The Grapes of Wrath

No words to adequately describe the love of family and desperation for survival of theJoads described in this book. Just one of many thousands of dust bowl family victims. Amazing is the tragic inability of any government agency to keep Americans from starvation or provide any help at all. Sad period of American history. Steinbeck’s writing allows readers to actually visualize the reality of the suffering. Absolutely wonderful work.

In this novel about Oklahoma farmers forced by the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression to seek a new life for themselves as migrant laborers in California, John Steinbeck may well have written the Great American Novel. "The Grapes of Wrath" is the story of the Joad family, but it's also the story of a people on the move, a nation in crisis, and humanity in its extremes of greed and goodness. The first quarter of the novel tells of young Tom Joad's homecoming after several years in prison for killing a man in a drunken brawl. Contact with his family has been minimal over the years, and he looks forward to seeing his parents, grandparents, and siblings again - but the house is empty, obviously abandoned, like so many others in this land where a combination of drought and poor agricultural techniques has resulted in failure and foreclosure on countless family farms. Fortunately, Tom learns from a neighbor that his family has gone over to his uncle's place, and he arrives there just in time to join them on their way to California, where they've been told there's plenty of work in the state's lush Central Valley. The second quarter of the novel is the story of the Joads' arduous journey west on Route 66, a trip distinguished by breakdowns, death, and intimations by those who have been there that California may be something less than the paradise they've been led to imagine. The final half of the novel follows the Joads after they arrive in California, only to discover that it's possible to starve even in a land of plenty as too many would-be workers are forced to compete for available jobs by accepting wages barely sufficient to buy enough food from one day to the next. The novel ends with one of the most stunning and affecting scenes you'll ever read, and although nothing at all is resolved, the story feels complete. The structure of the novel underscores Steinbeck's creation of the Joads as the human face of a social crisis. Long chapters that advance the plot alternate with short chapters in which the Joads are never mentioned, in which Steinbeck's richly poetic prose establish the physical and moral setting of his work: the conditions leading to the Dust Bowl, the loss of a way of life, the journey to a new beginning, and the disillusionment and growing anger of the migrants - all on a massive scale. These short, poignant chapters are as beautiful, captivating, and necessary as the story chapters, as they provide context and grant a kind of holy universality to the Joads' experiences. Steinbeck's writing is raw, earthy, and viscerally powerful. This is realism at its finest: full of small, telling details, and at times casually vulgar, not for shock value but because life itself is casually vulgar. I was about 13 the first time I read this novel, and the blunt honesty of the writing was a bit much for my somewhat sheltered mind; I remember feeling uncomfortable when an old man reached into his pants and "contentedly scratched under the testicles," as that wasn't a word I was used to seeing in print, at least outside of biology texts. I loved the background chapters but found the Joad chapters distasteful for the first hundred pages or so, when I finally allowed the vivid immediacy of Steinbeck's style to make the characters real for me. As an adult, I have no such difficulties and am able to appreciate the masterful style and rich characterizations immediately. This is a mature novel, about people too crassly human to elicit our pity, but too warmly human not to elicit our compassion. I must admit that as a native Californian, I feel a special connection with this novel. For most of my life I lived just a few blocks away from the old Route 66 (although farther west than the point where the Joads left it to go north). Several of my husband's children live in the Central Valley, around places Steinbeck mentions by name. However, Steinbeck's skill is such that even if you've never been there, you'll close this novel feeling as though you had. This is a novel every American should read - indeed, everyone interested in what it means to be human in trying times. These days more than ever we need this book, we need this reminder of the values of proud self-sufficiency and fierce decency, for it is when we stop pulling, and pulling together, that we lose our way.

An American classic.

