Grapes Guide.pdf - Minnesota Opera

existence until cleaner sanitary government camps came
into existence.
MULTIMEDIA LIBRARY
Ironically, only a handful of these relative oases were ever
constructed. Though intended to raise social conscience,
The Grapes of Wrath went into print just as the crisis was
just about to end – with the dark cloud of world conflict
nearing, many migrants found solid jobs in city-based
shipyards and military supply or by conscription into the
armed forces.
Steinbeck co-dedicated his novel to one of the first
government camp managers, Tom Collins, to whom he
owed much of his research for The Grapes of Wrath,
including working side-by-side with migrant workers (as
an homage Collins appears in the novel as the benevolent Jim Rawley). As a one-time investigative journalist for the San
Francisco News, the author was commissioned to write a series of articles, published October 5–12, 1936, citing gastly
conditions that Grapes barely grazes. Steinbeck’s examination was compiled in a short work, The Harvest Gypsies (with
photography by Dorothea Lange), observations he would later summarize: “During the migration of thousands of
dispossessed families … I saw people starve to death. That’s not just a resounding phrase. They starved to death. They
dropped dead.” 3 The articles were represented in a
N OT MY FAULT vaguely political pamphlet, Their Blood Is Strong,
which included an additional epilogue with
suggestions for change, including a resettling of
the Okies on small family farms. Quite obviously,
this concept ran contrary to California’s large,
commercial fields.
Steinbeck was predisposed toward the
downtrodden [as two earlier works, Tortilla Flats
(1935) and In Dubious Battle (1936) attest; another,
Cannery Row, would follow in 1945], and his
interest didn’t end there. He began with an epic
survey, The Oklahomans (no text is known to
survive), then turned L’Affaire Lettuceberg, a bitter
satire based on conflict between corporate
agriculture and the field workers in his native Salinas. Though his
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
publishers hotly anticipated the completion of the then-65,000+ word
novel, the author soon became dissatisfied with the work, desiring
something more true-to-life. To everyone’s dismay, he burned the pages
of his nearly complete manuscript.
But the seeds had been laid, and those three false starts yielded a unique
milestone in literature. It took critics at least twenty years to unravel
The Grapes of Wrath’s many layers, and the novel is still worthy of
analysis even today. One remarkable feature is the alternation of
intercalary chapters between the Joad narrative, described as
“repositories of all the external information” by the author. In most
cases they describe the migrants’ journey in the greater context, but
background notes
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