2010–2011
Hard Times: John Steinbeck, American
Literature, and the Great Depression
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MONTVILLE HS - OAKDALE, CT
LANGUAGE &
LITERATURE
RESOURCE GUIDE
SEC T ION I:
Critical Reading. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
ONCE THERE WAS A WAR (1958). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
25
Life and Writing in the 1960s. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
THE WINTER OF OUR DISCONTENT (1961). . . . . . . . .
25
TRAVELS WITH CHARLEY (1962) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
25
THE NOBEL PRIZE FOR LITERATURE, 1962. . . . . . . . . .
25
AMERICA AND AMERICANS (1966). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
26
Early Life and Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
THE ACTS OF KING ARTHUR AND
HIS NOBLE KNIGHTS (1976) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
26
Work Experience . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
STEINBECK’S DEATH, DECEMBER 20, 1968. . . . . . . . .
26
SEC T ION II:
John Steinbeck and
the Grapes of Wrath. . . . . . . . . . 10
Introduction: Relationship to the Theme . . . . . . . . . . 10
John Steinbeck’s Life (1902–68). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
Early Publication: Cup of Gold (1929). . . . . . . . . . 13
The Grapes of Wrath (1939). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
First Marriage, Family Life, and Friendship. . . . . 13
Historical Context:
The Great Depression in California . . . . . . . . . . . 27
Life and Writing in the 1930s. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
THE PASTURES OF HEAVEN (1932). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
14
TO A GOD UNKNOWN (1933). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
14
Documentary Evidence of the
Great Depression in California . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
TORTILLA FLAT (1935) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
15
Literary History and the Novel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
IN DUBIOUS BATTLE (1936). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
16
Form and Structure of the Novel . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
IN DEPTH: OF MICE AND MEN (1937) . . . . . . . . . . . . .
17
Characters. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34
THEIR BLOOD IS STRONG (1938) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
18
TOM JOAD. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
34
THE LONG VALLEY (1938) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
18
MA JOAD. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
35
THE GRAPES OF WRATH (1939), FILM (1940). . . . . . . .
18
JIM CASY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
35
Life and Writing in the 1940s. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
ROSE OF SHARON. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
36
THE FORGOTTEN VILLAGE (1941) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
19
PA JOAD. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
36
SEA OF CORTEZ (1941). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
19
AL JOAD. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
36
THE MOON IS DOWN (1942). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
19
JIM RAWLEY. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
36
BOMBS AWAY (1942). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
20
UNCLE JOHN JOAD . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
37
LIFEBOAT (1944). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
20
NOAH JOAD. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
37
CANNERY ROW (1945). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
21
GRANMA AND GRAMPA JOAD. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
37
THE WAYWARD BUS (1947). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
21
RUTHIE AND WINFIELD JOAD . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
37
IN DEPTH: THE PEARL (1947) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
21
MULEY GRAVES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
37
A RUSSIAN JOURNAL (1948). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
21
IVY AND SAIRY WILSON . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
38
Life and Writing in the 1950s. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22
FLOYD KNOWLES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
38
BURNING BRIGHT (1950). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
22
THE WAINWRIGHTS. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
38
IN DEPTH: VIVA ZAPATA! (1952) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
22
CONNIE RIVERS. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
38
IN DEPTH: EAST OF EDEN (1952). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
23
WILL FEELEY. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
38
SWEET THURSDAY (1954) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
24
Setting. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38
THE SHORT REIGN OF PIPPIN IV (1957). . . . . . . . . . . .
24
THE DUST BOWL. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
38
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Table of Contents
THE ROAD, HIGHWAY 66 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
39
CALIFORNIA, THE GARDEN OF EDEN. . . . . . . . . . . . .
40
THE BAKERSFIELD HOOVERVILLE CAMP. . . . . . . . . . .
40
THE WEEDPATCH CAMP. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
41
Selected Work: “Women on the Breadlines”
(1932) By Meridel Le Sueur. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62
THE FLOOD . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
42
“Women on the Breadlines”. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65
Style. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42
Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960) and
“The Gilded Six-Bits”. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68
Literary and Historical Allusion. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46
Metaphor, Figurative Language,
Motif, and Symbolism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48
Selected Work: “The Gilded Six-Bits,”
(1933) by Zora Neale Hurston. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70
“The Gilded Six-Bits”. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75
Themes and Symbolism. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49
William Faulkner (1897–1962) and “Barn Burning” . . 77
Contemporary Reviews of the Novel. . . . . . . . . . 50
Selected Work: “Barn Burning,”
From Novel to Film . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51
(1938) by William Faulkner. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79
Conclusion: The Place of The Grapes of Wrath
in the Discourse of the Great Depression. . . . . . . . . . 52
“Barn Burning”. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87
Carl Sandburg (1878–1967) and The People, Yes. . . . 89
SEC T ION III:
Shorter Selections. . . . . . . . . . . . 53
Selected Work: Excerpt from
The People, Yes, (1936) by Carl Sandburg . . . . . . . . . 91
Introduction: Relationship to the Theme
and to The Grapes of Wrath . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53
The People, Yes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92
Studs Terkel (1912–2008) and Hard Times:
An Oral History of the Great Depression. . . . . . . . . . 55
Selected Work: “The Song,” Interview with
Yip Harburg, from Hard Times: An Oral History
of the Great Depression by Studs Terkel . . . . . . . . . . 57
Langston Hughes (1902–67) and
“Let America Be America Again” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93
Selected Work: “Let America Be America
Again,” (written in 1936, published in 1938)
by Langston Hughes. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96
“Let America Be America Again”. . . . . . . . . . . . . 97
Selected Work: “Cesar Chavez,” from
Hard Times: An Oral History of the
Great Depression by Studs Terkel. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58
NOTES. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 100
Hard Times. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60
BIBLIOGRAPHY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 108
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Narrative Viewpoint. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44
Meridel Le Sueur (1900–96) and
“Women on the Breadlines” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61
SECTION
I:
C
ritical reading is a familiar exercise to students, an
exercise that many of them have been engaged in
since the first grade. Critical reading forms a major
part (more than fifty percent) of the PSAT, the SAT, the
ACT, and both Advanced Placement Tests in English.
It is the portion of any test for which students can do
the least direct preparation, and it is also the portion
that will reward students who have been lifelong readers. Unlike other parts of the United States Academic
Decathlon Test in Language and Literature, where the
questions will be based on a specific works of literature
that the students have been studying diligently, the critical reading passage in the test, as a previously unseen
passage, will have an element of surprise. In fact, the
test writers usually go out of their way to choose passages from works not previously encountered in high
school so as to avoid making the critical reading items
a mere test of recall. From one point of view, not having
to rely on memory actually makes questions on critical
reading easier than the other questions because the
answer must always be somewhere in the passage,
stated either directly or indirectly, and careful reading
will deliver the answer.
Since students can feel much more confident with
some background information and some knowledge
of the types of questions likely to be asked, the first
order of business is for the student to contextualize the
passage by asking some key questions. Who wrote it?
When was it written? In what social, historical, or literary
environment was it written?
In each passage used on a test, the writer’s name
is provided, followed by the work from which the passage was excerpted or the date it was published or the
dates of the author’s life. If the author is well known to
high school students (e.g., Charles Dickens, F. Scott
Fitzgerald, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Jane Austen), no
dates will be provided, but the work or the occasion
will be cited. For writers less familiar to high school
students, dates will be provided. Using this information,
students can begin to place the passage into context.
As they start to read, students will want to focus on what
they know about that writer, his or her typical style and
concerns, or that time period, its values and its limita-
tions. A selection from Thomas Paine in the eighteenth
century is written against a different background and
has different concerns from a selection written by Dr.
Martin Luther King Jr. prior to the passage of the Civil
Rights Act. Toni Morrison writes against a different
background from that of Charles Dickens.
Passages are chosen from many different kinds
of texts—fiction, biography, letters, speeches, essays,
newspaper columns, and magazine articles—and may
come from a diverse group of writers, varying in gender, race, location, and time period. A likely question
is one that asks readers to speculate on what literary
form the passage is excerpted from. The passage itself
will offer plenty of clues as to its genre, and the name
of the writer often offers clues as well. Excerpts from
fiction contain the elements one might expect to find
in fiction—descriptions of setting, character, or action.
Letters have a sense of sharing thoughts with a particular person. Speeches have a wider audience and a
keen awareness of that audience; speeches also have
some particular rhetorical devices peculiar to the genre.
Essays and magazine articles are usually focused on one
topic of contemporary, local, or universal interest.
Other critical reading questions can be divided into
two major types: reading for meaning and reading for
analysis. The questions on reading for meaning are
based solely on understanding what the passage is saying, and the questions on analysis are based on how the
writer says what he or she says.
In reading for meaning, the most frequently asked
question is one that inquires about the passage’s main
idea since distinguishing a main idea from a supporting
idea is an important reading skill. A question on main
ideas is sometimes disguised as a question asking for
an appropriate title for the passage. Most students
will not select as the main idea a choice that is neither
directly stated nor indirectly implied in the passage, but
harder questions will present choices that do appear in
the passage but are not main ideas. Remember that an
answer choice may be a true statement but not the right
answer to the question.
Closely related to a question on the main idea of
a passage is a question about the writer’s purpose. If
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Critical Reading
the opposite of what it is. With each of these methods
of irony, two levels of meaning are present—what is said
and what is implied. An ironic tone is usually used to
criticize or to mock.
A writer of fiction uses tone differently, depending
on what point of view he or she assumes. If the author
chooses a first-person point of view and becomes one
of the characters, he or she has to assume a persona and
develop a character through that character’s thoughts,
actions, and speeches. This character is not necessarily sympathetic and is sometimes even a villain, as in
some of the short stories of Edgar Allan Poe. Readers
have to pick up this tone from the first few sentences. If
the author is writing a third-person narrative, the tone
will vary in accordance with how intrusive the narrator appears to be. Some narrators are almost invisible
while others are more intrusive, pausing to editorialize,
digress, or, in some cases, address the reader directly.
Language is the tool the author uses to reveal
attitude and point of view. A discussion of language
includes the writer’s syntax and diction. Are the sentences long or short? Is the length varied—is there an
occasional short sentence among longer ones? Does
the writer use parallelism and balanced sentence structure? Are the sentences predominantly simple, complex, compound, or compound-complex? How does
the writer use tense? Does he or she vary the mood of
the verb from indicative to interrogative to imperative?
Does the writer shift between active and passive voice?
If so, why? How do these choices influence the tone?
Occasionally, a set of questions may include a grammar question. For example, an item might require students to identify what part of speech a particular word is
being used as, what the antecedent of a pronoun is, or
what a modifier modifies. Being able to answer demonstrates that the student understands the sentence structure and the writer’s meaning in a difficult or sometimes
purposefully ambiguous sentence.
With diction or word choice, one must also consider
whether the words are learned and ornate or simple
and colloquial. Does the writer use slang or jargon?
Does he or she use sensual language? Does the writer
use figurative language or classical allusions? Is the
writer’s meaning clearer because an abstract idea is
associated with a concrete image? Does the reader
have instant recognition of a universal symbol? If the
writer does any of the above, what tone is achieved
through the various possibilities of language? Is the
writing formal or informal? Does the writer approve of
or disapprove of or ridicule his or her subject? Does he
or she use connotative rather than denotative words to
convey these emotions? Do you recognize a pattern of
images or words throughout the passage?
Some questions on vocabulary in context deal with a
single word. The word is not usually an unfamiliar word,
but it is often a word with multiple meanings, depending on the context or the date of the passage, as some
words have altered in meaning over the years.
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the passage is fiction, the purpose, unless it is a digression—and even digressions are purposeful in the hands
of good writers—will in some way serve the elements of
fiction. The passage will develop a character, describe
a setting, or advance the plot. If the passage is nonfiction, the writer’s purpose might be purely to inform;
it might be to persuade; it might be to entertain; or it
might be any combination of all three of these. Students
may also be questioned about the writer’s audience. Is
the passage intended for a specific group, or is it aimed
at a larger audience?
The easy part of the Critical Reading section is that
the answer to the question is always in the passage, and
for most of the questions, students do not need to bring
previous knowledge of the subject to the task. However,
for some questions, students are expected to have
some previous knowledge of the vocabulary, terms,
allusions, and stylistic techniques usually acquired in an
English class. Such knowledge could include, but is not
limited to, knowing vocabulary, recognizing an allusion,
and identifying literary and rhetorical devices.
In addition to recognizing the main idea of a passage, students will be required to demonstrate a more
specific understanding. Questions measuring this might
restate information from the passage and ask students
to recognize the most exact restatement. For such
questions, students will have to demonstrate their clear
understanding of a specific passage or sentence. A
deeper level of understanding may be examined by
asking students to make inferences on the basis of
the passage or to draw conclusions from evidence in
the passage. In some cases, students may be asked to
extend these conclusions by applying information in
the passage to other situations not mentioned in the
passage.
In reading for analysis, students are asked to recognize some aspects of the writer’s craft. One of these
aspects may be organization. How has the writer chosen
to organize his or her material? Is it a chronological narrative? Does it describe a place using spatial organization? Is it an argument with points clearly organized in
order of importance? Is it set up as a comparison and
contrast? Does it offer an analogy or a series of examples? If there is more than one paragraph in the excerpt,
what is the relationship between the paragraphs? What
transition does the writer make from one paragraph to
the next?
Other questions could be based on the writer’s
attitude toward the subject, the appropriate tone he or
she assumes, and the way language is used to achieve
that tone. Of course, the tone will vary according to the
passage. In informational nonfiction, the tone will be
detached and matter-of-fact, except when the writer is
particularly enthusiastic about the subject or has some
other kind of emotional involvement such as anger,
disappointment, sorrow, or nostalgia. He or she may
even assume an ironic tone that takes the form of exaggerating or understating a situation or describing it as
Sample Passage
To Prepare For Critical Reading
“We will each write a ghost story,” said Lord Byron, and his proposition was acceded to.
There were four of us. The noble author began a tale, a fragment of which he printed at the
end of his poem of Mazeppa. Shelley, more apt to embody ideas and sentiments in the
radiance of brilliant imagery and in the music of the most melodious verse that adorns our
(5)
language than to invent the machinery of a story, commenced one founded on the
experiences of his early life. Poor Polidori had some terrible idea about a skull-headed
lady who was so punished for peeping through a key-hole—what to see I forget:
something very shocking and wrong of course; but when she was reduced to a worse
condition than the renowned Tom of Coventry1, he did not know what to do with her and
(10) was obliged to dispatch her to the tomb of the Capulets, the only place for which she was
fitted. The illustrious poets also, annoyed by the platitude of prose, speedily relinquished
their uncongenial task.
I busied myself to think of a story—a story to rival those which had excited us to this task.
One which would speak to the mysterious fears of our nature and awaken thrilling
(15) horror—one to make the reader dread to look round, to curdle the blood, and quicken the
beatings of the heart. If I did not accomplish these things, my ghost story would be
unworthy of its name. I thought and pondered—vainly. I felt that blank incapability of
invention which is the greatest misery of authorship, when dull Nothing replies to our
anxious invocations. “Have you thought of a story?” I was asked each morning, and each
(20) morning I was forced to reply with a mortifying negative.
Mary Shelley
Introduction to Frankenstein (1831)
1. Tom of Coventry—Peeping Tom who was struck blind for looking as Lady Godiva passed by.
INSTRUCTIONS: On your answer sheet, mark the lettered space (a, b, c, d, or e) corresponding to the
answer that BEST completes or answers each of the following test items.
1. The author’s purpose in this passage is to
a. analyze the creative process
b. demonstrate her intellectual superiority
c. name-drop her famous acquaintances
d. denigrate the efforts of her companions
e. narrate the origins of her novel
2. A
ccording to the author, Shelley’s talents
were in
a. sentiment and invention
b. diction and sound patterns
c. thought and feeling
d. brightness and ornamentation
e. insight and analysis
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In order to prepare for the critical reading portion of the test, it may be helpful for students to take a
look at a sample passage. Here is a passage used in an earlier test. The passage is an excerpt from Mary
Shelley’s 1831 Introduction to Frankenstein.
7. “
Noble” (line 2) can be BEST understood to
mean
a. principled
a. accurate
b. aristocratic
b. prejudiced
c. audacious
c. appreciative
d. arrogant
e. eminent
d. detached
e. exaggerated
a. amused
8. A
ll of the following constructions, likely to
be questioned by a strict grammarian or a
computer grammar check, are included in
the passage EXCEPT
b. sincere
a. a shift in voice
c. derisive
b. unconventional punctuation
d. ironic
c. sentence fragments
e. matter-of-fact
d. run-on sentences
5. T
he author’s approach to the task differs
from that of the others in that she begins by thinking of
e. a sentence ending with a preposition
a. her own early experiences
a. intellectual value
b. poetic terms and expressions
b. philosophical aspect
c. the desired effect on her readers
c. commonplace quality
d. outperforming her male companions
d. heightened emotion
e. praying for inspiration
e. demanding point of view
4. The author’s attitude toward Polidori is
MONTVILLE HS - OAKDALE, CT
3. T
he author’s descriptions of Shelley’s talents
might be considered all of the following
EXCEPT
9. In context “platitude” (line 11) can be BEST
understood to mean
6. At the end of the excerpt the author feels
10.“The tomb of the Capulets” (line 10) is an
allusion to
a. determined
a. Shakespeare
b. despondent
b. Edgar Allan Poe
c. confident
c. English history
d. relieved
d. Greek mythology
e. resigned
e. the legends of King Arthur
Answers and Explanations of Answers
1. (e) This type of question appears in most sets of critical reading questions. (a) might appear to be
a possible answer, but the passage does not come across as very analytical, nor does it seem like a
discussion of the creative process but rather is more a description of a game played by four writers to
while away the time. (b) and (c) seem unlikely answers. Mary Shelley’s account here sounds as if she is
conscious of inferiority in such illustrious company rather than superiority. She has no need to namedrop, as she married one of the illustrious poets and at that time was the guest of the other. She narrates
the problems she had in coming up with a story, but since the passage tells us that she is the author of
Frankenstein, we know that she did come up with a story. The answer is (e).
2. (b) This type of question asks readers to recognize a restatement of ideas found in the passage. The
sentence under examination is found in lines 3–6, and students are asked to recognize that “diction and
sound patterns” refers to “radiance of brilliant imagery” and “music of the most melodious verse.” (a)
would not be possible because even his adoring wife finds him not inventive. “Thought and feeling,”
(c), appear as “ideas and sentiments” (line 3), which according to the passage are merely the vehicles to
exhibit Shelley’s talents. Answer (d), incorporating “brightness,” might refer to “brilliant” in line 4, but
“ornamentation” is too artificial a word for the author to use in reference to her talented husband. (e) is
incorrect, as insight and analysis are not alluded to in the passage.
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3. (d) This question is related to Question 2 in that it discusses Shelley’s talents and the author’s opinion
of them. The writer is obviously not “detached” in her description of her very talented husband. She is
obviously “prejudiced” and “appreciative.” She may even exaggerate, but history has shown her to be
accurate in her opinion.
5. (c) This question deals with the second paragraph and how the author set about writing a story.
Choices (a), (b), (d), and (e) may seem appropriate beginnings for a writer, but they are not mentioned
in the passage. What she does focus on is the desired effect on her readers, (c), as outlined in detail in
lines 13–16.
6. (b) This question asks for an adjective to describe the author’s feeling at the end of the excerpt. The
expressions “blank incapability” (line 17) and “mortifying negative” (line 20) suggest that “despondent”
is the most appropriate answer.
7. (b) This question deals with vocabulary in context. The noble author is Lord Byron, a hereditary peer
of the realm, and the word in this context of describing him means “aristocratic.” “Principled,” (a), and
“eminent,” (e), are also possible synonyms for “noble” but not in this context. Byron in his private life
was eminently unprincipled (nicknamed the bad Lord Byron) and lived overseas to avoid public enmity.