"What some people find in religion a writer may find in his craft...a kind of breaking through to glory." —John Steinbeck, in an interview from 1965 Winner of the 1940 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, Steinbeck's powerful ode to the working poor is mandatory reading. The reader is given a front seat to the plight of migrant workers during the Dirty Thirties, a time when drought and famine displaced thousands of families and pushed even the most virtuous to the extremes of their humanity. Starting in the summer of 1930, weather conditions changed for the worse across the Great Plains—a region occupying the middle expanse of the contiguous U.S. marked by flat, relatively arid farmland and temperate climate. Rainfall hit record lows, with the growing season gains in the climatically favorable 1920s insufficient to offset the rapidly swelling shortfall. When drought eventually set in, the windswept grasslands eroded and the topsoil moldered into thin films of dust. As one of the windiest regions of the country, high-energy winds swept across the Plains, lifting the dusty particulate matter and carrying it as far east as New York City and Washington, D.C. With the breadbasket desiccated and an already depressed economy exacerbated, more than three million Great Plains natives vacated west in search of work and better conditions. It's a story that couldn't have waited any longer to be told. Initially working as a reporter on the abject conditions ripping through the American heartland, Steinbeck quickly became verklempt over the millions of Midwestern vagabonds forced out by the Dust Bowl. During multiple stints in the 1930s he witnessed the hardship firsthand in Visalia and Nipomo, where some five thousand able-bodied families, many from Oklahoma, were "not just hungry, but starving to death." Drawing on notes borrowed from the Farm Security Administration, Steinbeck recounts how government assistance was forestalled all down the line by oligarchic interests, in which the feudal-like dispositions of wealthy landowners and corporate farmers reigned wickedly over the lives of millions and ensured the deplorable conditions continued unabated. The sting to his conscience over the crisis out West grew so sharp that The Grapes of Wrath burst from Steinbeck's pen in a mere 100 days. It was the culmination of many years of anger, unrest and passive advocacy, a literary opus that sought to throw light on the scourge of social inequality the way that Uncle Tom's Cabin paved the way for abolition. Yet Steinbeck's novel is not a classic solely for its uncompromising portrayal of the era, but for its indefatigable cast that sets down roots in the reader's mind. The close-knit Joads are a microcosm of the tumult that swept the agricultural belt during the Great Depression, and they come across vibrantly as their sense of dignity, pride and sanity is tested at every turn. This is an unhappy novel with an unhappy ending that all but forces you to admire the unflagging resolve and indomitable spirit of the harried families that trudged across state borders in search of the most basic means of survival. As an embattled generation charges through fantastic adversity, Steinbeck's dramatis personae stand out as inspiration for us all. Some have faulted the lyrical structure of the book, which alternates between narrative and meta-exposition, as amounting to tedious filler and interrupting the flow of the story. But this is much more than just a story; operating here are themes of history, of politics, of social structure and of human nature. The symbology of the chapters intervening the Joad plight serves as a means of expressing a national-historical mood through metaphor and helps ground the narrative in its larger context. In Steinbeck's hands it is an effective tool for digging through to these more open-ended themes and passing them down through the coffers of history. For newcomers as well as repeat readers I recommend the Penguin Books edition for its scholarly introduction by Robert DeMott. You'll get a lot of interesting foreground on Steinbeck and the series of events that compelled him to lend a voice to this memorable era in American history.

Basic Amazon print, the pixels of the cover art are visible because it is just copy pasted......

A experiência de leitura nessa edição é demais, começando pela introdução maravilhosa do Robert Demmot, um estudioso da obra de Steinbeck, que também é responsável pelas notas. O prefácio traz a contextualização e os desdobramentos do impacto da obra na história norte-americana, além de uma análise do autor, de suas obras e muitas dicas sobre filmes, documentários, músicas (há uma canção do Bon Dylan para um dos personagens) e até de uma paródia da revista Mad. Robert Demmot também é responsável pelas notas de rodapé, que são bem importantes nessa obra, pois há bastante gíria e o autor utiliza a forma coloquial da fala da região em sua escrita.

Riletto in lingua originale dopo che non ero riuscito a finirlo quasi 60 anni fa in versione tradotta. La storia di disperazione e speranza di questa famiglia che va a Ovest oggi è tragicamente attuale vedendo un intero continente che cerca un futuro a Nord. Si fa fatica a finirlo, la disperazione non finisce mai. Poi il colpo di genio, nelle ultime righe. Da leggere, come tutti i libri di Steinbeck, d'altra parte.

Perfecto para viajes en avion a camion

The quality of the paper is not met my expectation.