A Note About The Grapes of Wrath

History, submitted via email by Patty:
John Steinbeck is one of my favorite American authors. He was born in
Salinas, California in 1902. There is now a museum in Salinas honoring him
as well as a yearly Steinbeck festival each August. During most of his
writing career he felt he was not welcome in Salinas but he wished to be
buried there. People in Salinas were especially outraged when East of Eden
was published, as he included some real people still living there. He is
remembered for many of his short stories and some of the earlier lighter
novels, especially Cannery Row, Sweet Thursday and Tortilla Flat.

However, his greatest novel was The Grapes of Wrath, and it is generally
included in lists of the 100 greatest novels. It was the publishing event of
1939 and was the best seller of that year. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize
for this novel in 1940 and in l962 won the Nobel Prize for literature. He
said that he never looked upon himself as an author - he said he was a
writer. He cared about language and he cared about people. He didn't want
to be famous or popular - he just wanted to write books. He created men and
women who live on after one has finished the book - we cannot forget
characters like Tom Joad and Ma Joad.

I don't find any notes about our discussion of this book, but I did find a message with some history that Patty sent:

In preparation for writing The Grapes of Wrath, he lived and worked with the
migrants. He went to Oklahoma and rode to California with them and lived in
the camps with them. Although this is a fictional account of a family, it is
based on fct. At the time it was published it raised strong feelings of
opposition, from people from Oklama and also from California and from
churches. There was much public reaction against the book at first, it was
only later that it was judged as a work of art.

There are three settings in the book - Oklahoma, US Highway 66, and California
(includes tenant farms, migrant camps, service stations, truck stops and
boxcars and barns. The time is the Great Depression of the 1930's. The
main characters are Ma and Pa Joad, Tom Joad, Jim Casy (a former preacher)
and several younger Joad children.