(c) and (d) are not synonyms for “noble.”
8. (d) This is a type of question that appears occasionally in a set of questions on critical reading. Such
questions require the student to examine the sentence structure of professional writers and to be aware
that these writers sometimes take liberties in order to make a more effective statement.
They know the rules, and, therefore, they may break them! An additional difficulty is that the question
is framed as a negative, so students may find it a time-consuming question as they mentally check off
which constructions Shelley does employ so that by a process of elimination they may arrive at which
construction is not included. The first sentence contains both choices (a) and (e), a shift in voice and a
sentence ending in a preposition. Neither of these constructions is a grammatical error, but computer
programs point them out. The conventional advice is that both should be used sparingly, and they should
be used when avoiding them becomes more cumbersome than using them. The sentence beginning in
line 14 is a sentence fragment (c), but an effective one. Choice (b) corresponds to the sentence beginning
in line 6 and finishing in line 11, which contains a colon, semicolon, and a dash (somewhat unconventional)
without the author’s ever losing control. This sentence is not a run-on even though many students may
think it is! The answer to the question then is (d).
9. (c) Here is another vocabulary in context question. Knowing the poets involved and their tastes,
students will probably recognize that it is (c), the commonplace quality of prose, that turns the poets away
and not one of the loftier explanations provided in the other distracters.
10. (a) The allusion to “the tomb of the Capulets” in line 10 is an example of a situation where a student
is expected to have some outside knowledge, and this will be a very easy question for students. Romeo
and Juliet is fair game for American high school students. Notice that the other allusion is footnoted, as
this is a more obscure allusion for American high school students, although well known to every English
schoolboy and schoolgirl.
This set of ten questions is very typical—one on
purpose, a couple on restatement of supporting ideas,
some on tone and style, two on vocabulary in context,
and one on an allusion. Students should learn how to
use the process of elimination when the answer is not
immediately obvious. The organization of the questions is also typical of the usual arrangement of Critical
Reading questions. Questions on the content of the
passage, the main idea, and supporting ideas generally appear first and are in the order they are found in
the passage. They are followed by questions applying
to the whole passage, including general questions
about the writer’s tone and style. Students should be
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4. (a) This is another question about the writer’s attitude. Some of the adjectives can be immediately
dismissed. She is not ironic—she means what she says. She is not an unkind writer, and she does not use
a derisive tone. However, there is too much humor in her tone for it to be sincere or matter-of-fact. The
correct answer is that she is amused.
setting, either outdoor or indoor, and the role it is likely
to play in a novel or short story.
Speeches generate some different kinds of questions because of the oratorical devices a speaker
might use—repetition, anaphora, or appeals to various
emotions. Questions could be asked about the use of
metaphors, the use of connotative words, and the use
of patterns of words or images.
The above suggestions should provide a useful background for critical reading. Questions are
likely to follow similar patterns, and knowing what to
expect boosts confidence when dealing with unfamiliar
material.
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able to work their way through the passage, finding the
answers as they go.
Additional questions on an autobiographical selection like this passage might ask what is revealed about
the biographer herself or which statements in the passage associate the author with Romanticism.
Since passages for critical reading come in a wide
variety of genres, students should keep in mind that
other types of questions could be asked on other types
of passages. For instance, passages from fiction can
generate questions about point of view, about characters and how these characters are presented, or about
SECTION
II:
Introduction:
Relationship to the Theme
I
n the closing chapter of You Can’t Go Home Again,
Thomas Wolfe’s narrator surveys the state of America
in the midst of the Great Depression, not only looking backward upon the vast wasteland created by
economic collapse at home, but also forward to the
growing threat of militaristic fascism abroad. While
Wolfe stands firm in his belief that America can find
itself once again, he feels compelled to warn his readers of his vision of “the enemy” who, assuming many
shapes, is the embodiment of the causes for a “lost”
America of the thirties. “I think I speak for most men
living,” Wolfe writes, “when I say that our America is
Here, is Now, and beckons on before us, and that this
glorious assurance is not only our living hope, but our
dream to be accomplished.”1 The warning which follows, however, offers a compelling portrait of America
in the Depression:
I think the enemy is here before us, too. But I
think we know the forms and faces of the enemy,
and in the knowledge that we know him, and
shall meet him, and eventually must conquer
him is also our living hope. I think the enemy is
here before us with a thousand faces, but I think
we know that all his faces wear one mask. I think
the enemy is single selfishness and compulsive
greed. I think the enemy is blind, but has the
brutal power of his blind grab. I do not think
the enemy was born yesterday, or that he grew
to manhood forty years ago, or that he suffered
sickness and collapse in 1929, or that we began
without the enemy, and that our vision faltered,
that we lost the way, and suddenly were in his
camp. I think the enemy is old as Time, and
evil as Hell, and that he has been here with us
from the beginning. I think he stole our earth
from us, destroyed our wealth, and ravaged and
despoiled our land. I think he took our people
and enslaved them, that he polluted the fountains of our life, took unto himself the rarest
treasures of our own possession, took our bread
and left us with a crust, and, not content, for the
nature of the enemy is insatiate—tried finally to
take from us the crust…. Look about you and see
what he has done.2
As Wolfe struggled to find artistic expression for
the political chaos of his time, John Steinbeck formed
characters who would live their lives in a battle with the
“enemy” who steals the land they’ve worked all of their
lives, forces them to join a vast sea of humanity migrating westward, and denies them work and sustenance
once they arrive. The shape of Steinbeck’s “enemy”
takes form in his defining fictional portrait of the Great
Depression, The Grapes of Wrath.
John Steinbeck’s Life (1902–68)
Come, my friends,
‘Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles, And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.
Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
NOTE TO STUDENTS: This year’s selected literature includes literary masterpieces by some of the greatest American writers in our nation’s
history. Some of these works contain profanity and deeply offensive racial slurs and address mature themes and topics. It is our hope that
Academic Decathletes will not only read and discuss these works with a scholarly appreciation for their richness and for the insights they provide into the topic of the Great Depression, but also will approach the subject matter with maturity and sensitivity.
Students should also be aware that all page references cited in the discussion of The Grapes of Wrath refer to the Penguin Classics edition of
the novel that is included in the bibliography at the end of the resource guide.
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John Steinbeck and
the Grapes of Wrath
— Closing lines from “Ulysses,”
Alfred Lord Tennyson
On December 20, 1968, John Steinbeck passed
quietly away, slipping into a coma after a long battle
with arteriosclerosis. At his funeral a few days later,
Henry Fonda, the actor who portrayed Tom Joad in
the film version of The Grapes of Wrath, read passages
from three of Steinbeck’s favorite poems, among them,
“Ulysses” by Alfred Lord Tennyson, whose closing lines
appear above. The lines suggest not an ending, but a
beginning, a fitting tribute to a writer whose work is
reborn with each new generation of readers.
Early Life and Education
John Steinbeck was born the third child of John and
Olive Steinbeck, on February 27, 1902. At the time of
his birth, Steinbeck’s parents lived in Salinas, California,
where his father served as the treasurer for Monterey
County. Steinbeck’s mother, who had been certified as
a teacher at the age of seventeen, gave up her profes-
sion after her marriage, but continued to serve as a
community leader. His mother provided a home filled
with books, an atmosphere that stimulated Steinbeck’s
imagination from a very early age. There is an additional important influence on Steinbeck, which came from
his mother’s side—his deep affection for his Hamilton
grandparents’ ranch about sixty miles south of Salinas.
The ranch provides the setting for Steinbeck’s The Red
Pony and figures prominently, along with the Hamilton
family, in East of Eden (1952). Among the early influences in his reading were works by Robert Louis Stevenson,
Alexandre Dumas, and Sir Walter Scott.
However, perhaps the most important influence
of all, one that would sustain Steinbeck throughout
his life, was his introduction to Thomas Malory’s Le
Morte d’Arthur. In one way or another, almost all of
Steinbeck’s fiction bears the mark of Malory. In fact,
Steinbeck planned and worked on a modern translation of Malory in the 1950s which was published posthumously in its unfinished form and entitled The Acts
of King Arthur and His Noble Knights (1976).
In high school, Steinbeck decided to become a
writer. While school itself didn’t seem to enchant him as
The John Steinbeck Map of America, Molly Maguire, Color Lithograph Map, Los Angeles:
Aaron Blake, 1986, Geograph and Map Division, Library of Congress.
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One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.3
…the dark corridors of the school and the
desks in the ill-lighted room shining fiercely…the
grey light from the windows, and the teachers,
weekend over, facing us with more horror than
that with which we faced them.4
From the “horror” of the high school classroom,
Steinbeck entered the hallowed halls of Stanford
University, taking classes intermittently during a period
of six years, from 1919 to 1925 without ever completing
a degree. His record was only remarkable for the number of incompletes, withdrawals, and leaves of absence
he amassed, but he found a way to use his time at
Stanford to acquire the education he needed. After
several lengthy absences from the university, Steinbeck
realized that he did need a formal education of sorts
to accomplish his goals, so he reapplied for admission,
determined, however, to do it his own way.
One summer experience is worth mentioning in
some detail—Steinbeck enrolled in the Hopkins Marine
Station with his sister Mary for the summer quarter
in 1923. His instructor for general zoology had been
trained at Berkeley where the prevailing view of nature
was “organismal,” that is, a view that everything in
nature formed a whole in which the whole and its parts
were inextricably interrelated. The impact of this view
on Steinbeck’s later work and on his relationship with
Edward Ricketts, a marine biologist, is immeasurable.
From the time of his reentry at Stanford in January 1923
until he left in 1925, Steinbeck devised his own course
of studies, choosing classes in elementary Greek, writing, literature, and the classics, and avoiding his lowerdivision requirements. While at that time Stanford did
not offer a degree in creative writing, Steinbeck took
every course that was offered in the writing of fiction,
poetry, advanced composition, and journalism.
Arguably the most important influence on Steinbeck
at this time was his short fiction instructor, Edith
Mirrielees. Her insistence on a “lean, terse style”5 and
her demands for revision became increasingly important as Steinbeck learned his craft largely through
internalizing the lessons of his instructors as well as
by teaching himself through his writing. As Mirrielees
wrote in her own book on writing, which she was preparing for publication while Steinbeck was in her class:
There are a few helps towards general
improvement which it is feasible to offer, there
are many specific helps in the work of revision,
but help in the initial shaping of a story there is
none. That is the writer’s own affair.6
By the 1930s, Mirrielees’ lessons had taken root, for
Steinbeck was shedding the preference he displayed in
college publications for overblown figurative language
and began to find his voice in the lean, muscular style
of Tortilla Flat, Of Mice and Men, and The Grapes of
Wrath.
Work Experience
During his frequent absences from Stanford,
Steinbeck worked to accumulate enough money to
return, finding employment as a store clerk, cotton
picker, and ranch hand, among other jobs. What he
learned on these jobs was as formative for the material of his writing as his Stanford classes were for the
development of his style. At some point during his
1920–January 1923 hiatus from Stanford, Steinbeck
stopped at a hobo camp and asked if anyone had a
good story. According to his biographer, Steinbeck
may have gotten the idea here for what would become
the ending of The Grapes of Wrath when one of the
hoboes, Frank Kilkenny, told him the story of how he
almost died and was saved by a Finn farmer’s wife who
gave him her breast to keep him from starving to death.
“I can use that,” Steinbeck told Kilkenny and paid him
two dollars.7
When he finally decided to leave Stanford without a
degree, Steinbeck continued to work, mostly as a laborer. He took a summer maintenance job at Lake Tahoe,
earning enough money to ship out on a freighter for
New York. His passage through the Panama Canal and
a stop in Panama City helped give him firsthand information that he would use later in his first novel Cup of
Gold. In New York, Steinbeck hoped he could make
a serious start on his writing career, but he needed to
work. He worked as a day laborer on the construction
of Madison Square Garden, which left him little time to
write; however, he was fortunate to get hired as a cub
reporter by the New York American. The job lasted only
a few months, though, as Steinbeck failed to meet his
deadlines, and he faced the reality that, without work,
he’d have to return to California.
The decision to return to the West was a fateful one,
for Steinbeck found work as a year-round caretaker on a
summer estate at Lake Tahoe. In the summer, his duties
were heavy, taking care of the family in residence, but in
the winter, he was alone, and finally had the chance to
establish a disciplined schedule for writing. Once he’d
escaped the initial inertia to begin writing, Steinbeck
set aside a time for writing each day, completing the
manuscript of Cup of Gold, his fictional biography of
the seventeenth-century pirate Henry Morgan, in late
January 1928. He also managed to publish his first
story, “The Gifts of Iban,” in The Smokers Companion
and began reworking a play that his friend Toby Street
had given him to complete. The unfinished play would
become the basis for Steinbeck’s third novel, To A God
Unknown.
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he was neither athletic nor extremely popular, he spent
a great deal of time at his desk in his room writing and
demonstrated a growing skill as associate editor of the
yearbook during his junior and senior years. His memories of high school suggest a sharp displeasure at the
necessity of returning to school on Monday mornings:
rate dust jacket designed by his artist friend Mahlon
Blaine. By this time, though, Steinbeck had put Captain
Morgan’s story behind him, feeling that the work had
little value, referring to it as the “Morgan atrocity.”8
He had also come into contact, at Carol’s urging, with
Ernest Hemingway’s story “The Killers.” Steinbeck felt
threatened by the sheer stark power of Hemingway’s
prose, telling Carol that Hemingway “was the finest
writer alive.”9 But, Steinbeck would avoid reading any
more of Hemingway’s work until much later.
Early Publication:
Cup of Gold (1929)
Cup of Gold: A Life of Sir Henry Morgan, Buccaneer,
with Occasional Reference to History is the expansion
of an earlier story, “The Lady in Infra-Red,” begun when
Steinbeck was still at Stanford. The novel is Steinbeck’s
only historical romance and bears the marks of so
many influences, especially the influence of Malory and
the quest for the Holy Grail, as is indicated in the title
itself. Of course, the “Cup of Gold” is also Panama, a
repository for Spanish gold during the early modern
period. Steinbeck mixes mythical characters with the
historical, like Merlin, from Malory’s Morte d’Arthur, as
a way of expanding the tale beyond fictional biography.
Morgan, as Steinbeck creates him, is a slave to his own
ambition, a man unfulfilled by his success and doomed
to “mediocrity.”10 The first edition of 1500 copies of the
novel appeared in August 1929, and by Christmas had
sold quite well. Even though Steinbeck found it objectionable, Mahlon Blaine’s rather gaudy dust jacket may
well have contributed to the book’s sales.
First Marriage,
Family Life, and Friendship
An undated photograph
of John Steinbeck.
As the stock market crashed in October 1929,
Steinbeck and Carol had begun to plan a life together.
They became engaged and moved south to Los
Angeles in anticipation of their wedding. On January
14, 1930, the Steinbecks celebrated their marriage in
Glendale and settled in Eagle Rock, in the hills above
Los Angeles. While there, Steinbeck worked on two
manuscripts, “Dissonant Symphony,” which he would
ultimately abandon and destroy, and “Murder at Full
Moon,” a potboiler mystery written in an effort to make
money, which remains unpublished today. Before these
two, though, Steinbeck had been hard at work on the
“Green Lady” manuscript given to him years before by
his friend, Toby Street. Steinbeck reworked this idea in
1929, giving it the new title “To an Unknown God” in
1930, and he continued to work on it for the next two
years.
1930 was a watershed year for Steinbeck not only
because of his marriage, but also for his fateful meeting
with Ed Ricketts, the man who influenced his work and
his thought more, perhaps, than anyone else. While
Ricketts was alive, Steinbeck produced almost all of
his major work; he collaborated with Ricketts on Sea of
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In May of 1928, Steinbeck left his position as caretaker for the Brigham family estate and went to work
at the Tahoe Hatchery. That summer, Steinbeck met
the woman who would become his first wife, Carol
Henning. By the end of the summer, Steinbeck had
left the Hatchery to move to San Francisco to be near
Carol. But his work in a warehouse, coupled with the
time he devoted to his growing relationship with Carol,
left him little time to write. His solution to the problem
was to quit his job, move back to his parents’ summer
home in Pacific Grove, and accept a small monthly
subsidy from his father. The subsidy afforded him the
time and inspiration to work on the manuscript of “The
Green Lady,” which formed the basis of To A God
Unknown (1933), and to learn the process of writing and
destroying what he had written until he had sharpened
and clarified his prose.
In January 1929, Steinbeck learned that, through
the efforts of his friend Ted Miller, Cup of Gold had
been accepted by Robert M. McBride. The first edition
would appear in August of that year, with an elabo-
Life and Writing in the 1930s
Steinbeck continued to work at a feverish pace
through 1931, but he had not published a word since
Cup of Gold. By now, he had three completed manuscripts, all of which had been rejected, but by late
summer, he signed a contract with Mavis McIntosh and
Elizabeth Otis to represent him as his literary agents.
Their association would be lifelong, and their first success as his agents was the contract they secured with
Jonathan Cape for The Pastures of Heaven in February
1932.
The Pastures of Heaven (1932)
Cape went bankrupt that same year, but the manuscript was picked up by Brewer, Warren & Putnam and
published, finally, in October. The Pastures of Heaven
centers on a theme that is a Steinbeck mainstay—the
loss of the Garden of Eden. “Las Pasturas del Cielo,”
Steinbeck’s fictional valley, was based on the real Corral
de Tierra near Salinas. The twelve “chapters,” or stories,
in the novel are loosely connected through their geographical location and through the presence of a family, the Munroes, woven throughout, whose members
play a major or minor role in all of the chapters except
the first and last and who appear as the catalysts for the
misfortunes of the inhabitants of the valley.
The structure and themes of the collection reveal
the influence of Sherwood Anderson’s loosely connected stories in Winesburg, Ohio (1919) as well
as the influence of American Naturalist writers like
Stephen Crane and Theodore Dreiser. The underlying
tragedy traced through the stories is, as one critic has
pointed out, that “although this rich valley presents
the promise of a fulfilling life, the characters within it
are either so restricted or so driven by self-deception
and obsession that they do not make the most of their
abundant opportunities.11 Since its publisher went
bankrupt shortly after the novel’s release, the book was
not widely circulated and did not offer Steinbeck much
relief from financial pressure. The promise of payment,
though, did offer enough relief for the Steinbecks to
move back to the Los Angeles area in July 1932.
To A God Unknown (1933)
Photograph of Ed Ricketts, who
had a tremendous influence on the
life and work of John Steinbeck.
Photo courtesy of Pat Hathaway.
In early 1933, Steinbeck decided to withdraw his
manuscript “Dissonant Symphony” from circulation
and ultimately destroyed it. His work on “To an
Unknown God,” however, continued, its title changing
to To A God Unknown when he sent it to his agents.
The novel, so long in the making, finally appeared in
September 1933, published by Robert O. Ballou. The
development of the novel was heavily influenced by
Steinbeck’s friendship and many conversations with
Joseph Campbell, a leading authority on mythology.12
Campbell moved next door to Ricketts in 1932, just at
the time when Steinbeck was reworking the “Unknown
God” manuscript.
The final version of the novel incorporates mythological themes intertwined with a belief in pantheism,
mysticism, and the sacredness of nature. The protagonist, Joseph Wayne, literally weds himself to the land
he buys in a California valley, and at the end of the
novel allows himself to bleed to death in the mystical
belief that his self-sacrifice will restore the land from
drought. Here Steinbeck begins his preoccupation
with an important notion in his work—westward migration—as Joseph and his brothers leave Vermont to
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Cortez; and he repeatedly used Ricketts as a character
in his fiction.
The Steinbecks weren’t in Los Angeles a year before
finances forced their return to his parents’ summer
cottage in Pacific Grove in October, and once there,
Steinbeck became a frequent visitor at Ricketts’ laboratory in Cannery Row, Monterey. Ricketts was a student
of marine life without a formal degree who collected
and provided specimens to biological supply houses.
