of 1939 there was little likelihood of its being accepted and evaluated as a piece of fiction. Because of its nominal subject, it was too readily confused with such high-class reporting as Ruth McKenny's Industrial Valley, the WPA collection of case histories called These Are Our Lives, and Dorothea Lange and Paul S. Taylor's An American Exodus. The merits of The Grapes of Wrath were debated as social documentation rather than fiction. In addition to incurring the disadvantages of its historical position, coming as a kind of climax to the literature of the Great Depression, Steinbeck's novel also suffered from the perennial vulnerability of all social fiction to an attack on its facts and intentions.

Lange's Antecedents: The Emergence of Social Documentary Photography of California's Farmworkers

2006 ◽  
Vol 75 (3) ◽  
pp. 385-428
Author(s):  
RICHARD STEVEN STREET
Keyword(s):  
Great Depression ◽  
Documentary Photography ◽  
Diverse Group ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
Social Documentary ◽  
Dorothea Lange

Photographers focusing on California farmworkers are often described as heirs to a tradition that emerged midway through the Great Depression, mainly from the heroic efforts of one iconic photographer, Dorothea Lange. By calling attention to a diverse group of underappreciated antecedents who have never been linked together, this article presents a more sequential, less tidy account of how social documentary photography focused on farmworkers in the Golden State in the years before Lange moved out of her studio into the countryside. Without ever referring to their work as social documentary photography, these photographers, largely on their own and with little knowledge of one another, broke with standard commercial practices, turned a probing eye on the fields, recorded history as it unfolded, and created a visually stunning, realistic,often uncomfortable body of work.

scholarly journals John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath As a Naturalistic Novel

2018 ◽  
Vol 216 (1) ◽  
pp. 91-108
Author(s):  
Assist. Instr. Ansam Muthanna
Keyword(s):  
Great Depression ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Hostile Environment ◽  
Farm Families ◽  
Farm Family ◽  
Grapes Of Wrath ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
The Government

      John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath(1939) exposes the desperate conditions that surrounded the migratory farm families in America during the year of the Great Depression from the Naturalistic point of view. It combines his adoration of the land and his simple hatred of the corruption resulting from Materialism and his faith in common to overcome his hostile environment. It attempts to present the problem of the workers of the lower classes, and exposes the unusual family, conditions under which the Joads, the migratory farm family, was forced to live during these years. The progress the government intended to spread on the Oklahoma fields and ranches sheltered families a part and reduced the migrants to beggars suffering from deprivation and hunger. His California novels attack the counterfeited image of paradise that people held when they set their migration to California.

THE SEAMY SIDE OF AMERICAN CAPITALISM IN JOHN STEINBECK'S THE GRAPES OF WRATH

2014 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 16
Author(s):  
Fuad Hasyim
Keyword(s):  
Great Depression ◽  
Interdisciplinary Approach ◽  
Social Phenomena ◽  
Grapes Of Wrath ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
Library Research ◽  
American Capitalism ◽  
Consumptive Behavior ◽  
Materialistic Values ◽  
The Impact

This article is an attempt to study Steinbeck’s vision of the American system of capitalism during 1930’s as causing the greatest economic crisis in American history. The study particularly observes the growth of materialistic values in this era. The main discussion concerns the dramatic journey of Joad’s family toward California as reflected in The Grapes of Wrath.With an interdisciplinary approach, the study examines the novel to comprehend the author’s view about his social phenomena. This is a kind of qualitative research in which the researcher applied library research on The Grapes of Wrath. The data gathered from bibliographical sources was analyzed and written descriptively to describe the seamy side of capitalism in America.The result of this research shows that material success is not the human’s only orientation in his life. The great depression and tragic life of Oklahoma tenant farmers were viewed by the author as due to the impact of uncontrolled American Capitalism in 1930’s. The seamy sides of American Capitalism such as greed, selfishness, corruption, and consumptive behavior, etc. have been described by the author as source of the extensive destruction among American people.Keywords: capitalism, the great depression, materialism, dehumanization.

The Emotional Life of the Great Depression

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Marsh
Keyword(s):  
Stock Market ◽  
Great Depression ◽  
American Woman ◽  
American People ◽  
Emotional Life ◽  
Grapes Of Wrath ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
Social Security Act ◽  
Structures Of Feeling ◽  
Stock Market Investment

The Emotional Life of the Great Depression documents how Americans responded emotionally to the crisis of the Great Depression. Unlike most books about the 1930s, which focus almost exclusively on the despair of the American people during the decade, The Emotional Life of the Great Depression explores the 1930s through other, equally essential emotions: righteousness, panic, fear, awe, love, and hope. In expanding the canon of Great Depression emotions, the book draws on an eclectic archive of sources, including the ravings of a would-be presidential assassin, stock market investment handbooks, a Cleveland serial murder case, Jesse Owens’s record-setting long jump at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, King Edward VIII’s abdication from his throne to marry a twice-divorced American woman, and the founding of Alcoholics Anonymous. In concert with these, it offers new readings of the imaginative literature of the period, from obscure Christian apocalyptic novels and H.P. Lovecraft short stories to classics such as John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath and Richard Wright’s Native Son. The upshot is a new take on the Great Depression, one that emphasizes its major events (the stock market crash, unemployment, the passage of the Social Security Act) but also, and perhaps even more so, its sensibilities, its structures of feeling.

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