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Home>Services>For Book Lovers>Book Clubs>The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
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| Story | | Shocking and controversial when it was first published in 1939, Steinbeck's Pulitzer prize-winning epic, The Grapes of Wrath, remains his undisputed masterpiece. Set against the background of Dust Bowl Oklahoma and Californian migrant life, it tells of the Joad family, who, like thousands of others, are forced to travel west in search of the promised land. Their story is one of false hopes, thwarted desires and broken dreams, yet out of their suffering Steinbeck created a drama that is intensely human, yet majestic in its scale and moral vision; an eloquent tribute to the endurance and dignity of the human spirit.
(From Penguin Group (Australia)) Top
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| Author Details | | Born in Salinas, California, in 1902, John Steinbeck grew up in a fertile agricultural valley about twenty-five miles from the Pacific Coast - and both valley and coast would serve as settings for some of his best fiction.
In 1919 he went to Stanford University, where he intermittently enrolled in literature and writing courses until he left in 1925 without taking a degree. During the next five years he supported himself as a labourer and journalist in New York City, all the time working on his first novel, Cup of Gold (1929).
After marriage and a move to Pacific Grove, he published two Californian fictions, The Pastures of Heaven (1932) and To a God Unknown (1933), and worked on short stories later collected in The Long Valley (1938).
Popular success and financial security came only with Tortilla Flat (1935), stories about Monterey's paisanos. A ceaseless experimenter throughout his career, Steinbeck changed course regularly. Three powerful novels of the late 1930s focused on the Californian labouring class: In Dubious Battle (1936), Of Mice and Men (1937) and the book considered by many his finest, The Grapes of Wrath (1939).
Early in the 1940s, Steinbeck became a filmmaker with The Forgotten Village (1941) and a serious student of marine biology with Sea of Cortez (1941). He devoted his services to the war, writing Bombs Away (1942) and the controversial play-novelette The Moon is Down (1942), Cannery Row (1945), The Wayward Bus (1947), The Pearl (1947), A Russian Journal (1948), another experimental drama, Burning Bright (1950), and The Log from the Sea of Cortez (1951) preceded publication of the monumental East of Eden (1952), an ambitious saga of the Salinas Valley and his own family's history.
The last decades of his life were spent in New York City and Sag Harbor with his third wife, with whom he travelled widely. Later books include Sweet Thursday (1954), The Short Reign of Pippin IV: A Fabrication (1957), Once There was a War (1958), The Winter of Our Discontent (1961), Travels with Charley in Search of America (1962), America and Americans (1966) and the posthumously published Journal of a Novel: The 'East of Eden' Letters (1969), Viva Zapata! (1975), The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights (1976) and Working Days: The Journals of 'The Grapes of Wrath' (1989). He died in 1968, having won a Nobel Prize in 1962.
(From Penguin Group (Australia))Top
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| Discussion Points |
| What were the reasons for the Joade family immigrating to California? | | What are the most important characteristics of Ma and Pa? Who is the most important character in the book? | | What is the symbolic significance of the dust, the turtle and the grape? | | What is the purpose of inter chapters? What do they add to the book? | | Grapes of Wrath is widely recognised as one of the great landmarks of American literature. Why do you think the novel continues to have such wide appeal? | | Is it its message still relevant today?
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| Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston | | Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen | | Coriolanus by William Shakespeare | | Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
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