With Ricketts, Steinbeck forged not only a friendship,
but also a philosophical world view heavily influenced
by his study of and discussions about science.
Steinbeck’s childhood home
in Salinas, CA. In March 1933,
Steinbeck and his wife Carol moved
back to this Salinas home to care
for Steinbeck’s aging parents.
forcing its way in on Steinbeck—the increase in labor
strikes all over California. Steinbeck collected material
from scenes of unrest in his own neighborhood, meeting fugitive labor organizers, striking farm workers,
and members of the Young Communist League. These
events gave Steinbeck his most powerful themes and
led directly to three of his greatest works: In Dubious
Battle, Of Mice and Men, and The Grapes of Wrath.
Tortilla Flat (1935)
Tortilla Flat, originally meant to be a collection of
stories, had by early 1934 become instead an episodic
novel. The publication of this novel marked the beginning of Steinbeck’s fame. Its characters comprise a
subculture of the Mexican-American community in
Monterey called “paisanos,” or countrymen, because,
in addition to Mexican and Indian blood, many of them
also had either Italian or Portuguese ancestry. The
novel produces, with comic overtones, a retelling of
the tale of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round
Table played by the poverty-stricken inhabitants of
Tortilla Flat. Steinbeck needed to write something light
to relieve the suffering he endured as he watched the
decline of both parents, and he was fortunate to have
his work introduced to Pascal Covici, the publisher who
would be his friend and editor for the rest of his life.
Covici agreed to publish Tortilla Flat in February 1935.
With its emphasis on the lower class and its use of the
vernacular, Tortilla Flat may be seen as an introduction to Steinbeck’s great proletarian novels that would
follow.
Despite his father’s continued failing health,
Steinbeck now had more time to begin research on
what would become his great theme—the plight of the
California farm worker. Migrants from the Dust Bowl
had begun arriving in the Salinas area in early 1934,
establishing a “Hooverville” camp just outside the
city. Steinbeck was aware of this movement, and as he
started collecting information about the clash between
the farm workers and the growers, he met two strike
organizers who were hiding from arrest and offered to
pay them for their stories.14
As a response to falling wages, agricultural workers, who had been spurned by traditional labor unions,
engaged in a number of strikes between 1930 and
1932. Without organization, though, the strikes could
not help but fail. With the help of the Communist Party
USA, workers formed the Cannery and Agricultural
Workers’ Industrial Union (CAWIU) from earlier parent
organizations in 1931, which helped secure modest
gains in wages. Steinbeck met a number of people associated with the movement, including Lincoln Steffens,
a journalist and “muckraker” who in the early decades
of the century had sought to expose corruption in business and government. Steffens and his wife Ella Winter
hosted a wide circle of activists at their home in Carmel,
among them, George West, with the San Francisco
News, who later asked Steinbeck to write a series of
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farm in California. The novel offers an early example
of Steinbeck’s theory of “non-teleological” thinking,
a theory he and Ricketts debated and which, for
Steinbeck at this early stage of his development of the
concept, incorporated the belief in a universe which
operates almost like a machine, independently of God
or man, where things just happen without cause or
explanation.13
In March 1933, Steinbeck’s mother suffered a devastating stroke, so Steinbeck and his wife moved back
to the family home in Salinas to help with her care. It
was hard for Steinbeck to maintain continuity in his writing during this period, but perhaps the circumstances
which forced him to face his mother’s mortality also
inspired him to begin work on narratives drawn from his
own childhood, a collection of stories which would later
appear in The Red Pony (1938). Faced not only with
his mother’s rapidly declining health, but also with his
father’s increasing frailty, Steinbeck devoted himself to
short fiction for more than a year. The stories produced
during this period included the four stories collected
as The Red Pony (“The Gift,” “The Great Mountains,”
“The Promise,” and “The Leader of the People”), the
remaining stories collected later in The Long Valley,
and stories that, reworked, would become Tortilla Flat.
On February 19, 1934, Steinbeck’s mother died following a second stroke. Within a week, while caring for
his father, Steinbeck finished one of his most widely
anthologized stories, “The Chrysanthemums.” Within
another two weeks, Steinbeck had finished the manuscript “Tortilla Flat,” and his story “The Murder,” published in the North American Review, won the O. Henry
Prize in April. In addition to health issues with his parents in 1933–34, another pressure from the outside was
In Dubious Battle (1936)
In Dubious Battle is considered the first of Steinbeck’s
“Labor Trilogy,” his fictional account of the atrocities he
witnessed against Dust Bowl migrants and itinerant
farm workers. The story has a minimum of narrative and
consists in large part of vernacular dialogue, frequently
profane and obscene. The novel is also important for
the appearance of the character “Doc,” loosely patterned on Ed Ricketts. Doc serves as a one-man Greek
chorus, commenting on the actions in the narrative
Pickets on the highway calling
workers from the fields during
the 1933 cotton strike.
International News Photos, Inc.
Photo courtesy of Bancroft Library.
and extrapolating from them philosophical lessons,
especially his theory of “group-man” on the mechanistic behavior of human beings in groups. Furthermore,
Steinbeck cast an argument he had introduced in a
1933 essay, “Argument of Phalanx,” in fictional form
here in an effort to observe the behavior of humans
individually and within a group.18
Steinbeck refuses to take a side in the novel, choosing instead to present two forces in combat whose
outcome can only be “dubious.” Another point to be
made here is that the actual strike on which the novel
is, in part, based included a vast majority of Mexican
and Filipino farm workers while Steinbeck’s strikers are
largely white. Steinbeck, from personal experience,
could not have failed to be aware of the ethnic diversity
of the workers, but his greatest sympathies seemed
reserved for poor white farm workers. Perhaps, too,
he chose to focus on a more homogeneous group
that could demonstrate the efficacy of his theory. By
February of 1935, Steinbeck had finished the manuscript for the novel, and by August, he had a contract
with Covici-Friede. By the time Steinbeck signed the
contract for In Dubious Battle, Tortilla Flat had become
a bestseller.
During this period of burgeoning success for
Steinbeck, there was also sadness. His father finally
succumbed to illness and died in May 1935. Finally
free of tending to sick and dying parents, Steinbeck
and his wife Carol traveled to Mexico and New York
in the fall. The year 1936 opened with promises of
further success for Steinbeck. He signed a contract
with Paramount Pictures for the movie rights to Tortilla
Flat. In Dubious Battle appeared and sold well, and
in April Steinbeck began the manuscript provisionally
entitled “Something That Happened,” the first version
of Of Mice and Men. Steinbeck worked simultaneously
on this manuscript while writing a series of articles on
migrant workers for the San Francisco News, published
as “The Harvest Gypsies,” from October 5–12. These
articles were based on Steinbeck’s travels in an old
bakery truck, accompanied by Tom Collins, a federal
government labor camp manager, to migrant and government camps in the San Joaquin Valley. Within a
month, Steinbeck had begun work on an early draft,
which would later be destroyed, entitled “L’Affaire
Lettuceberg,” the first attempt at what would later
become The Grapes of Wrath.
By March of 1936, Steinbeck had finished the first
draft of Of Mice and Men, designing it as an experiment—it was a novel that could also double as a stage
play. Two months later, though, his setter puppy had
destroyed about half of the manuscript. Steinbeck
wrote to his agent, “I was pretty mad but the poor
little fellow may have been acting critically.”19 After
a trip to Baja California with Ricketts to collect octopuses, Steinbeck went back to work on the manuscript,
which progressed simultaneously with the construction
of a new house in Los Gatos in the summer of 1936,
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articles on Dust Bowl migrants. Those articles served
as the research for and the backbone of The Grapes of
Wrath. First, though, Steinbeck was impelled to write a
novel about a strike.
With the help of leftist sympathizers who wanted the
story to get out, Steinbeck met Cicil McKiddy (an alias),
a Dust Bowl migrant and labor organizer who had been
sent into hiding in Seaside to avoid possible arrest.
McKiddy participated in the “largest single agricultural
strike in American history,”15 the cotton strike in the
San Joaquin Valley in October 1933. The great cotton
strike possessed the “epic sweep worthy of the Great
Depression,”16 and McKiddy had been in a position to
know much of what occurred during the strike. He was
especially knowledgeable about CAWIU organizer and
strike leader Pat Chambers. Steinbeck spent hours with
McKiddy gathering information that would become
the core of In Dubious Battle. The novel, however, is
not meant to be a documentary of the cotton strike;
Steinbeck himself refused to acknowledge a particular
geographical location or a specific strike as the scene
of his novel.17
designed and supervised by Carol as a response to
Steinbeck’s increasing need for privacy to write.
In Depth: Of Mice and Men (1937)
MONTVILLE HS - OAKDALE, CT
Steinbeck finished the manuscript in mid-August of
1936, titling it Of Mice and Men, a reference to a line
from Robert Burns’ “To a Mouse,” which reads: “the
best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men gang aft agley”
(often paraphrased as: “The best laid schemes of mice
and men go oft awry”). Because of Steinbeck’s intent
to dramatize the novella, much of its discourse is dialogue, for what Steinbeck may have had in mind was
an audience of working poor who, though they might
not read books, would attend a play.20 The main characters are hoboes, or “bindlestiffs,” George Milton and
Lennie Small, whose dream to “live offa the fatta the
lan’” is doomed from the beginning.
Poor mother and children during the Great Depression. Elm Grove, California. As he
toured migrant camps, Steinbeck became outraged by the deplorable conditions.
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Their Blood is Strong (1938)
In March 1938, Steinbeck was approached by Helen
Hosmer on behalf of the Simon J. Lubin Society, who
asked for permission to reprint “The Harvest Gypsies,”
the series of articles on the deplorable conditions in
migrant worker camps that he had written for the San
Francisco News. Her intent was to use the money made
on the pamphlet to aid the migrants. Steinbeck agreed
and added an essay to the original seven. Illustrations
included photographs by Dorothea Lange on the front
and back covers of the pamphlet, which Hosmer retitled Their Blood is Strong.
As Steinbeck grew increasingly impassioned about
the plight of migrant farm workers, his success continued to mount. Steinbeck’s play version of the novel
Of Mice and Men appeared on Broadway and subsequently won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award
for the best American play of the season. Additionally,
he had published a number of short stories in various
magazines, had consulted with producers and directors in Hollywood about a film version of In Dubious
Battle, and had received two gold medals from the
Commonwealth Club of California for Tortilla Flat and
In Dubious Battle. Steinbeck’s editor and publisher,
Pascal Covici, had declared bankruptcy, but went to
Viking Press as senior editor, taking Steinbeck with
him.
The Long Valley (1938)
In September 1938, Viking published a collection of
Steinbeck’s stories titled The Long Valley. The collection included a number of stories previously published
in magazines, including “The Chrysanthemums,” considered the finest example of Steinbeck’s short fiction,
and the four stories which comprise The Red Pony. The
stories are set in California’s Central Valley, and many
introduce themes which appear in Steinbeck’s later
novels. In August 1938, the Steinbecks, still in search
of privacy which they had not acquired in their current
Los Gatos home, purchased the fifty-acre Biddle Ranch
in Los Gatos and worked on constructing their second
new house. By the end of the year, working day and
night, Steinbeck finished The Grapes of Wrath, with
the new title suggested by Carol, who also typed the
manuscript.
The Grapes of Wrath (1939), Film (1940)
Despite the pleading of Elizabeth Otis, his agent,
in January 1939, Steinbeck refused to change much of
the language in The Grapes of Wrath manuscript, nor
would he agree to change the controversial ending. By
April 1939, the novel was out and became an immediate bestseller. Steinbeck was elected to the National
Institute of Arts and Letters. While his writing was being
met with great success, Steinbeck’s personal life was
crumbling. His marriage had been in trouble for some
time, and Steinbeck spent much of the early part of
1939 away from home. In September, the Steinbecks
tried to salvage their marriage, taking a trip to the
Pacific Northwest and then traveling on to Chicago; but
in June, while working in Los Angeles, Steinbeck had
already met the woman who would be his next wife,
Gwyndolyn Conger. By December, Steinbeck was back
in Los Angeles for film screenings of both The Grapes
of Wrath and Of Mice and Men. Eugene Solow’s
screenplay for Of Mice and Men preserved most of
Steinbeck’s dialogue, only softening the language and
altering the ending to comply with Hollywood’s Hays
decency code. The film was nominated for best picture
but lost to Gone With the Wind. After previewing the
film version of The Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck wrote
his agent: “it looks and feels like a documentary film
and certainly it has a hard, truthful ring.”22
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Both men work as itinerant ranch hands, saving for
their dream of owning their own ranch, an unattainable quest. Lennie, whose mental incapacity is in sharp
contrast to his huge strength, operates instinctively,
and these limitations set the stage for his demise. First,
Lennie pets a puppy to death and then kills the wife
of the ranch owner’s son, Curley, when he tries to
stroke her hair and she struggles against him. George,
Lennie’s self-appointed caretaker, realizes that he can’t
control or help Lennie and shoots him in the back of the
head as he soothes him with the tale of the ranch they’ll
own someday. Steinbeck’s original title for the novel,
“Something That Happened,” suggests Steinbeck’s
determination to present life as non-teleological—the
story of George and Lennie is simply something that
happened without an exploration of grand, overarching causes. When the novel appeared in February 1937,
it hit the bestseller list almost immediately, and the
Steinbecks decided to leave for Europe.
From May through August, the Steinbecks traveled
to Denmark, Sweden, Finland, and the Soviet Union.
Back in California in the fall, Steinbeck saw several of his
stories published in Harper’s Magazine and Esquire. At
this point, Steinbeck took another tour of the migrant
camps in the Central Valley to gather information.
There, he witnessed the appalling poverty and disease
of a portion of the more than 70,000 migrants from the
Dust Bowl who had gathered in the San Joaquin Valley
during the summer of 1937. By now, the large growers
had beaten union organizers and resumed control of
the state’s agriculture. In February and March 1938,
Steinbeck visited the Visalia area in the aftermath of
devastating floods; now he could use his fame to get
the conditions of the migrants reported in newspapers,
which had notoriously ignored them. When he returned
again in March, he was accompanied by Life photographer Horace Bristol. “I want to put a tag of shame,”
Steinbeck wrote his agent, “on the greedy bastards
who are responsible for this but I can do it best through
the newspapers.”21
Sea of Cortez (1941)
As a new decade dawned, the world was at war.
Hitler had invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, an
action which precipitated declarations of war against
Germany by Great Britain and France, and Steinbeck
would become increasingly involved in the war effort.
In early 1940, his fame as a writer continued to climb.
First, the world premiere of The Grapes of Wrath
opened in New York City in January 1940, followed by
awards for the novel from the American Booksellers
and Social Work Today. The most important award to
date, though, came on May 6—the prestigious Pulitzer
Prize in fiction; in the same year Carl Sandburg won
in history for his biography of Abraham Lincoln and
William Saroyan won for drama. When Steinbeck was
asked to comment on Saroyan’s refusal to accept
the prize for drama, he chose not to, writing instead:
“While in the past I have sometimes been dubious
about Pulitzer choices I am pleased and flattered to
be chosen in a year when Sandburg and Saroyan were
chosen. It is good company.”23 In the midst of such
acclaim, Steinbeck continued to work as hard as ever.
Steinbeck spent March and April with Ricketts, Carol,
and four crew members on a specimen-collecting trip
to the Gulf of California; the research from the trip
would result in Steinbeck and Ricketts’ collaborative
publication of Sea of Cortez.
In early January 1941, Steinbeck had begun the
manuscript for Sea of Cortez. Sea of Cortez: A Leisurely
Journal of Travel and Research consists of two parts: a
narrative portion, written largely by Steinbeck, which
he would later publish separately as The Log from the
Sea of Cortez (1951), and a lengthy annotated catalogue of the marine life examined, which was largely
Ricketts’ contribution. The journal or “log” details the
daily activities in scientific collecting, interactions with
the local population, and philosophical musings about
the broader meanings of the authors’ experiences. The
work, published just two days before the Japanese
attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, went
largely unnoticed and didn’t begin to receive much
scholarly attention until the 1990s. Currently, there
is increased interest in viewing the work as an early
example of ecological discourse that reverences the
interrelatedness and natural balance among species.
Despite their collaboration on the journey to the
Sea of Cortez, Steinbeck and his wife Carol continued
to have escalating marital problems. In fact, Steinbeck
never mentions Carol’s presence on the voyage in the
narrative of Sea of Cortez. In February, Carol left for
an extended vacation in Hawaii, while Gwyn came to
stay with Steinbeck in Monterey. In April, the situation
became explosive—Steinbeck told his wife about the
affair and forced Gwyn into a confrontation with her.
By late April, the Steinbecks had permanently separated. In August, Steinbeck decided to move east and
asked Gwyn to accompany him. After settling in New
York, Steinbeck began work on the manuscript for The
Moon is Down, and in late December, Steinbeck and
Gwyn traveled to New Orleans to stay at author Roark
Bradford’s French Quarter home for Christmas and
New Year’s. Bradford and Steinbeck shared an interest
in rendering the lives of common people and making
the forgotten lower class visible, as Bradford’s work on
African-American folktales demonstrates. Bradford’s
first book, Ol’ Man Adam an’ His Chillun (1928), a collection of stories recasting the narratives of the Old
and New Testaments in African-American dialect, was
adapted by playwright Marc Connelly into the Pulitzer
Prize winning play Green Pastures.
The Forgotten Village (1941)
Barely back from his collecting trip in the Bay of
Cortez, Steinbeck left for Mexico in May 1940 to work
on a documentary film about life in a Mexican village
which he would entitle The Forgotten Village. Set in
the pueblo of Santiago in the mountains of Mexico,
the film depicts the clash between twentieth-century
medicine and science and the villagers’ belief in magic
and curanderos (native healers). Steinbeck wrote in the
opening lines of the film that it depicts the lives of Juan
Diego and his people “who live in the long moment
when the past slips reluctantly into the future.”24
While filming in Mexico, Steinbeck first heard a story
of a poor Mexican Indian who had found a pearl of
enormous value; the story formed the germinating idea
for his novella The Pearl. Also during his stay in Mexico,
Steinbeck discovered that the country was being
flooded with Nazi propaganda; Steinbeck was so concerned about this that he was granted a brief interview
with President Franklin Roosevelt in Washington, D.C.,
to report what he had observed. Steinbeck met with
Roosevelt again in September to suggest a scheme
for wreaking economic disaster in Germany; however,
Roosevelt, probably wisely, declined to implement
his plan. In October, Steinbeck was back in Mexico to
work on filming The Forgotten Village, wrapping up the
year in Hollywood with Gwyn Conger, the woman who
would become his second wife in March 1943.
The Moon is Down (1942)
As Viking Press prepared The Moon is Down for
publication, Steinbeck worked on a dramatic script of
the novel in early 1942. The Moon is Down represents
another of Steinbeck’s efforts to write a novel in play
form—heavy on dialogue and structured in scenes.
While on assignment with the Foreign Information
Service, an agency created to combat Nazi propaganda, Steinbeck worked on this story which was originally
to be set in a small American town invaded by a foreign
enemy. However, Steinbeck revised the manuscript,
setting the events instead in a Scandinavian town
invaded by unidentified foreign soldiers. The novel
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Life and Writing in the 1940s
Bombs Away (1942)
In May 1942, Steinbeck was asked to write for the
Air Force. Bombs Away: The Story of a Bomber Team
was the result of Steinbeck’s travels from May through
December, as he logged thousands of miles with Air
Force trainees to gather information for the book.
Steinbeck’s idea was to follow Air Force cadets from
their recruitment to their formation into a bomber
squad, and since it was a fairly obvious work of wartime
propaganda in support of the American war effort, little
scholarly attention has been paid to it. But, what it does
show, once more, is Steinbeck’s ongoing interest in the
interrelationship between man and machine or man
and nature and the concept of the “group man.” The
book appeared in November of 1942, and Steinbeck
donated the royalties from the book and the film to the
Air Force Aid Society Trust Fund.
Steinbeck was becoming increasingly involved in
film as another medium for his art. The film version of
Tortilla Flat premiered in New York in May 1942, with
a star-studded cast, including Spencer Tracy, John
Garfield, and Hedy Lamarr; however, Steinbeck was not
as heavily involved with this production as he would be
with later films of his work.
ance his portrayal of brutality with the humanity of the
Nazis.
Once his divorce from Carol was final on March
18, 1943, Steinbeck was free to marry Gwyn in New
Orleans at the home of writer Lyle Saxon on March 29.
Despite his new wife’s objections, though, Steinbeck
was determined to accept an appointment from the
War Department to serve as a correspondent in the
European theater. On June 3, 1943, Steinbeck sailed for
England where, from June through October of 1943, he
sent dispatches to the New York Herald Tribune from
Britain, North Africa, and Italy. Steinbeck returned to
the States on October 15 physically and emotionally
exhausted. By November, he was back at work on fiction, beginning his manuscript for Cannery Row and
working on an idea for a novella with a Mexican setting
(The Pearl).
Steinbeck returned to Mexico in January 1944, and
planned further for the novella that would become
The Pearl, but he would not begin work on it until
the end of the year. Meanwhile, Steinbeck had an
opportunity to view Lifeboat and register his dissatisfaction with Hitchcock for having changed some of
Lifeboat (1944)
In January 1943, Steinbeck had begun to write the
script for Alfred Hitchcock’s film Lifeboat. However,
Steinbeck had a disagreement with Hitchcock as production began, and he left without completing the
screenplay. Hitchcock hired Joe Swerling to write
the screenplay, and Steinbeck tried unsuccessfully
to remove his name from the film. In Hitchcock and
Swerling’s hands, the film became unabashed anti-Nazi
propaganda rather than a view of stranded survivors as
a microcosm of the world at war.25 Steinbeck was credited, despite his efforts to the contrary, and, ironically,
the film received an Academy Award nomination for
best original story.
The film of The Moon is Down was released in March
1943, with a screenplay written by Nunnally Johnson,
who did such a remarkable job with the screenplay for
The Grapes of Wrath. Steinbeck gave Johnson license
to “tamper” with his novel to render it more effective
as a film.26 The result was a film that showed German
brutality more intensely than the novel had done, for
Steinbeck’s intention in the novel had been to bal-
Author Ernest Hemingway shown at
work on a manuscript in 1939. Though
Steinbeck admired Hemingway’s talents
as a writer, the two authors did not
get on well on a personal level.
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was extremely successful as a psychological study of
the effects of war on both the invaded and the invaders; and, in 1946, as a result of the warm reception
of the novel in Scandinavia, Steinbeck was awarded
the Norwegian King Haakon Liberty Cross. The novel
appeared in March, sold well, and became a Book-ofthe-Month selection. Once again, though, Steinbeck’s
success was paired with personal difficulties as his wife
filed for divorce on the grounds of mental cruelty.
Cannery Row (1945)
In the meantime, though, Steinbeck had begun
work on The Pearl at the end of 1944, and Cannery Row
was a massive sell-out before its official publication in
January 1945. Even though Cannery Row was written
after Steinbeck’s firsthand experiences of war in the
European theater, the book ignores the war, inviting the
imaginative reconstruction of a less complicated and
combative time. Similar in ways to Tortilla Flat, Cannery
Row invokes Arthurian legends, as the earlier novel had
done, and reinstates the “Doc” figure as Steinbeck’s
image of Ed Ricketts.
By February 1945, Steinbeck and Gwyn were back
in Mexico to film The Pearl. The earliest version of
the novella was published in the December issue
of Woman’s Home Companion as “The Pearl of the
World,” but the filming of the story would be completed before the novel’s publication in 1947. In August
1945, Steinbeck collaborated with Emilio Fernandez
and Jack Wagner on the screenplay, and in November,
he returned to Mexico for a three-week period to continue working on the film. As he worked in mixed media
on The Pearl, Steinbeck also began, in early 1946, to
write the manuscript of The Wayward Bus, completing
it in October, a few months after the birth of his second
son, John Steinbeck IV, in June. Much of the summer of
1946 was consumed with postproduction work on The
Pearl, but in November, Steinbeck traveled to Norway
to be awarded the Liberty Cross, a medal previously
given only to fighters in the Norwegian resistance.
Perhaps because of the enormous attention being
showered on her husband, Gwyn managed to stay ill
most of the trip; strain had already begun to appear in
Steinbeck’s second marriage.
The Wayward Bus (1947)
The Wayward Bus, published in February 1947,
portrayed a diverse collection of characters who happen to be on the same bus traveling across California.
Steinbeck’s novel functions as an allegory, suggesting
the ways in which characters react to adversity and how
they must cooperate if they are to succeed. Though the
book was a Book-of-the-Month Selection, it received
very mixed reviews. In May 1947, Steinbeck was severely injured in a fall from his balcony in New York, but by
June, he was well enough to travel to Paris and then on
to the Soviet Union in July.
In Depth: The Pearl (1947)
In November 1947, The Pearl, with black and white
illustrations by Mexican artist Jose Clemente Orozco,
was published. The novel is a parable, illustrating the
tragedy that ensues when a poor Mexican fisherman
finds a magnificent pearl. Rather than the riches he
anticipates, the pearl only brings tragedy to Kino, the
protagonist. Kino initially searches for a valuable pearl
to pay the doctor to tend to his infant son, who has
been poisoned by a scorpion’s bite. Kino cannot get
a fair price for the pearl in his village and finds himself
attacked repeatedly in his hut as thieves try to steal his
pearl. Kino and his wife take the baby and flee, but are
tracked by three men, who shoot at them and kill the
baby. Kino kills all three men and, bearing the bloody
bundle of his dead baby, returns to his village and
the edge of the sea to throw the pearl back into the
water. This book, written in the aftermath of world war,
explores several issues prevalent in Steinbeck’s own
life—new fatherhood and the achievement of wealth
and success, among them—but it also seems that
Steinbeck was thinking about the Biblical concept of
sacrifice, as Kino and his wife not only lose their baby,
but also must sacrifice their one chance at wealth when
they realize that the source of that wealth, The Pearl,
can only bring evil.
In contrast to a relative lack of involvement with films
made of his other novels up to this point, Steinbeck
poured himself into collaborating on the film version of
The Pearl. When he couldn’t get Hollywood to produce
it, Steinbeck went to Mexico, found a Mexican production company to film, collaborated with the famed
Mexican director Emilio Fernandez, and helped with
casting Mexican actors. After its release in February
1948, the film received mixed reviews, and Steinbeck
himself appeared embarrassed by the result.29
A Russian Journal (1948)
Steinbeck had already moved on to his next projects, though, flying to California in January to gather
research for his long novel about the Salinas Valley—
eventually East of Eden—and in April, A Russian
Journal, the result of his collaborative work with pho-
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what he had written. He also had the opportunity to
meet Ernest Hemingway, the one contemporary writer
whom Steinbeck admired the most.27 After Steinbeck
wrote to Hemingway expressing his admiration for
“The Butterfly and the Tank,” a story about the Spanish
Civil War, Hemingway asked him to meet in New York.
According to Steinbeck’s biographer, the meeting was
a disaster.28 At the party given to bring the two writers together, the writer John O’Hara proudly showed
Hemingway an heirloom blackthorn walking stick that
Steinbeck had given him. “That’s no blackthorn,”
Hemingway said, taking the sturdy and valuable walking stick and breaking it. Steinbeck, already incredibly
professionally jealous of Hemingway’s enormous talent,
was, as a result of Hemingway’s antics, increasingly hostile toward him and his work for years.
Steinbeck’s first child, a son, Thomas, was born on
August 2, 1944, just days after he finished the manuscript of Cannery Row. Steinbeck could barely contain
his impatience for Gwyn and the baby to be ready to
travel, as he was intent on returning to California to
work on a very large book that had been formulating in
his mind for several years—“Salinas Valley,” the provisional title for what would later evolve into his longest
novel, East of Eden.
new to him, sometimes utilizing an old method
for a new idea and vice versa. Some of his
experiments will inevitably be unsuccessful but
he must try them anyway….30
With the play closed and behind him, Steinbeck
married Elaine on December 28, 1950.
In Depth: Viva Zapata! (1952)
Steinbeck’s next production, in film rather than theater, would be a huge success; Viva Zapata! was one of
the most successful movies of 1952. The film’s roots go
back as far as Steinbeck’s visit to Cuernavaca, Mexico,
in 1945, when he was writing The Pearl. Steinbeck
completed his work on a narrative of Zapata’s life that
incorporated much of his research on the Mexican
Revolution and the screenplay between 1949 and 1951.
Steinbeck read widely and used, among other materials, Edgcumb Pinchon’s Zapata the Unconquerable as
a reference.
The film telescopes the main force of the Revolution
into a compact space, the revolt of Zapata against the
dictatorial presidency of Porfirio Diaz, between 1911
and 1919. Zapata learns, once he unwillingly agrees to
become president, that absolute power corrupts absolutely, and he relinquishes the presidency. Zapata’s life,
of course, is doomed once he agrees to lead the revolt,
but in death he rises to the level of legend, as the villagers surrounding his bullet-riddled corpse deny that
it could be Zapata and look to the distant hills where
his white stallion gallops. Directed by Elia Kazan and
produced by Darryl Zanuck, the film starred Marlon
Life and Writing in the 1950s
Burning Bright (1950)
Steinbeck’s enthusiasm for the theater rekindled
as he worked on Burning Bright in the early months
of 1950, but he shelved another theatrical project, the
production of Cannery Row, in favor of composing
his testament to Ricketts, “About Ed Ricketts,” which
appeared in The Log from the Sea of Cortez, the separate narrative portion of Sea of Cortez, published in
1951. Burning Bright opened in New York in October
1950, but lasted only a few performances and received
perhaps the most negative criticism of Steinbeck’s
career. The play, a three-act morality play which takes
its title from a line in William Blake’s “The Tyger,” examines the issues of marriage, infidelity, and the need to
produce an heir. Steinbeck was stung by the critics’
attacks, and he responded in an essay, “Critics, Critics
Burning Bright,” published in the Saturday Review. In
the piece, Steinbeck defended himself, writing:
If a writer likes to write, he will find satisfaction
in endless experiment with his medium. He will
improvise techniques, arrangements of scenes,
rhythms of words, and rhythms of thought. He
will constantly investigate and try combinations
John Steinbeck (right) with acclaimed
film director Elia Kazan (left) who
directed the films of Viva Zapata!
as well as East of Eden.
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tographer Robert Capa in the Soviet Union, was
published. The late spring and early summer of 1948
brought Steinbeck more personal heartbreak. On May
7, Ed Ricketts’ car was hit by a train, and, after lingering
for four days, Ricketts died. It was left to Steinbeck to
go through Ricketts’ belongings in the lab on Cannery
Row and decide on their disposition—he destroyed
all of his own letters to Ricketts. Steinbeck and Gwyn
had separated in April, and in June, Gwyn demanded
a divorce. With his divorce final in October, Steinbeck
began serious work on the preliminary research for
his screenplay Viva Zapata! As 1948 drew to a close,
Steinbeck was elected to the American Academy of
Arts and Letters on November 23.
In January 1949, Republic Pictures finally released the
film version of The Red Pony, starring Robert Mitchum
and featuring a musical score by famed composer
Aaron Copland. Its release had been delayed for seven
years due to the onset of world war and preproduction
difficulties with adapting the loosely related stories of
The Red Pony to a more unified narrative for film. As
the year progressed, Steinbeck began serious work on
Viva Zapata! and continued developing the concept for
East of Eden. By May of 1949, Steinbeck had finished
the first draft of the Zapata script and, as a result of his
friendship with the actress Ann Sothern, he met the
woman who would become his third wife, Elaine Scott.
By summer, Elaine and Steinbeck had decided to marry,
pending her divorce from her husband, actor Zachary
Scott. As the year ended, Steinbeck, having spent most
of the year in California, was back in New York and had
begun another project, a play titled Burning Bright.
In Depth: East of Eden (1952)
Throughout 1951, Steinbeck was working on his
longest novel, which at this point was still named “The
Salinas Valley.” During this time, Steinbeck kept a log
of his work on the novel in the form of letters to his
editor, Pascal Covici. After Steinbeck’s death, Covici
published this invaluable record of the gestation of
the novel, titled Journal of a Novel: The East of Eden
Letters (1969). In June, Steinbeck found a passage in
Genesis that provided him with the new title: “And
Cain went out from the presence of the Lord and dwelt
in the land of Nod on the east of eden.” (Genesis 4:16).
Clearly the story of Cain and Abel was much on his
mind as Steinbeck worked on this ambitious autobiographical project, the story of two families: the historical Hamiltons, Steinbeck’s own maternal ancestors, and
the fictional Trasks. As noted earlier, Steinbeck had
begun his research for the novel as early as 1948, in the
wake of the loss of Ricketts and the end of his second
marriage; for he planned this novel to be a sprawling epic whose timeline would stretch from the 1860s
through World War I.
Steinbeck wrote in his journal that East of Eden was
“the story of my country and the story of me.”31 But the
novel is also a story of brothers and a story of fathers
and sons. Written primarily as an object lesson and
family history for his two sons, Thomas and John IV,
the narrative focuses on two generations and two sets
of brothers, Adam and Charles Trask, and their sons,
James Dean was part of the star-studded cast of the film of Steinbeck’s East of Eden.
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Brando as Zapata, Jean Peters as his wife Josefa, and
Anthony Quinn as his brother Eufemio. The film won
critical acclaim and received five Academy Award nominations, including one for Steinbeck for best screenplay and Brando for best actor, while Anthony Quinn
won the award for best supporting actor.
film also received nominations for best director and
best screenplay, and Jo Van Fleet’s performance won
her the Academy Award for best supporting actress.
Steinbeck and Elaine spent much of 1952, from
March through August, traveling in Europe. Steinbeck,
his pace slowing a bit, did not begin work on a new
novel until the summer of 1953.
Sweet Thursday (1954)
Steinbeck would complete Sweet Thursday, initially
titled “Bear Flag,” in September. Sweet Thursday acts
as a sequel to Cannery Row, reprising the characters,
including “Doc,” the recreation of Ed Ricketts, and
exuding comic energy. Steinbeck originally meant to
adapt Cannery Row as a stage musical but decided on
a wholly new work instead. His work on the completion
of the draft, though, sent Steinbeck, suffering from
depression, into the hospital in October.
In 1954, the Steinbecks once again sailed for an
extensive European trip; they would not return to
New York until December. Shortly after their return,
in January 1955, Steinbeck met William Faulkner. This
meeting was as disastrous as Steinbeck’s encounter
with Hemingway; throughout the evening of cocktails and dinner that had been arranged, Faulkner
was drunk and uncommunicative. The two writers did
have another brief opportunity to work together on a
committee at the behest of President Eisenhower and
found that they could get along fine as long as they
talked about anything but their work.33 On March 9,
Steinbeck attended the premiere of the film version
of East of Eden, but he had seen a preview before the
opening and wrote to a friend on March 2, “…its [sic]
a real good picture. I didn’t have anything to do with
it. Maybe that’s why. It might be one of the best films
I ever saw.”34 In April and May, Steinbeck would begin
writing articles for the Saturday Review, the beginning
of a long association with that periodical. In the fall of
1955, Pipe Dream, Steinbeck’s musical comedy version
of Sweet Thursday that was produced by the famed
musical composers Rodgers and Hammerstein opened
on Broadway.
Steinbeck spent more time in the States in 1955
and 1956, moving into a home in Sag Harbor, New
York, and traveling to both Democratic and Republican
Conventions in the summer of 1956. Attending the
conventions helped Steinbeck gather material to
write speeches for Adlai Stevenson, the Democratic
candidate; however, it was Dwight Eisenhower, the
Republican incumbent, who was reelected President.
The Short Reign of Pippin IV (1957)
At the same time that he was involved in political
and global issues, Steinbeck was working on his manuscript for The Short Reign of Pippin IV: A Fabrication,
and he had also begun to conceptualize the project he
would work on for the rest of his life, his translation of
Malory’s Morte d’Arthur into modern English. Pippin IV
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Caleb and Aron Trask. The catalyst for events which
bind these fathers and sons together in tortured relationships is the figure of Cathy, or Kate, as she is later
known. Cathy is the “monster” at the heart of the tale;
she marries Adam but bears twins who are not Adam’s,
but Charles’s sons. Rivalry between Charles and Adam
had already escalated into violence long before Cathy
enters the scene, when Charles, jealous of their father’s
affection for Adam, nearly beats his brother to death.
Once Cathy arrives at the Connecticut farm where the
brothers live, she will not stay long, disappearing days
after delivering her twin sons. She finds anonymity in a
brothel in Salinas, adopting the name “Kate.”
As Aron and Cal grow up, they repeat the pattern
of vying for the affection of their father, resulting in
a climactic scene where Adam highhandedly rejects
money Cal offers him as a gift to replace the losses
he’s suffered in speculating on transporting lettuce. In
revenge, Cal, who’s already discovered the identity of
their mother, takes Aron to the brothel and forces him
to confront the mother he thought was dead. Aron hastily leaves for the battlefront and, once there, is killed in
action. Adam suffers a stroke at the news, but instead
of blaming Cal for his brother’s death, Adam offers Cal
a blessing as he struggles, at the end of the novel, to
pronounce the Hebrew word timshel. As Steinbeck
worked on the meaning of the word from Genesis 4:7,
he concluded that rather than “Thou shalt” or “Do
thou” as various versions of the Bible translate it, the
word means “Thou mayest,” suggesting the operation
of free will in the choice between good and evil. Adam
frees Cal to choose what is right.
For the first time in his fiction, Steinbeck chose to
expose himself in this novel, adopting his own persona
narrating in first person and even inserting himself as a
minor character in the narrative of the Hamiltons. It was
a risky gamble, and though the novel quickly achieved
best-seller status after its publication in September
1952, it received very mixed reviews. Mark Schorer,
reviewing for The New York Times Book Review,
called the novel “a strange and original work of art,”
while Orville Prescott, writing for The New York Times,
claimed that the novel was “defaced by excessive
melodramatics.”32 Steinbeck quickly agreed to film the
novel with Elia Kazan, on the heels of their successful
collaboration on Viva Zapata!.
Once again, Kazan chose a star-studded cast, including Raymond Massey, Jo Van Fleet, Burl Ives, Julie
Harris, and James Dean in his first full-length film. The
screenplay, written by Paul Osborn and taken from the
final section of the novel, raises the conflict between
Aaron and Caleb and their discovery of their mother’s
true profession and character to a brooding intensity beautifully matched by Dean’s acting. Sadly, Dean
would die in an automobile accident on September 30,
1955, just months after the film’s release in March, and
before shooting was completed on his final film, Giant.
Dean was posthumously nominated for best actor; the
Once There Was a War (1958)
In England, Steinbeck had the opportunity to
meet one of the world’s leading scholars on Malory,
Eugene Vinaver, professor of French at the University of
Manchester in England. Vinaver quickly agreed to help
Steinbeck with his project. In late September 1958,
Steinbeck gave the Malory manuscript to his agents
for their comments, and Viking published a collection
of his war dispatches as Once There Was a War. By
October of 1958, Steinbeck chose to set the Malory
project briefly aside, following only lukewarm responses from his agents. Steinbeck spent much of 1959
in England, returning to his research on the Malory
project. Once back in New York, Steinbeck suffered a
stroke in December 1959, and he required hospitalization into the New Year.
Life and Writing in the 1960s
in a truck he outfitted and named “Rocinante” (for
Don Quixote’s horse), recording his observations of
American life and descriptions of his contact with
the common people in a travel narrative. In the work,
Steinbeck expresses concern about the future of the
nation but also refuses to relinquish his optimism that
the nation would survive its own burgeoning progress.
Once he had finished the manuscript, Steinbeck and
Elaine left for an extended trip to Italy and Greece. On
November 25, 1961, Steinbeck suffered a major heart
attack and was hospitalized. He was determined to
continue the tour, however, remaining abroad until May
1962. Viking published the book in the summer of 1962,
and it was met with enthusiastic reviews and achieved
best-seller status.
The Nobel Prize for Literature, 1962
In October 1962, Steinbeck would learn that he had
been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature; together
with Elaine, he flew to Stockholm to receive the prize
on December 10. Steinbeck’s acceptance speech was
brief but eloquent; its message meant to convey his
abiding passion for literature and its place in the world
as well as his abiding faith in humankind’s greatness. In
the closing words of his speech, Steinbeck wrote:
We have usurped many of the powers we
once ascribed to God. Fearful and unprepared,
The Winter of Our Discontent (1961)
By March of 1960, Steinbeck had begun work on his
last novel, The Winter of Our Discontent. The novel was
one of two projects that consumed his time during this
year; the journey across America researching for Travels
with Charley was the other. Steinbeck meant The Winter
of Our Discontent to reflect America; his epigraph for
the novel read in part: “Readers seeking to identify the
fictional people and places here described would do
better to inspect their own communities and search
their own hearts, for this book is about a large part
of America today.”35 The novel is distinguished from
Steinbeck’s other work by its setting on the East Coast
and by its shifting narrative viewpoint. Recent critics
view the work, a study of the moral decay of a good
man, the protagonist Ethan Hawley, as a movement
from Steinbeck’s earlier emphasis on broader social
issues toward the ethics of the individual.36 The novel
appeared in the spring of 1961, and, even though it was
an immediate Book-of-the-Month selection, guaranteeing heavy sales, it received very mixed reviews from
critics, who seemed confused about whether to treat
the novel as fable or realist fiction.
Travels with Charley (1962)
Steinbeck continued his interest in the state of
the nation and in the individual’s place in the nation
in Travels with Charley: In Search of America. From
September 1960 through January 1961, Steinbeck
traveled coast to coast with his pet poodle Charley
Photograph of John Steinbeck
receiving his Nobel Prize.
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appeared in the spring of 1957 while Steinbeck was
back in Europe gathering research for his Malory project. Pippin IV is both a fantasy and a satire on the restoration of the last living descendant of Charlemagne
to the monarchy in France. Pippin, a comical character
and most unlikely king, is deposed and happily returns
to his former life. The book has been labeled as superficial, and Steinbeck’s agent and editor urged him not
to publish it; however, he persisted in seeing into print
what most critics now consider a minor work.
Following his triumph in receiving the Nobel Prize,
Steinbeck was selected to receive the Presidential
Medal of Freedom by President John F. Kennedy, who
would not live to present it to him, and Steinbeck
was asked to travel to the Soviet Union as part of
the Cultural Exchange Program. Steinbeck was still
abroad when he learned of President Kennedy’s assassination, and following his return to the States, he was
officially awarded the medal by President Johnson in
September 1964.
America and Americans (1966)
In August 1964, Steinbeck’s publisher, Thomas
Guinzburg, asked him to add essays to a collection of
photographs. This project expanded into nine essays
with a foreword, afterword, and photographs interspersed throughout. As the last work published during
his lifetime, America and Americans reveals Steinbeck’s
passion for his native place and fits thematically with
his last novel, The Winter of Our Discontent, and his
travelogue, Travels with Charley. Before the publication
of America and Americans in October 1966, Steinbeck
suffered two devastating personal losses: the loss of his
longtime friend and editor, Pascal Covici, in October
of 1964, and the loss of his sister Mary in January of
1965.
The Acts of King Arthur
and His Noble Knights (1976)
Throughout 1964 and 1965, Steinbeck worked intermittently on the Malory project, and, from November
of 1965 to May of 1967, Steinbeck wrote a regular column for Newsday. In late 1965, Steinbeck traveled with
Eugene Vinaver in search of previously undiscovered
Malory manuscripts. At the Duke of Northumberland’s
Alnwick Castle near the Scottish border, they found
a forty-eight page manuscript which they believed to
be uncatalogued. The manuscript, however, similar in
script to the Malory manuscript in Winchester, England,
had been catalogued after the war though little attention had been paid to it.38 Steinbeck’s excitement was
boundless, for, as he had written in an earlier letter,
This thesis has haunted me for a long time,
first as a pestering thing but now that I have
accepted it and in the workings of my new
work—the Matter of Arthur is the Matter of Me.
In all of it I find myself.39
Through the efforts of his wife, Elaine, the completed portion of Steinbeck’s Malory project, entitled
The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights, was
posthumously published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux
in 1976.
With the knowledge that his younger son, John IV,
would be deployed to Vietnam in 1966 and that his older
son was in training at Fort Ord, California, Steinbeck
itched to experience the war firsthand himself and successfully persuaded Newsday to send him there as a
correspondent in October 1966. Steinbeck spent most
of his time in Vietnam—from October 1966 to January
1967—in the field, riding helicopters from one location
to another; his experiences in World War II as a war
correspondent and his work with the bomber squadron
had prepared him well. Steinbeck’s fierce devotion and
pride in the men at war made him especially distasteful
to those protesting American involvement in Vietnam.
For Steinbeck, there was moral justification for this war,
and he took the opportunity to blast the protesters,
showing how far to the political right he had come
since the days of The Grapes of Wrath:
I suppose it is the opposite of the shiver of
shame I sometimes feel at home when I see the
Vietnicks, dirty clothes, dirty minds, sour smelling wastelings…Their shuffling…protests that
they are conscience-bound not to kill people are
a little silly. They’re not in danger of that. Hell,
they couldn’t hit anybody.40
Steinbeck’s Death, December 20, 1968
Beginning with severe back trouble in 1967,
Steinbeck’s health began to worsen. Doctors originally
chose not to operate on his back because of his history
of heart problems but finally did operate on a ruptured
disk in October 1967. Steinbeck, dealing with serious
pain, had begun to feel that American involvement
in Vietnam was “sinking deeper and deeper into the
mire,”41 and that America might not be able to win this
war. Even more importantly, he had begun to sense
that his life as a writer might be over. In May and July
of 1968, Steinbeck suffered first a small stroke and then
heart failure. These episodes were the beginning of
the end; Steinbeck would be hospitalized on and off,
with recurring episodes of heart failure due to seriously
clogged arteries.
Perhaps aware that his end was near, Steinbeck
asked his wife to take him out of the hospital and back
to their home at Sag Harbor. With crises in heart failure
increasing, though, Steinbeck was moved back to their
apartment in New York, where he could more easily be
tended by his doctor and nurses. At 5:30 in the evening
on December 20, 1968, Steinbeck slipped quietly away.
On Christmas Eve, in accordance with Steinbeck’s wishes, Elaine and Steinbeck’s son Thom took his ashes to
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we have assumed lordship over the life and
death of the whole world—of all living things.
The danger and the glory and the choice rest
finally in man. The test of his perfectibility is at
hand. Having taken Godlike power, we must
seek in ourselves for the responsibility and the
wisdom we once prayed some deity might have.
Man himself has become our greatest hazard
and our only hope. So that today, St. John the
Apostle may well be paraphrased: In the end is
the Word, and the Word is Man, and the Word
is with Men.37
The Grapes of Wrath (1939)
Historical Context: The Great
Depression in California
Steinbeck lived in the moment of his novel—the
Great Depression in California. Precipitated by the
stock market crash in October 1929, the nation entered
into a depression that would last a decade. California’s
experience with the Great Depression differed from the
rest of the country. California was not a highly industrialized state; rather, it depended on agribusiness for
its economy and on cheap labor to harvest its crops.
Thus, Californians didn’t really begin to experience the
depression in all of its force until about 1933 as waves
of migrants from the Dust Bowl entered the state in
search of jobs in an agricultural climate where, with an
oversupply of labor, wages were falling below subsistence levels.
The 1920s were a time of relative prosperity in
California, and farms were worked primarily by people
of color—Mexicans and Filipinos, largely. In fact, by
the early 1930s, Mexicans represented one-third of
California’s farm labor force.43 The few agricultural
strikes in California in the 1920s were Mexican-led, and
the experience of Mexican unions in the face of an
increasing pattern of repression on the part of growers
may be considered the prologue to anti-strike terrorist
tactics and threats of a “Red” scare throughout the
1930s.
A migrant family looks for work
picking peas in California during
the Great Depression.
The accusations of Communist Party involvement
in labor unions were not false. The Communist Party
USA, founded in 1919 in the aftermath of the Russian
Revolution, played a significant role in unionizing
workers in the United States. In 1931, the Cannery and
Agricultural Workers Industrial Union (CAWIU) was
founded by the Trade Union Unity League, a national
organization headed by William Foster, the Communist
Party candidate for president in the 1920s. The stage
was rapidly being set for confrontations between
the Left—farm workers’ unions and Communist activists—and the Right—farmers and their organizations,
local and state police, and American Legionnaires, who
displayed a power similar in many ways to the growing
repressive power of European Fascist states.44 Growers
and local authorities were further armed by the Criminal
Syndicalism Act, passed in 1919, which made it a felony
to organize or assist in organizing or to become a
member of any group advocating a change in industrial
ownership or control through acts of violence.45
The record of the 1930s in California reveals a history of unionism and strike activity. In fact, 170 strikes
occurred between 1933 and 1939. Formed in association with the Santa Clara cannery strike in 1931, the
CAWIU, led by a well-trained and dedicated group of
organizers, would work to reverse the trend of labor
losses sustained from 1930–32. Learning from the Santa
Clara strike, the CAWIU began to show its strength
through its involvement with the Vacaville fruit pickers’
strike of 1932. In November of 1932, strikers barricaded
the main street of Vacaville to prevent replacement
workers from being brought in; police arrested some of
the strikers at gunpoint, and vigilantes later abducted
six CAWIU organizers and beat them, painting their
faces red. The entire town mobilized against the “Red”
scare on a rumor that armed Communists were on their
way.
By the summer of 1933, President Roosevelt had
signed the National Industrial Recovery Act into law,
which made it legal for workers to organize and engage
in collective bargaining. In October of 1933, the CAWIU
would participate in perhaps the most important
strike of the decade, the cotton pickers’ strike in the
San Joaquin Valley. The “largest single agricultural
strike in American history,” the California cotton strike
“possessed an epic sweep”46 and was organized and
led by a charismatic young woman named Caroline
Decker, replacing CAWIU organizational leader Patrick
Chambers, who had been imprisoned on charges of
criminal syndicalism. The strike began in early October,
and by the middle of the month, an estimated 13,000
to 15,000 workers—ninety-five percent of whom were
Mexican—had left the cotton fields of five San Joaquin
Valley counties.
Growers had already entered this harvesting season
heavily leveraged, for they had sold three-quarters of
the San Joaquin crop to Japan at seven cents a pound.
They offered pickers 60 cents per one hundred pounds
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California, where, after a private family service on Point
Lobos overlooking the Pacific Ocean,42 Steinbeck’s
ashes were interred in his mother’s family plot in the
Garden of Memories Cemetery in Salinas, California.
tried, and convicted on charges of criminal syndicalism.
She would spend a year in prison.
By 1934, the Associated Farmers of California, Inc.
had formed to do battle with what they believed to be
a Communist-driven labor movement. Two percent of
the farmers in the state owned twenty-five percent of
the land, and almost sixty percent of the farms were
organized as “industrial plantations.”49 The Associated
Farmers were the face of the Right, breaking the 1934
apricot pickers’ strike by herding strikers into a cattle
corral, similar in appearance to a concentration camp,
in the center of the town of Brentwood. The semblance
to fascism was chilling. Journalist Lillian Symes would
write ambivalently in Harper’s in 1935 about her fear
of the rise of fascism in the United States. She did
not believe fascism had yet crystallized in the nation,
but, she wrote, “if the Right continued its insistence
on the threat of a Communist takeover, fascism could
become a real possibility.” In California, she wrote, “we
may find the beginnings of psychological reactions
not essentially different from those we have witnessed
abroad…strike sympathizers of every shade felt the
pressure of sullen hostility. It was like this, I imagine, in
Rome in 1922, in Berlin in 1932.”50
The Imperial Valley lettuce strike began in January
1934 and lasted for three months, but the result was
the opposite of what the workers wanted. Power had
become so centralized in the hands of the growers
and law enforcement that vigilantes could abduct and
beat strikers and organizers almost at will and could
force the arrest of strike leaders, resulting in the jailing
of almost a hundred organizers. In the ensuing 1936
lettuce strike in Salinas, for example, the growers and
shippers had become so powerful that they were able
to force a walkout by the Vegetable and Fruit Workers
Union in the belief that they could quickly replace the
strikers.
With all of the forces of government assembled
against the strikers, the growers launched a battle
against the picketers who assembled to keep the lettuce trucks from shipping. Law enforcement officials
launched tear gas bombs to disperse the strikers, and
Salinas became a town under siege with deputized vigilantes patrolling the city. Paul Smith, editor of the San
Francisco Chronicle, flew to Salinas to witness the situation firsthand. Following his return to San Francisco,
he filed four articles in the Chronicle titled “It Did
Happen in Salinas.” Smith wrote, “For a full fortnight
the ‘constituted authorities’ of Salinas have been but
the helpless pawns of sinister fascist forces which have
operated from a barricaded hotel floor in the center of
town.”51 Smith alludes in this quote to the presence of
Colonel Henry Sanborn, with the U.S. Army Reserve,
who set up a command post at a Salinas hotel to direct
vigilante violence.
As thousands of migrants poured into the state, local
law enforcement acted to stem the tide. Los Angeles
Police Chief James Davis managed to form a block-
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picked; the pickers demanded a dollar. Working all
day at the rate offered by the growers, a strong man
would make $1.20 a day, and a family working together
would average $2, hardly enough for them to buy food.
CAWIU organizers knew that for the union’s survival,
the growers would have to recognize the union as the
exclusive agent for the workers. George Creel, director of the Western division of the National Recovery
Act (NRA), realized how dangerous a prolonged strike
would be to California’s “Progressive” vision in which
all three segments of a planned society—capital, labor,
and government—cooperated with each other. He
was determined to end the strike through government
intervention and “quash the dangerous precedent”
being set in the San Joaquin Valley.47
On October 10, 1933, vigilantism reached a murderous peak when forty armed vigilantes rode into the
small town of Pixley armed and ready for battle. One
man was beaten to death, and the vigilantes fired into
a crowd which had gathered to hear Pat Chambers
speak. A woman was killed, and eight people were
wounded as highway patrolmen stood by and watched
without stopping the violence. On the same day,
another confrontation between growers and workers
occurred near Arvin, and another striker was killed. A
few days later, Caroline Decker led a long line of strikers into a committee meeting to appear before the
governor and represent the true conditions of their
labor. But, despite the appalling conditions described
by worker after worker, the best settlement that the
CAWIU could negotiate, brokered by Creel and the
NRA, was to get both sides to agree to seventy-five
cents per 100 pounds. Even though the CAWIU was
unable to win the exclusive right to represent the workers, the organization had brought the beginning of the
future to California—“a future of organizational choice
and collective bargaining that would take forty years to
consolidate….”48
One of the earliest major documentary reports
to record the events of the cotton strike was the
“Documentary History of the Strike of the Cotton
Pickers in California 1933,” produced by graduate student Clark Kerr and economics professor Paul Taylor.
The report is so impressive that it was appended to the
report of the La Follette commission, Violations of Free
Speech and the Rights of Labor, in 1939.
Even though the cotton strike, coordinated by the
CAWIU, had seriously threatened oligarchic power
structures in the agricultural industry in California, the
CAWIU’s failure to become the workers’ collective
bargaining agent and its loss of the support of the
Communist Party spelled the end of the union. By 1935,
the union would disband in favor of joining with the
Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). Caroline
Decker continued her heroic work on the part of strikers, helping to organize apricot pickers in Contra Costa
County, but just six weeks later, Decker was arrested,
Documentary Evidence of the
Great Depression in California
A number of important documentaries emerged in
the second half of the decade as writers and filmmakers attempted to portray the unconscionable human
suffering of the “Okies.” The first of these, early in the
decade, was the report on the cotton strike mentioned
earlier, “Documentary History of the Strike of the
Cotton Pickers in California 1933.” Documentary art
appeared in several media as the decade progressed.
Dorothea Lange began to photograph scenes of poverty and unrest in San Francisco in 1932, capturing
one of her most powerful photos, “White Angel Bread
Line, San Francisco, 1932.” In 1935, Lange was in the
field documenting the plight of migrant pea pickers on
the central coast and in migrant camps in the Imperial
Valley. In August 1935, Lange became a photographerinvestigator for the Resettlement Administration and
Photograph of a migrant mother,
Florence Owens Thomson, and
her children taken by Dorothea
Lange in Nipomo, CA.
joined a team of photographers who would document
the Great Depression in various regions of the country.
Lange’s most famous photograph, Migrant Mother,
shot in Nipomo in 1936, has achieved the status of an
American classic, giving the country one of its most
poignant images of the Great Depression.
Documentary filmmaker Pare Lorentz, whom
Steinbeck admired and liked, produced several documentaries during the period, including his recording of
the devastation wrought on the Great Plains by the single-sided plow, The Plow That Broke the Plains (1936).
Lorentz knew and admired Steinbeck’s strike novel,
In Dubious Battle, to the point of bringing him out to
Hollywood to discuss filming it. There Steinbeck had
the opportunity to see Lorentz’s film and learn his technique of mixing images, music, and words to create a
compelling film narrative. In fact, Lorentz’s film had no
small influence on the later shaping of Steinbeck’s art
in The Grapes of Wrath.
Steinbeck’s own series of documentary articles for
the San Francisco News, “Harvest Gypsies,” appeared
in October 1936 and was ultimately turned into booklet
form by the leftist, labor-friendly Simon J. Lubin Society
as Their Blood is Strong (1938) with accompanying photographs by Dorothea Lange, including a cover shot of
a nursing mother. In preparation to write the articles
the San Francisco News had commissioned him to do,
Steinbeck bought an old “pie wagon,” outfitted it as a
camper, and visited government, ditch, and growers’
camps with Tom Collins, manager of Arvin’s Weedpatch
government camp.
What Steinbeck witnessed in the summer and fall
of 1936, with the exception of Collins’ camp and the
Marysville government camp, were conditions that
were beyond appalling. In the first article, Steinbeck
provides a brief history of farming and migratory labor
in California coupled with an immediate description of
the growing “swarm”53 of migrant workers on the highways, driven by hunger and in flight from the Dust Bowl
states, in search of work. The second piece renders the
slow descent of migrant families into utter degradation
as they run out of money and have no work. Describing
a child suffering from acute malnourishment, Steinbeck
writes: “The three year old child has a gunny sack tied
about his middle for clothing. He has the swollen belly
caused by malnutrition. He sits on the ground in front
of the house, and the little black fruit flies buzz in circles
and land on his closed eyes and crawl up his nose until
he weakly brushes them away.”54
Steinbeck switches his emphasis in the third essay
to the farmers, both great and small, and selects the
Associated Farmers to hold accountable for the conditions. Steinbeck describes their tactics in controlling
the workers as a:
…system of terrorism that would be unusual
in the Fascist nations of the world. The stupid
policy of the large grower and the absentee
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ade of entry points into the state for more than two
months, demonstrating unprecedented police power.
By the late 1930s, approximately 683,000 migrants had
come to California from the Dust Bowl states, a “human
river” of “displaced and dispossessed.”52 At the same
time, the Mexican work force was being repatriated; by
1937, nearly 150,000 workers had returned to Mexico.
Since growers viewed these workers as militant, given
their history of strikes from 1930–34, they were not sad
to see them go. In the second half of the decade, the
principal actors in the drama of farm labor were no
longer Mexican, but English-speaking Americans. Their
fate was to become stigmatized, much as their Mexican
counterparts had been, and was summed up in the slur
soon attached to them en masse: “Okies.”
The remaining four articles in the series raise
the issues of the migrants’ need to maintain human
dignity; the effective example of the Resettlement
Administration’s camps, like the one at Weedpatch; and
the need for public assistance for migrants. Steinbeck
closes with an impassioned appeal to maintain the
state’s democracy and provide across the board reform
of conditions for migratory labor. Steinbeck’s scathing
attack on corporate farmers and big growers made
him a target for the Right, and he feared the loss of his
privacy, and worse, his life.
In 1939, photographer Horace Bristol, who had traveled with Steinbeck to labor camps in 1938, published
a series of intense and intimate photographs in the
pages of Life magazine. Bristol believed that his image
of a nursing mother was one of several inspirations for
the ending of The Grapes of Wrath. In the closing year
of the decade and within the context of the astounding
response to the publication of Steinbeck’s novel, three
additional documentaries of major importance were
published. Their records certified the truth beneath the
fictional skin of Steinbeck’s novel.
The first of these documentaries, Carey McWilliams’
Factories in the Field: the Story of Migratory Farm
Labor in California (1939), appeared just as The Grapes
of Wrath was registering its impact on the nation.
“Here is the data,” wrote one reviewer of McWilliams’
work, “that gives the terrible migration of the Joad
family historical and economic meaning not only for
the immediate present, but also for the larger canvas
of American rural life at the end of a long, rich cycle.”56
An American Exodus, with photographs by Dorothea
Lange and text by Paul Taylor, completes the trio of
interlocking works with Steinbeck’s and McWilliams’.
Exodus provides visual evidence of the claims of the
other two while invoking the Biblical imagery of the
wandering Israelites in its title and displaying faces
which could easily have illustrated the novel or served
as still shots from John Ford’s film. In “Ditched, Stalled,
and Stranded, San Joaquin Valley, California,” 1935,
a Henry Fonda type stares out into space from the
driver’s seat of his jalopy, avoiding eye contact with the
eye of the camera, his mouth slightly agape, his hand
resting on a steering wheel that does not move.
The culminating documentary of the 1930s, the 1,707
page report of the La Follette Commission, Violations
of Free Speech and Rights of Labor (1940–42), assembles narrative, testimony, and documentary evidence;
and in its vivid case studies of “the cotton strike of
1933, the Brentwood Plan of 1934, the Sacramento conspiracy trials of 1935, the Salinas lettuce packers’ strike
of 1936, and the Stockton cannery strike of 1937,” it
asserts a central thesis. This thesis, according to histo-
rian Kevin Starr, argues for “the existence in California
in the 1930s of a conspiracy to suppress constitutional
rights that, in a comparison made frequently in the
report, made California seem more a fascist European
dictatorship than part of the United States.”57
Literary History and the Novel
In the context of literary technique and form,
another contextual element of Steinbeck’s novel is its
place within literary history. At the time when Steinbeck
was at Stanford teaching himself to write in creative
writing classes, his contemporaries Ernest Hemingway,
James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, and F. Scott Fitzgerald,
among others, were in Paris, shaping the direction of
High Modernism through their art. Paris in the twenties proved to be a fertile milieu for these writers who
stretched the shape of fiction in ways never before
thought possible. The experimentation of narrative
viewpoint, for example, in Joyce, Stein, and Faulkner,
gave voice to stream of consciousness writing, a slippage from external reality to internal reality where
the processes of the mind direct the course of the
narrative.
Photograph of poet Robinson
Jeffers, whose work greatly
influenced John Steinbeck.
Photograph by Carl van Vechten.
Library of Congress Prints and
Photographs Division.
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speculative farmer in California has accomplished
nothing but unrest, tension and hatred. A continuation of this approach constitutes a criminal
endangering of the peace of the state.55
Lastly, The Grapes of Wrath is not just partly naturalist in its philosophical bent, but also is arguably the best
example of the proletarian novel in the history of U.S.
proletarian literature. Fiction about the working class
from a leftist perspective became increasingly popular
during the years of the Great Depression, displaying a
central concern with how to create a seamless blend of
art with politics. The form of Steinbeck’s novel reflects
one of the most inventive modes of proletarian fiction:
the collective novel.63 It is in the “interchapters,” for
example, that Steinbeck moves from “I” to “we,” as he
shifts registers from the localized, particular situation
of the Joad family to larger macrocosmic political and
philosophical concerns.
Form and Structure
of the Novel
In a work of this nature, indeed, with regard to much
of the literary art of the 1930s, there is a dilemma of
where to draw the line between documentary, or even
propaganda, and art. The Grapes of Wrath comes so
close to inviting the reader to experience it as real
that the question of the validity of its events was con-
A cotton picker handbill created
by cotton growers in Arizona
during the Great Depression.
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Modernist writers, born too from the despair in
the aftermath of the global warfare of World War I,
sought a mythology that could restore wholeness to
the earth and to human experience. T. S. Eliot’s The
Waste Land (1922), for example, provided the quintessential expression of modernism—through the extremity of its experimentation, its use of ancient myth and
foreign language, and its deployment of pastiche,
ragtime, and dialect. Of Eliot, Steinbeck wrote in 1958:
“The Wasteland was certainly in the brilliantly dry and
despairing mind of Elliot [sic].”58 The exaltation of ego
and elitism that characterized much of modernist writing may have repelled Steinbeck, but he was unquestionably influenced by reading Eliot, Joyce’s Ulysses
(1922), Hemingway’s short fiction, and Faulkner’s The
Sound and the Fury (1929) and As I Lay Dying (1930).
In Hemingway, Steinbeck may have admired the
nature of his tough, muscular prose. In Faulkner, he
may have been drawn to the mentally retarded Benjy
in The Sound and the Fury, as his own work with mentally marginal characters attests, and he may have been
intrigued, in reading As I Lay Dying, by the odyssey of
a poor family to bury its matriarch. In Joyce, he may
have found a kindred openness to human sexuality and
may have been impressed by the panoramic sweep of
Joyce’s epic of a single day in Dublin in Ulysses.
But the most kindred spirit of all, poet Robinson
Jeffers, was, like Steinbeck, outside of the mainstream
of High Modernism. Jeffers’ narrative poetry celebrated place, the natural world, and the environment in
California and the American West. Steinbeck owned
nine volumes of Jeffers’ poetry and wrote about Roan
Stallion in 1932, “After the Roan Stallion, I thought
Jeffers would do it [capture the mythos of California’s
landscape] but he hasn’t…. He wrote the greatest
poetry since Whitman but he didn’t write my country.
Perhaps he didn’t want to.”59 Or, perhaps, Steinbeck
felt that Jeffers had left the field open for Steinbeck
himself to “write [his] country.”60
In addition to the work of Jeffers, Steinbeck was
drawn more to the themes and narrative tensions of
naturalist writers than to those of the modernists. Given
his pronounced devotion to science and the natural
world, Steinbeck would find the philosophical underpinnings of naturalism congenial for its desire to apply
scientific principles to the study of humans and its interest in the interaction between humans and their surroundings. But he clearly balked at the darkest principle
of that body of work: the pessimistic belief in a future
that has already been predetermined.61 Steinbeck was
influenced, though, by Theodore Dreiser, Stephen
Crane, Jack London, and Frank Norris in the generation
before him; and perhaps the most important contemporary influence for The Grapes of Wrath was John
Dos Passos’ collective, kaleidoscopic montage, U.S.A.
Steinbeck admitted in a letter that the interchapters of
his novel “may be influenced by Dos Passos to some
extent.”62
chapters of the novel constitute the dramatic backdrop
of leave-taking in Oklahoma, the structure of this section alternates between odd-numbered “interchapters,” which paint on a broad canvas the situation of
thousands of displaced Dust Bowl refugees, and evennumbered chapters, which portray the specific case of
the Joad family’s loss of home and livelihood. Chapters
2, 4, 6, 8, and 10 advance the plot by tracing Tom Joad’s
return home from four years in prison for homicide and
his discovery that he has no home. Tom first appears as
a man with a chip on his shoulder as he argues a truck
driver into giving him a ride, but his character softens
and grows in dimension as he encounters his former
preacher, Jim Casy; an old neighbor, Muley Graves; and
finally, his family at the home of his uncle John.
Steinbeck balances the microcosmic experience
of the destruction of the Joad home with the larger
experience of what will become a river of migrants.
Furthermore, Steinbeck describes in painstaking detail
the slaughter of the hogs for food for the journey and
the communal efforts of the family to pack through the
night only what they need for the journey toward a better life. Chapters 1, 3, 5, 7, and 9 provide an overarching
commentary on the state of the land in the Dust Bowl
states, the relentless urgency of westward migration,
the ruthlessness of banks and landowners, and the
tragic nostalgia of migrants who must leave their past
behind.
A signature of Steinbeck’s fiction appears in the epic,
sweeping description of drought-plagued Oklahoma
depicted in the first chapter. Steinbeck had not traveled to Oklahoma, but he knew, liked, and collaborated with Pare Lorentz during the gestational months
of The Grapes of Wrath, and it is possible that the
grand sweep of Lorentz’s filming of the Great Plains
in The Plow That Broke the Plains gave Steinbeck the
visual imagery he needed to reconstitute in the written
word. “The surface of the earth crusted, a thin hard
crust,” Steinbeck writes, “and as the sky became more
pale, so the earth became pale, pink in the red country
and white in the gray country.” (1) The conclusion of
Lorentz’s film depicts a true wasteland, with dead trees
and earth covered with mounds of dust. Also notable
among the interchapters for this section is Chapter 3,
famous for its microscopic, scientific examination of a
great land turtle’s journey across a highway, a painstaking journey that takes on mythic and symbolic dimensions. The Oklahoma section ends in Chapter 10 with
the implacable, but exhausted determination of Ma
Joad. “Ma tried to look back, but the body of the load
cut off her view. She straightened her head and peered
straight ahead along the dirt road. And a great weariness was in her eyes.” (114)
The second major section of the novel, on the road
to California, consists of Chapters 11–18. Steinbeck
changes his arrangement of chapters and interchapters slightly in this section, in large part to facilitate the
experience of motion as thousands of migrants travel
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stantly raised during the years following its publication.
Steinbeck earned the reprobation of California’s growers and Oklahomans for depictions that each group
felt were erroneous. Without having read the novel,
Oklahoma congressman Lyle Boren denounced it as “a
lie, a damnable lie, a black, infernal creation of a twisted, distorted mind.”64 Boren clearly feared the impact
of a fictional vision of his part of the world as too real
to dismiss. The editor of an Oklahoma newspaper,
Wheeler Mayo, provided testimony before Congress
to dispute Steinbeck’s depiction of the “tractoring out”
of the Joads, treating the family as real documentary
beings.
Studio executive Darryl Zanuck, fearing repercussions against the film if Steinbeck’s portrait of the Joads
was not accurate, sent private investigators into the
field to check Steinbeck’s facts and found that conditions were truly worse than Steinbeck had described.
Politician Philip Bancroft, supporting the position of
the Associated Farmers, gave a speech entitled “Does
Grapes of Wrath Present a Fair Picture of California
Farm-Labor Conditions?” In it, he attacked the novel
for its “straight revolutionary propaganda, from beginning to end,” which “strictly conforms to what the
Communists call the ‘party line.’”65
One error of fact in the novel, though, if such is
important to its study as documentary art, is Steinbeck’s
motif of the handbill emanating from California growers to lure Dust Bowl migrants to the state for work. In
fact, the Associated Farmers warned migrants, in Dust
Bowl newspapers, to stay away. It was cotton growers in
Arizona who were responsible for issuing these handbills, but workers who arrived in Arizona and found
no work naturally moved on to what they imagined
might be the land of plenty, California. Steinbeck’s
distortion of the facts heightens the sinister portrayal
of the league of California growers who seem intent
on driving prices ever lower as the supply of cheap
labor increased. Even contemporary critics of the novel
viewed the work as social commentary; in the words of
Alfred Kazin, the book is “[t]he most influential social
novel of the period.”66 Such a claim underscores much
contemporary reception of the novel as a historical
document rather than fictional art.
The novel, however, is fundamentally not a documentary but a carefully crafted work of fiction. Steinbeck
learned from documentary artists about the power of
the message of mixed media—vivid imagery almost
photographic in its power; snatches of folk music and
the rhythm of the language of the folk in dialect; lean,
muscular descriptive discourse; and the focusing eye
of the moving film camera as the family crawls along
the “mother road,” Highway 66—all these techniques
combine in molding the artistic vision of the novel.
The plot of the novel divides into three main sections tied to the geographical landscape: the Joad
family and vast numbers of nameless migrants in
Oklahoma, on the road, and in California. The first ten
Photograph of migratory families
near Imperial Valley, CA.
Photograph by Dorothea Lange.
Library of Congress Prints and
Photographs Division.
and 18, follow the Joads as they travel westward. The
Joads experience firsthand the kind of prejudice that
Steinbeck has painted more broadly as the migrant
experience in the interchapters, and they continue to
experience loss—their dog is hit by a car, Grampa dies
in a roadside camp, and Granma dies in the truck after
the family passes through the border into California.
In Chapter 16, the Joads continue learning the
value of a larger family beyond the immediate family
as they form a community with the Wilsons, pooling
their resources and working together to keep both
families going in the midst of automobile troubles and
diminishing food and money. At a tent camp along the
road, the family hears with growing concern that there
may not be jobs in California after all, that the flyers
they’ve seen may lie. At the beginning of Chapter 18,
the Joads cross through New Mexico and Arizona and
enter California.
The remaining chapters of the novel, 18–30, comprise the final section that is set in California. Chapter
18 serves as a transition between the two sections,
as the Joads begin the chapter moving through New
Mexico and Arizona, but less than a page into the
chapter, they arrive in Needles at the California border.
As the Joads camp by the Colorado River before crossing the Mojave Desert, the sense of foreboding grows,
and the losses continue. Noah, the oldest of the Joad
siblings, disappears along the river, telling his brother
Tom to let Ma know that he’s taking off on his own.
In the structural management of this last section,
Steinbeck returns to the alternating pattern of chapter
and interchapter of the first section. The odd chapters—19, 21, 23, 25, 27, and 29—serve as interchapters
while the remaining even chapters continue to advance
the plot by narrating the experiences of the Joads.
With Chapter 19, for example, Steinbeck gives a history lesson on the state of California, describing the
ferocity of an American land grab and the determination of squatters who succeeded in wresting the land
from Mexican ownership. These former squatters, now
owners, are faced with a new invasion of needy against
whom they must protect their land.
In the interchapters, Steinbeck alternates between
the description of the wealthy and the description of
the poor, and, as a reflection of the seemingly inevitable confrontation between rich and poor, he writes,
invoking the novel’s name, “In the souls of the people
the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy with the vintage.” (349) The progress of the
Joads throughout this section consists of a movement
from one migrant camp to the next in the desperate
attempt to find work. Once Granma’s body is left in the
coroner’s office in Bakersfield, the Joads set up camp
in Hooverville, a dirty, crowded place where they learn
firsthand what vicious tactics the growers will employ to
lure workers to the fields only to drive prices down to
ridiculous levels when there are far more workers than
needed.
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“Highway 66.” Of the eight chapters in the section, five
are interchapters: 11, 12, 14, 15, and 17. These chapters
are shorter, and, as in the first section, generally provide macrocosmic perspectives on the events affecting
the Joads as individuals. In Chapter 11, Steinbeck surveys a land which has been deserted, tractors which are
nothing but dead machinery, and houses left empty for
feral cats and mice to roam through.
Moving quickly from what has been left behind to
rot, Steinbeck focuses the next chapter on Highway 66,
the iconic concrete trail from, as he describes it, the
Mississippi River to Bakersfield, California. Steinbeck
highlights a vast throng of humanity moving along the
westward route by listing the towns along the way, the
strains on aging vehicles, and the desperate need for
gasoline, water, and tires to keep those vehicles running. Chapter 14 parallels Chapter 11 by shifting the
scene from the devastation of the Dust Bowl states to
rising tension in the Western states as the human river
moves in their direction.
In Chapters 15 and 17, Steinbeck universalizes the
experiences of the migrants by using the travails and
interactions of anonymous families in flight from starvation. Chapter 15, for example, presents a type character
in the waitress, Mae, who at first refuses to sell bread to
a starving family and then, shamed by the cook, relents
and sells the bread and candy very cheaply. Her initial
lack of humanity is emblematic of the attitude of many
who witness this vast migration, forming negative opinions of the “Okies” traveling the “mother road.”
Chapter 17 details the experiences of the migrants
in tent cities, sharing stories, songs, and fears about
whether they’ll truly find work once they reach California.
The remaining three chapters in the section, 13, 16,
Characters
Tom Joad
“I’ll be all aroun’ in the dark. I’ll be ever’where—
wherever you look. Wherever they’s a fight so hungry
people can eat, I’ll be there. Wherever they’s a cop
beatin’ up a guy, I’ll be there…An’ when our folks eat
the stuff they raise an’ live in the houses they build—
why, I’ll be there.” (419) Tom Joad is the protagonist of
the novel, a man who has been somewhat hardened
by the four years he served in prison for killing a man
in self-defense. He appears early as a defensive and
combative character when he accepts a ride from a
trucker but resents the trucker’s obvious interest in his
background. “Sure, I know you’re wettin’ your pants
to know what I done. I ain’t a guy to let you down…
Homicide.” (12–13)
Tom, imprisoned unjustly for having killed a man in
self-defense, is unrepentant about his “crime,” insisting that he’d do it again—and he will. But the rough
edges of his character must be sanded as he encounters the philosophy of Jim Casy and is embraced back
into the fold of his family. He is a profoundly compassionate man who loves and protects his mother along
with the rest of his family and wants desperately to
right the injustices he sees as the novel progresses. He
meets the former preacher Jim Casy early in the novel
as, having been released on parole, he walks through
the Oklahoma dust to rejoin his family, and it is in the
Oklahoma wasteland that he listens to Casy’s belief in
the power of love and the holiness of all living things.
Tom reveals to Casy that while he was in prison, his
grandmother sent him a Christmas card with the following verse inscribed on it:
Merry Christmas, purty child,
Jesus meek an’ Jesus mild,
Underneath the Christmas tree
There’s a gif’ for you from me. (26)
Henry Fonda played the
role of Tom Joad in the film
of The Grapes of Wrath.
When the other men in his cell block see the card,
they find it uproariously funny and nickname Tom
“Jesus Meek.” The echoes of early Romantic poet
William Blake’s “The Lamb” are very evident in the
quotation; as is the irony of Tom, the “jailbird,” being
thought of as an innocent and “meek” Jesus. Tom,
though let out of prison early for good behavior, is anything but meek—he does not regret his “crime” and
will become, if he’s meant to represent the Savior in any
way, a Messianic avenger.
Upon his return to the family, Tom is the one everyone looks up to, a natural leader who understands his
mother’s desperate determination to keep the family
together but who grows in understanding the nature
of the larger human family. His destiny is to guide his
family westward and to learn the moral lessons of the
novel from Casy, and, in his separation from the immediate family, he must take on the workers’ fight as his
own once Casy dies.
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Rose of Sharon’s husband Connie disappears without telling anyone, and the Joads strike camp and
leave Hooverville in the fear that Tom’s jail record will
be discovered. In Chapter 22, the Joads reach a high
point in their experiences when they have the good fortune to find a place in the government-run Weedpatch
camp. In this camp, run by Jim Rawley, whose real-life
counterpart was Tom Collins, migrants are able to
restore their sense of dignity and self-worth. The growers, though, don’t want camps like Weedpatch to succeed, for such camps threaten their ability to control
hordes of migrant workers; and Chapter 24 details the
extent to which the Farmers Association will go to try to
infiltrate the camp, start a riot, and bring in the police
to force the workers into submission. The migrants,
however, band together to prevent the riot.
The Joads can’t stay in this welcoming environment
without work, though, and in their desperation to find
work, they’re unwittingly lured to a peach farm as strike
breakers. Tom slips out of the camp to find that Casy
is in the same area helping the workers to unionize. It
is Casy who explains the strike and urges Tom and his
family to join in. In the raid that ensues, Casy is killed,
and Tom beats Casy’s murderer to death before escaping into hiding. The Joads are forced to leave Tom
behind and seek work in the cotton fields, where they
set up housekeeping in a boxcar. It is here that Rose
of Sharon gives birth to a stillborn child, and the family
is flooded out by torrential rains, which force them to
leave the boxcar and find shelter in a barn on higher
ground. Finally, Rose of Sharon will perform the last
symbolic act of the novel by breastfeeding a starving
man.
“She was the power. She had taken control…. ‘All
we got is the family unbroke’.” (169) Ma Joad is the
true strength and backbone of the family and must
make decisions when Pa crumbles in his role as leader.
Steinbeck’s depiction of Ma Joad may well have been
shaped by his reading of Robert Briffault’s The Mothers:
The Matriarchal Theory of Social Origins (1931).67
Steinbeck’s own note on the book suggests the influence it had on the formulation of his thesis about the
primacy of the group over the individual: “I find that
in…phases of anthropology Briffault…is headed in the
same direction and the direction is toward my thesis.
This in itself would indicate the beginning of a new
phalanx or group unit.”68 The vision of Briffault, according to Warren Motley, is one of “relationship between
people based on cooperation rather than power.”69
Steinbeck’s first wife, Carol, even claimed that Ma Joad
was “pure Briffault.”70
Ma’s transformation into the “power” of the family clearly indicates a communal rather than individual
power; her entire being is devoted to nurturing the collective. In seemingly effortless and unending toil, Ma
cooks, feeds, clothes, and houses the family throughout the journey to California and their continual wandering once there. Her own character must learn, as
early as the acceptance of Casy into the family unit,
that there is something greater than the family. In steps
along the way to the fulfillment of that realization, Ma
accepts the Wilsons as family because Grampa died in
their tent, and she lies with the corpse of Granma as
they pass through the California border because “The
fambly had ta get acrost.” (228) She struggles with her
Jane Darwell played the role of
Ma Joad in the film of The Grapes
of Wrath. She is shown here with
Tom Joad (Henry Fonda).
desperate wish to feed the family over others as she
is surrounded by starving children in the Hooverville
camp. “I dunno know what to do. I got to feed the fambly. What’m I gonna do with these here?” (257)
In our earliest full view of Ma, Steinbeck describes
her as strong, maternal, controlled, and kindly, a
woman with “superhuman understanding,” who is the
“citadel of the family, the strong place that could not
be taken.” Later, Steinbeck adds, “she had become as
remote and faultless in judgment as a goddess.” (74)
It is Ma who will lead Rose of Sharon to the ultimately
selfless act with which the novel ends, reaffirming the
power of maternal nurturing and the value of the community over the individual.
Jim Casy
“There was the hills, an’ there was me, an’ we wasn’t
separate no more. We was one thing. An’ that one
thing was holy.” (81) Casy, the preacher who insists
that he is a preacher no more, serves as the moral
and philosophical barometer of the novel. His belief
in the holiness of all things echoes William Blake’s
poetic statement that “every thing that lives is Holy!”71
Numerous critics have speculated on Casy as the
“Christ-like” figure in the novel, even noticing that his
initials, of course, coincide with those of Christ. But to
assume that Casy is merely an iconic fictional Christ is
to simplify his role in the novel; for he has, as the novel
begins, undergone a transformation which has led him
away from preaching the gospel altogether. Nor is his
transformation complete; as he tells Tom, “I ain’t so
sure of a lot of things.” (21)
Increasingly aware of the hypocrisy of his frenzied
prayer meetings followed by his urges to pursue young
women out in the grass, Casy wanders into the wilderness and has a revelation: “There ain’t no sin and there
ain’t no virtue. There’s just stuff people do.” (23) This
quote seems to typify Steinbeck’s notion of “non-teleological” or cause-less thinking. For Steinbeck—and
for Ricketts, who helped to shape this theory—teleology insists on finding explanations through examining
cause and effect. On the other hand, non-teleological
thinking concerns itself “not with what should be, or
could be, or might be, but rather with what actually
is.”72
If Casy is emblematic of Steinbeck’s “Christology,”
then he would fit—within the context of the “Battle
Hymn of the Republic,” the source of the novel’s
title—as an icon of righteousness. A particularly pertinent line of the song reads: “As he died to make men
holy, let us die to make men free.”73 Given Steinbeck’s
impassioned defense of the meaning the song has for
the novel, and his determination to print all the verses
of the song at the beginning of the novel, the second
part of the verse, “let us die to make men free,” clearly
relates to Casy’s self-sacrifice as he dies in defense of
striking workers.
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Ma Joad
Preacher Casey was just a working man
And he said, “Unite, all your working men.”
Killed him in the river, some strange man,
Was that a vigilante man?74
Of Guthrie’s lyrics in the body of his musical work,
Steinbeck wrote, “There is the will of a people to
endure and fight against oppression. I think we call this
the American Spirit.”75
But Casy is also another of Steinbeck’s images of
Ed Ricketts, and the philosophy he proclaims, in addition to that of non-teleological thinking, is close to the
notion of an Emersonian “Over-soul,” a belief in an
underlying unity that transcends the plurality of human
experience. The nineteenth-century writer and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote that the Over-soul
is “that great nature in which we rest, as the earth lies
in the soft arms of the atmosphere; that Unity, that
Over-soul, within which every man’s particular being is
contained and made one with all others; that common
heart….”76
Rose of Sharon
“She looked up and across the barn, and her lips
came together and smiled mysteriously.” (455) As Tom
must take up the cause of Jim Casy, Rose of Sharon
must evolve throughout the novel, coming closer to
her mother in her understanding of the true nature of
maternity. Pregnant and married at the opening of the
novel, Rose of Sharon binds her husband Connie to her
in the mystery of their parenthood, excluding the rest of
the world. And this is exactly what she must not do, so
her lesson comes at a very high price through the loss
of her husband and baby. She is selfish, whining, and
peevish, but regardless of her flaws, she stands as an
icon of fertility and sexuality. Her very name is emblematic, evoking both the Biblical Song of Solomon, where
it appears, and a flowering bush. Abandoned by her
husband Connie, Rose of Sharon grows increasingly
depressed and sickly, giving birth to a stillborn baby
whose little corpse will be set afloat in the river during
the flood scenes near the end of the novel. But, she
rises to noble stature in her life-giving and life-affirming
action at the novel’s end, where, encouraged by Ma,
she feeds her breast milk to a starving man.
the family patriarch. It is the men, led by Pa, who first
squat together to decide whether to leave for California
and how to prepare for the journey. But Pa is helpless
against Ma’s revolt when the men suggest splitting up
to get the Wilsons’ car fixed. “I ain’t a-gonna go” (168),
she tells Pa, brandishing a jack handle. Pa’s recognition
of her supremacy also indicates a sense of pride in her
strength, “She sassy…I never seen her so sassy.” (169)
Al Joad
Al is Tom’s younger brother, who, according to Pa,
is “a-billygoatin’ aroun’ the country. Tom-cattin’ hisself
to death. Smart-aleck sixteen-year-older, an’ his nuts is
just a-eggin’ him on. He don’t think of nothin’ but girls
and engines.” (82) Al, despite his late night prowling,
is essential to the family’s survival because he’s taught
himself about engines and works to keep the Hudson
Super-Six wagon running on the family’s westward trek.
As the novel comes to a close, and Ma is determined
to move the family out of the water-logged boxcar and
into a barn on higher ground, she accepts Al’s decision to stay with the girl he’s chosen to marry, Aggie
Wainwright.
Jim Rawley
One of Steinbeck’s dedications in the novel, “To
TOM who lived it,” refers to the actual person upon
whom Rawley is modeled, Tom Collins. Collins was the
first camp manager of the migrant camp program for
the Farm Security Administration. Collins worked with
the camps from 1935 until just before World War II,
and in this capacity, he spent time touring the government camps with Steinbeck, helping him gain the trust
Pa Joad
“The whole group watched the revolt. They watched
Pa, waiting for him to break into fury. They watched his
lax hands to see the fists form. And Pa’s anger did not
rise, and his hands hung limply at his sides. And in a
moment the group knew that Ma had won.” (169) Pa
begins the novel as the de facto head of the family,
although consideration must still be paid to Grampa as
Tom Collins, manager of a Kern,
California, migrant camp, talking with
a drought refugee and her four sons.
Photograph by Dorothea Lange,
1936. Library of Congress Prints and
Photographs Division.
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Just as pertinent to this notion of Christology in the
novel are lyrics from Woody Guthrie’s song “Vigilante
Man,” written in the same year as his “Ballad of Tom
Joad” (1940), inspired by the John Ford film The
Grapes of Wrath. The verse about Casy reads:
Uncle John Joad
Uncle John is the younger brother of Pa Joad who
carries a tremendous sense of guilt, especially for the
death of his wife. He travels with the family after all are
“tractored out” and goes on a drinking binge during
the course of the journey. The family seems to understand and accept his need to purge his guilt periodically by alcoholic binging.
Noah Joad
The oldest Joad sibling, Noah has never seemed
quite right. Pa blames himself for his clumsy attempts
to deliver Noah himself. Noah seems disaffected and
somewhat detached from the family, and he decides,
once the family reaches the Colorado River at the
California border, to leave the family and make a life of
his own fishing along the banks of the river.
Granma and Grampa Joad
The oldest generation of Joads, Granma and
Grampa are doomed before they begin the arduous
trek west. Grampa, feisty and more than a little crude,
appears excited about the journey early in the novel.
Describing him, Steinbeck writes: “His was a lean excitable face with little bright eyes as evil as a frantic child’s
eyes.” (77) Grampa suddenly refuses to leave when
the family is ready to go, and they have to administer
cough syrup to make him drowsy enough to load him
into the back of the truck. At some profound level,
Grampa knows that leaving his land will kill him, and it
does. He suffers a stroke and dies in the Wilsons’ tent
at the first place where the Joads camp for the night.
Afraid that they’ll be forced to pay an undertaker if they
report the death, the family decides to bury Grampa
near their camp with a note identifying him and how
he died. Granma won’t last much longer. She makes
it through the California border, but dies during the
night. Ma lies next to her corpse through the night
because the family has to go on. Granma’s body is left
with the coroner in Bakersfield.
Ruthie and Winfield Joad
Ruthie and Winfield are the two youngest Joad siblings. Ruthie is older than Winfield and plays the role of
the leader. For these two, the trek west is an adventure;
they are, obviously, free of the huge burden of worry
the adults of the family must carry. Steinbeck provides
a spot of comic relief by describing the children’s first
experiences with indoor plumbing—when Winfield
flushes the toilet, Ruthie accuses him of having broken
it. Ruthie realizes that because her older brother has
killed a man, this makes him famous, and she accidentally lets the fact slip during a fight with another
child over a box of Cracker Jacks. The family manages
enough work and food to keep the youngest children
from starving, and near the end of the novel the two
children work alongside the adults in the cotton fields.
Ruthie is still looking for fun when the novel ends and
still getting her revenge for the lack of fun on her little
brother. But it is a better world that Steinbeck wills for
Ruthie and Winfield. Once the family drives down from
the mountains into the great Central Valley, Ma and
Pa lament that Granma and Grampa won’t ever see
the beauty of this new place, but, Tom insists, “They
wouldn’t of saw nothin’ that’s here…. They was too ol’.
Who’s really seein’ it is Ruthie an’ Winfiel’.” (230)
Muley Graves
“I’m jus’ wanderin’ aroun’ like a damn ol’ graveyard
ghos’.” (51) A neighbor of the Joads, Muley refuses to
leave the land even after his family has journeyed on
to California. He, Tom, and Casy share a meal, and he
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of the migrants. Collins gave Steinbeck copies of his
camp reports, which he would use in writing the novel
and which Carey McWilliams would also use later in
his research for Factories in the Field. Collins’ reports
acted not only as comprehensive documentation of
every facet of camp life, but also as a census, detailing
heads of families, occupations, states of origin, kinds
of cars, diet of family units, folk songs, and migrant
narratives.77
Collins had a good ear for migrant dialect, and
his reports recorded narratives in dialect, phonetically
spelled, which may well have aided Steinbeck as he
sought the right intonation for the language of his characters. One example of migrant wisdom from a Collins
report reads: “Times is gonna bee tuf fer six weeks.
When we gits down to the las of em air beans our bac
bones gonna haf a heluva scrape akeepin outa away our
nable. When we aswallas the last bean our innards wil
haf ter shek the dise ter see who agits it.”78 (“Times are
going to be tough for six weeks. When we get down to
the last of them there beans our back bones are going
to have a hell of a scrape keeping out of the way of our
navel. When we swallows the last bean, our insides will
have to shake the dice to see who gets it.”)
Migrant worker camps in the early thirties were
unsanitary because of a lack of interest on the part of
government or farmers who participated in a culture
of prejudice against the “bindlestiffs,” or single white
males, and the people of color who made up the farm
labor work force. One of the few bright spots, after
the flood of Dust Bowl migrants inundated the state
and raised even higher the levels of human degradation among farm workers, were the government camp
programs, which owed their success to Tom Collins and
other good managers. The fictional Rawley, like the real
Collins, turns over control of the Weedpatch camp to
the residents, establishing democracy and decency as
the residents take ownership of their own living conditions. The camp Jim Rawley runs, like Collins’, provides
running water and sanitary facilities, helping restore
dignity to migrants who have been tired, dirty, and
hungry for days on the road. Rawley is able to allay Ma’s
suspicions with his gentle, unassuming manner and the
clear evidence of his respect for her as a person.
describes what the banks and landowners have done to
drive Oklahoma farmers from their land. Muley symbolizes the vast graveyard that all of the states of the Dust
Bowl have become.
as Pa says, “Connie wasn’ no good. I seen that a long
time. Didn’ have no guts, jus’ too big for his overhalls.”
(272)
Ivy and Sairy Wilson
An Oklahoman who turns his back on his own
people, Will Feeley has taken a job driving the tractor
that knocks down a corner of the Joads’ home. Muley
Graves tells Tom and Casy that even though Grampa
shot out the headlights on the tractor, Will Feeley “jus’
come on, an’ bumped the hell outa the house, an’
give her a good shake like a dog shakes a rat.” (46) In
Chapter 5, Steinbeck presents the Feeley “type” in Joe
Davis’s boy who drives a tractor and destroys his neighbors’ houses because he has to feed his own family.
Floyd Knowles
A young man who tries to tell the Joads the truth
about California, Floyd is working on his car and getting ready to head to Salinas to find work when Tom
meets him. Floyd tries to caution Tom to look “bull
simple” (248) and quietly tells Tom and Al about work
he’s heard about up north. When a contractor arrives
in the camp looking for workers, Floyd insists that the
contractor show his license and tell the men what he’s
paying. When the contractor refuses to reveal the rate
of pay, Floyd turns to the crowd around him and insists
that the contractor has to show his license. Angered by
this resistance, the contractor turns to a deputy sheriff
with him and claims that Floyd is “talkin’ red, agitating trouble.” (263) Floyd fights back when the deputy
tries to take him in, and he escapes the deputy’s grasp.
When the deputy fires at Floyd’s retreating figure, he
hits a woman in her hand; and, before the deputy can
fire again, Tom trips the deputy, and Casy kicks him in
the neck, knocking him unconscious.
The Wainwrights
The Wainwrights are the last family with whom the
Joads share living space in a boxcar. The Wainwright
men help with shoveling to dam the rising water,
and Mrs. Wainwright assists with the birth of Rose of
Sharon’s stillborn baby. The Wainwrights worry about
their daughter’s attraction to Al Joad, but Al tells his
family that he and Aggie Wainwright plan to marry.
Connie Rivers
The husband of Rose of Sharon, Connie has aspirations of taking classes and opening a business of his
own. His actions in the narrative, though, speak louder
than his words, for he simply disappears when the
family stops at the Hooverville camp. Just before he
disappears, Steinbeck foreshadows his disappearance,
“Connie’s eyes were sullen. ‘If I’d of knowed it would
be like this I wouldn’ of came’.” (252) Once he’s gone,
it becomes clear that the family never really liked him;
Setting
The Dust Bowl
Early in the Great Depression, beginning in 1931,
the Great Plains states suffered from severe drought
which resulted in a massive loss of crops, and increasing winds raked the topsoil from land which had been
over-plowed and over-grazed. Dust storms continued
throughout the decade, increasing in severity, and
climaxing in the worst black blizzard of the Dust Bowl
on “Black Sunday,” April 14, 1935. Drought and dust
storms continued until 1939, but decreased in intensity
as President Roosevelt’s conservation measures began
to take effect. By the fall of 1939, the rains came to the
Great Plains, bringing an end to the drought.
Steinbeck never saw the devastation in Oklahoma,
Arkansas, Texas, or any of the other states that became
a part of the Dust Bowl; however, he did know and collaborate with the documentary filmmaker Pare Lorentz,
whose The Plow That Broke the Plains (1936) offered
powerful images of the devastation wrought by the
drought. For Steinbeck, setting was an integral part
of a story, and he characteristically began his works
with an evocative realization of place. The Grapes of
Wrath opens with a panoramic vista of the plains of
Oklahoma: “To the red country and part of the gray
country of Oklahoma, the last rains came gently, and
they did not cut the scarred earth.” (1) From this panoramic perspective, Steinbeck begins to narrow his
focus to the corn which, lifted temporarily by the rain,
begins to shrivel and die as the rains disappear. “The
surface of the earth crusted,” Steinbeck closes the first
paragraph of the novel, “a thin hard crust, and as the
sky became pale, so the earth became pale, pink in the
red country and white in the gray country.” (1)
Chapter 1 describes the clouds of dust whipped
by the wind over Oklahoma, “an emulsion of dust and
air” (3), as together, wind and dust crush the crops.
In Chapter 5, Steinbeck counterpoints the dry, dustcovered land with machines—the tractors which will
drive out tenant farmers, destroy their houses, and
ravage the land “without passion.” (36) Tom witnesses
firsthand the destruction caused by a tractor in his first
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The first couple the Joads meet on the road, the
Wilsons, are from Kansas and quickly become part of
the family as they offer a place in their tent for Grampa
to lie down. Once he dies in their tent and is buried
in their quilt, they have formed an irrevocable bond
with the Joads until it becomes clear that Sairy is too
ill to continue the journey. The Wilsons are important
to the philosophical intent of the novel because the
Joads must continue to learn, as they began to when
they accepted Casy into their family unit, that there is
a larger human community that is more important than
the immediate family.
Will Feeley
The Road, Highway 66
At the time The Grapes of Wrath was published,
Highway 66 provided the way from the Midwest to
California for thousands of migrating families. The
highway developed from a wagon road charted in the
nineteenth century to allow military transportation from
Fort Defiance near the Arizona/New Mexico border to
the Colorado River. Early in the twentieth century, as
travel moved increasingly from the back of a horse to
the inside of an automobile, motorists clamored for a
transcontinental, continuously paved, all-weather highway. In 1925 and 1926, the government passed amendments to the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1921, which
officially designated the number 66 to the Chicago
to Los Angeles route, acknowledging it as one of the
nation’s major east to west thoroughfares.79
Highway 66 was different from the other major
highways of the time in that it did not, like the Lincoln
Highway from New York to San Francisco, follow a
linear route, but traversed its course diagonally, link-
A farmer’s son in Cimarron County, Oklahoma, during the Dust Bowl era.
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view of the family home: “The small unpainted house
was mashed at one corner, and it had been pushed off
its foundations so that it slumped at an angle, its blind
front windows pointing at a spot of sky well above the
horizon.” (40) As the Dust Bowl section of the novel
ends, Steinbeck describes the frantic haste of the tenant farmers to sell the belongings they can’t take with
them as their houses are being destroyed around them,
“Got to get out quick now. Can’t wait.” (89) Only the
dust is left behind, “The dust hung in the air for a long
time after the loaded cars passed.” (89)
An automobile, packed with a family’s
belongings, heads west on Highway
66 during the Great Depression.
Chapter 13, turning west on Highway 66 out of Sallisaw,
Oklahoma, they, too, experience the urgency of flight.
But, Steinbeck notes in Chapter 16, “the land was too
huge for them and they settled into a new technique of
living; the highway became their home and movement
their medium of expression.” (163)
California, the Garden of Eden
For days on the road the Joads are warned of the
pitfalls waiting for them in California, and Steinbeck
warns the reader in the interchapters. Despite a growing sense of foreboding, though, the Joads and the
thousands of nameless migrants move relentlessly
westward, hoping against hope that work, food, and
prosperity await them there. The first view the Joads
have of the fertile fields of the San Joaquin Valley as
they come down the mountains from Tehachapi leaves
them ecstatic:
Al jammed on the brake and stopped in the
middle of the road, and, ‘Jesus Christ! Look!’
he said. The vineyards, the orchards, the great
flat valley, green and beautiful, the trees set in
rows, and the farm houses…. Pa sighed, ‘I never
knowed they was anything like her.’ The peach
trees and the walnut groves, and the dark green
patches of oranges. And red roofs among the
trees, and barns—rich barns. (227)
When Ma sees the valley, she climbs slowly down
off of the truck, “She turned her head, and her mouth
opened a little. Her fingers went to her throat and gathered a little pinch of skin and twisted gently. ‘Thank
God!’ she said. ‘The fambly’s here’.” (228) The Joads
had just driven the downgrade of what is now Highway
58 from Tehachapi and Mojave, and after the vast
wasteland of the Mojave Desert, the farmlands of Arvin,
Edison, and Bakersfield that lay stretched out before
them must have seemed like a paradise. But that sense
of paradise dispels as the family learns of Granma’s
death, and, in a symbolic action, Tom hits a rattlesnake
and leaves it broken and squirming on the road. (230)
In a subsequent, lyrical chapter, Steinbeck pits the
beauty of California against the symbolic snake at its
heart, the greed of large farmers who will drive the
small farmers into bankruptcy and hire migrant pickers at starvation wages. “The spring is beautiful in
California,” (346) Steinbeck writes. “Valleys in which the
fruit blossoms are fragrant pink and white waters in a
shallow sea….” With prices driven down, though, the
small farmers can’t afford to pick their crops and are
forced to let them rot in the fields: “The decay spreads
over the State, and the sweet smell is a great sorrow
on the land…. And the smell of rot fills the country.”
(348–49)
The Bakersfield Hooverville Camp
Once they’ve deposited Granma’s body at the coroner’s office in Bakersfield, the Joads drive to the edge of
the town where they see the local “Hooverville” camp.
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ing predominantly rural communities and providing
farmers with a major thoroughfare for trucking their
produce. In fact, 66 was not completely paved through
the western states of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona,
and southeast California until 1938, when President
Roosevelt’s New Deal Civilian Conservation Corps and
the Works Project Administration put thousands of men
to work as laborers on road gangs to complete the
road. Thus, 66 served not only the thousands using it
as their escape from the Dust Bowl, but also provided
work for thousands of unemployed.80 Woody Guthrie
memorialized the road in his “Highway 66 Blues,” writing: “Every old town that I ramble’ round/Down that
Lonesome Road,/The police in yo’ town they shove me
around,/I got them 66 Highway Blues.”81
“Highway 66,” Steinbeck writes, “is the main
migrant road” (118); it is the “mother road” (118) as
well as the path of flight. That image of flight drives
the pace of Steinbeck’s narrative: “66 out of Oklahoma
City; El Reno and Clinton, going west on 66. Hydro,
Elk City, and Texola; and there’s an end to Oklahoma.”
(118) In Chapter 12, the interchapter that paints the
broad image of flight on 66, Steinbeck rapidly moves
through the towns along the way, then turns to anonymous migrants on the road, desperately trying to keep
jalopies rolling. As the Joads begin the journey in
(241) Yet there are still those families, newly arrived,
who strive to keep order and cleanliness in their tents.
It is here that Ma Joad tries to feed her own family and
have enough left to feed a crowd of starving children,
and it is here that Tom learns from Floyd Knowles that
his dream of finding work and living well is doomed.
Once Floyd stands up to the labor contractor who
refuses to state the wages he’ll pay or show his license,
there is no longer any reason for deputies to leave the
residents of the camp alone. When the deputy is felled
by Floyd’s punch, tripped by Tom, and kicked in the
neck by Casy, there is immediate danger to Tom, the
ex-convict, if the Joads stay in the camp. The Joads
gather their belongings and leave as quickly as they
can as rumors spread that the camp will be burned out
in a matter of hours.
The Weedpatch Camp
In the Weedpatch Camp run by Jim Rawley, the
Joads find safety, cleanliness, and compassion. As
noted earlier, Steinbeck paid several visits to the Arvin/
Weedpatch federal camp with Tom Collins, the camp
Children photographed in a Hooverville near Sacramento, CA, during the Great Depression.
The Bancroft Library. University of California, Berkeley.
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Hoovervilles appeared early in the Great Depression
throughout the country, not just in California, as so
many families across the nation lost their homes. This
style of shanty town camp was satirically named after
President Herbert Hoover, who was blamed by many for
the nation’s economic crisis. By 1937, California historian Kevin Starr writes, “the Bakersfield Hooverville had
become a full-blown disaster, a crowded, filthy source
of contagion.”82 Nonetheless, Starr continues, this
Hooverville was not burned out in the way Steinbeck
describes; rather, public health officials worked with the
families to move them to more sanitary conditions, only
tearing down and burning the assortment of “cardboard, gunny sack, and scrap wood lean-tos”83 after
the migrants had vacated them.
For Steinbeck, though, the Hooverville camp is the
antithesis of the Weedpatch camp, where the Joads
will subsequently find temporary shelter. As the Joads
drive down the incline into Hooverville, what they see
is disheartening. “There was no order in the camp; little
gray tents, shacks, cars were scattered about at random…about the camp there hung a slovenly despair.”
The Flood
The final scene of the novel counterpoints the
drought at the novel’s beginning with a flood at the
end. From February to early March 1938, Steinbeck
traveled with Horace Bristol to the Visalia area where
heavy rains had flooded the migrant tents. Several of
Steinbeck’s critics suggest that he was more radicalized
by his experience in the relief effort during the Visalia
flood than by any other experience during the period
of the novel’s gestation.85 It rained for two months in
the Visalia area, and as he learned about it, Steinbeck
wrote his publisher, “I must go over to the interior
valleys…. There are about five thousand families starving to death over there, not just hungry but actually
starving.”86 In a video for PBS, critic Robert DeMott
argues that the floods in Visalia were, for Steinbeck,
“the profound trigger that got us the novel that we
now know as The Grapes of Wrath…he realized at that
point that it was impossible to treat the experience with
any kind of coolness, any kind of dispassion, any kind
of removal.”87
During the final three chapters of the novel,
Steinbeck builds the momentum of flooding. Forced to
leave Weedpatch in search of work, the Joads find work
picking cotton and move into an empty boxcar near
a stream. The clouds begin to threaten as Ma sneaks
food to Tom, who, injured in the fight that killed Casy,
is hiding out in the bushes near the family’s camp. Rain
begins to fall as Ma leaves Tom for the last time and
threatens the next day when the family works frantically
to pick cotton ahead of the rain. The rain begins to
fall again as the family returns to the boxcar, and Rose
of Sharon goes into premature labor. Steinbeck lets
Chapter 29 do the work of universalizing the migrants’
experiences with the floods:
In the barns, the people sat huddled together; and the terror came over them, and their
faces were gray with terror. The children cried
with hunger, and there was no food…. And the
rain fell steadily, and the water flowed over the
highways, for the culverts could not carry the
water. (433)
In the closing chapter, the men try valiantly to build
a dam to keep the water from flooding the boxcars, but
the banks break, and the family is driven to seek shelter
on higher ground.
Style
California migrant camp photographed
by Dorothea Lange, February 1936.
Once Steinbeck had worked out a structure for his
novel that would encompass the macrocosmic vision
of the greater problem alternating with the microcosmic vision of the individual experience, he sought an
appropriate style for each of the two major narrative
threads. As Steinbeck wrote later in his preface to
his screenplay for The Forgotten Village: “It means
very little to know that a million Chinese are starving
unless you know one Chinese who is starving.”88 Thus,
the only way to understand a situation at large is to
be exposed to its smaller, representative sample. The
model for the chapters on the Joads may have come,
in part, from Steinbeck’s work on The Harvest Gypsies,
particularly the second essay, which depicts the gradual
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manager, and wrote about it in The Harvest Gypsies.
In his description of the historical Weedpatch camp,
Steinbeck focused on the meaning of human dignity:
“From the first, the intent of the management has
been to restore the dignity and decency that had been
kicked out of the migrants by their intolerable mode
of life.”84
The one bright spot, in fact, in the tragic experiences of the Joads is the Weedpatch camp, where they are
fortunate to find space available. Here they find community in the true sense of the word, a place to get truly
clean with hot water and sanitation units, and a place to
share stories, laughter, and song at the weekly dances.
Steinbeck allows comic relief in this lengthy chapter
when he introduces Ruthie and Winfield to flush toilets
for the first time. Before many in the family are awake,
Ruthie lures Winfield into the sanitary unit to show off
her knowledge; she’s seen toilets in catalogues. But her
self-satisfaction evaporates when Winfield flushes the
toilet and the sound of the roaring water scares them
both. “‘You done it,’ Ruthie said. ‘You went an’ broke
it. I seen you’.” (300)
In addition to the welcome sanitation, the campers
are protected from the intrusions of law enforcement
officials who are forbidden to enter without a warrant.
Rawley restores human dignity by effacing himself as
head of the camp and leaving the administration of the
camp, in true democratic fashion, to its residents. Ma
describes the setting perfectly when she says, “Praise
God, we come home to our own people.” (307)
There is a crime here that goes beyond
denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here
that topples all our success. The fertile earth,
the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the
ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must
die because a profit cannot be taken from an
orange. (349)
The simple philosophy expressed here, argues
Peter Lisca, gives this and many other similar passages
authority through their style.93 A second stylistic variation in the interchapters includes the use of staccato
prose, which provides an exterior view of objects that
multiply in extended lists: “Cadillacs, LaSalles, Buicks,
Plymouths, Packards, Chevvies, Fords, Pontiacs.” (65)
Third, there is a narrative voice that slips into internal
monologue: “The women sat among the doomed
things, turning them over and looking past them and
back. The book. My father had it. He liked a book.
Pilgrim’s Progress. Used to read it. Got his name in it.
And his pipe—still smells rank.” (88) These two variations indicate Steinbeck’s facility in navigating from the
objective to the subjective—the staccato prose list of
objects, reminiscent of John Dos Passos’ U.S.A., evokes
the external world within which the migrants negotiate
their destinies while interior monologue reflects a slippage into the thoughts and language of the migrants’
personal and individual sense of loss and despair at
what they must leave behind.
In the chapters, Steinbeck advances the plot by narrating the travails of the Joads, allowing them to speak
in their own language. Thus, the management of dialect becomes a fourth element of Steinbeck’s style. As
he began to mold the characters, Steinbeck wrote:
Begin the detailed description of the family I
am to live with for four months. Must take time
in the description, detail, detail, looks, clothes,
gestures. Ma very important. Uncle John important. Pa very. In fact all of them are important.
Got to take it slowly…. We have to know these
people. Know their looks and their nature.94
Steinbeck was greatly aided in this effort to know
his people by the reports of Tom Collins, which he had
by his side as he wrote the novel. Collins kept very
unusual reports for a government official, incorporating the dialect, folk stories, humor, and songs of the
campers with whom he came into daily contact. In
fact, Jackson Benson, Steinbeck’s biographer, makes
a strong case for the numerous similarities between
incidents described in the Collins reports and scenes in
The Grapes of Wrath.95 In capturing the regional flavor
of the “Okie” language, Collins tended to exaggerate the effect through rendering speech that is almost
unreadable. In depicting a woman who was so overcome with excitement at the treat of “fruits, nuts, and
ice cream,” Collins records her spontaneous song:
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deterioration of anonymous, but particularized, camping migrant families.
Another concern for Steinbeck as he wove the
strands of the novel was to keep it from losing its unified focus and breaking into two parts. He manages
this by cross-referencing events, details, and symbols
between the alternating chapters. As far back as Percy
Lubbock’s The Craft of Fiction (1945),89 critics have
noticed that fiction often displays two broad narrative
styles that may be described as the “scenic,” which
dramatizes the interaction among characters, and the
“pictorial,” which displays a visual image.90 Steinbeck’s
interchapters equate roughly to a more visual presentation while the chapters focused on the Joads are largely dramatized. Steinbeck’s management of these two
styles, however, does not create a static differentiation
between them, but rather a flow of one into the other.
There is more to the novel’s prose, though, than
painting a picture or animating a scene; for Steinbeck
meant the interchapters to make music. “Going to do
a little work today,” Steinbeck wrote in his journal,”—
perhaps a page to finish the chapter of Casy and Joad.
If it doesn’t get done, it doesn’t matter. But since the
next chapter tells of the coming of the tractors and
must have a symphonic overtone…. Now must make
music again.”91
The “Form and Structure” section of this guide,
discusses the general purpose of the interchapters as
they function to universalize the actions of the Joads
and to comment, in choral fashion, upon the history
of land ownership, migrant labor, and the fight for fair
wages. Acting in a similar fashion to the way the chorus
functions in Greek tragedy, the choral comment of the
interchapters also serves as a medium for conveying
the novel’s philosophical message.
Steinbeck orchestrates a correspondence between
the canvas of the interchapter and the scene of the
chapter by, for example, offering a panoramic description of the Dust Bowl environment in the first chapter,
which provides the impetus for the Joads to leave. The
second chapter opens to a dramatic representation of
Tom’s return to the family as they prepare to flee the
Dust Bowl. A number of echoes reverberating between
chapter and interchapter exist like this: the pictorial
image of the anonymous house knocked off its foundation in Chapter 5 is echoed by the Joad house whose
corner has been knocked off its foundation. An anonymous tenant threatens the tractor driver in a dramatic
echo of the action of Grampa Joad who shoots out the
tractor’s headlights, and the dramatization blended
with the visual, pictorial imagery of tenant farmers selling their goods in Chapter 9 reflects what the Joads will
do in Chapter 10.
For the sixteen interchapters, which comprise
approximately one-sixth of the book, Steinbeck chose
at least four stylistic variations. The first style suggests
the dignity, the parallel construction, the simple diction, and the repetition of Biblical prose:92
Tho por famer folk we bee
(Though poor farmer folk we be)
We has ter trafel all ofer the erf
(We have to travel all over the earth)
Ter see if we kain allusgits wuk.96
(To see if we can all get work)
You can hear the music as you read the words, and
it’s clear, too, from this example that Collins renders
the dialect far more broadly than Steinbeck’s more
readable version, but Granma Joad’s stock phrase
“Pu-raise Gawd fur Vittory!” is taken, spelling intact,
from a Collins report describing a woman who may
have been the model for the religious fanatic in the
Weedpatch camp.97 Perhaps Collins’ ear for the language inspired him to come as close to the spoken
word of the migrant as possible, but Steinbeck’s aims
and methods were different. Rather than rendering
an ethnography like so many which appeared during
the thirties, Steinbeck was creating a fictional world in
which his inhabitants had to be understood. The reader
doesn’t need a lexicon to understand the Joads. Listen
to the music of Ma:
I seen the han’bills fellas pass out, an’ how
much work they is, an’ high wages an’ all; an’ I
seen in the paper how they want folks to come
an’ pick grapes an’ oranges an’ peaches. That’d
be nice work, Tom, pickin’ peaches. Even if they
wouldn’t let you eat none, you could maybe
snitch a little ratty one sometimes. An’ it’d be
nice under the trees, workin’ in the shade. I’m
scared of stuff so nice. I ain’t got faith. I’m scared
somepin ain’t so nice about it. (90–91)
What the reader hears, beside the lack of grammatical correctness (I seen) is the silencing of final
consonants on a number of words, especially gerunds
(pickin’, workin’); the gerunds themselves are action
words, while the loss of the final consonant allows for
more rapid, rhythmic speech.
Narrative Viewpoint
In The Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck generally adopts
an omniscient viewpoint, leaving his narrator free to
roam over the land and survey vast stretches of territory
while at the same time able to slip into a character’s
thoughts. The first two chapters demonstrate the two
facets of this viewpoint as Steinbeck surveys the wasteland of the Dust Bowl, narrows his focus to anonymous
tenant women who watch for a break in their men, and
moves on, in the second chapter, to observe the internal squirming of the truck driver who wants “to be a
good guy” (7), but has a company policy against taking
on hitchhikers like Tom. In both facets, the broad and
the narrowly focused, the narrator acts as a camera eye,
moving across the land or over the body of a character.
His eyes were dark brown and there was a
hint of brown pigment in his eyeballs. His cheek
bones were high and wide, and strong deep lines
cut down his cheeks, in curves beside his mouth.
His upper lip was long, and since his teeth protruded, the lips stretched to cover them, for this
man kept his lips closed. His hands were hard,
with broad fingers and nails as thick and ridged
as little clam shells. The space between thumb
and forefinger and the hams of his hands were
shiny with callus. (6)
Besides the freedom to enter the characters’
thoughts and to range over the body of a character or
the geographical terrain of the novel’s world, another
advantage of the omniscient viewpoint is that it allows
for slippage into a subsidiary narrative technique called
free indirect discourse. This point of view allows for a
double-voiced discourse, where the narrator’s voice
and a character’s indirect speech alternate and may
even merge with no external device distinguishing
between them. Chapter 5, the interchapter that examines the actions of the farm owners to begin the evictions of the tenant farmers, provides a good example
of Steinbeck’s use of free indirect discourse:
The squatting men looked down again. What
do you want us to do? We can’t take less share
of the crop—we’re half starved now. The kids are
hungry all the time. We got no clothes, torn an’
ragged. If all the neighbors weren’t the same,
we’d be ashamed to go to meeting. (33)
Notice that the passage begins in the viewpoint of
the narrator, but in the second sentence, the narrator’s
voice has shifted to the voice of an anonymous character, in indirect quotation; however, that voice still
retains the more literate discourse of the narrator. By
the fifth sentence, the anonymous character’s voice
takes on the features and lack of grammatical correctness of tenant dialect—while still presumably within
the omniscient narrator’s viewpoint, the voice of the
character emerges in his/her own language. Finally,
in the sixth sentence, the narrative voice resumes correct grammatical discourse, leaving dialect behind and
returning to the voice of the omniscient narrator.
Another feature of Steinbeck’s management of narrative viewpoint is direct address to the reader where
the narrator takes on a didactic tone and addresses the
reader as an outsider to the text:
If you who own the things people must have
could understand this, you might preserve yourself. If you could separate causes from results,
if you could know that Paine, Marx, Jefferson,
Lenin, were results, not causes, you might survive. But that you cannot know. (152)
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For example, the narrator lavishes rich detail on the
portrait of Tom Joad:
Jesus lufs us yer kain see
(Jesus loves us you can see)
hand on the gear-shift lever; listen with your feet
on the floor boards. Listen to the pounding old
jalopy with all your senses, for a change of tone,
a variation of rhythm may mean—a week here?
That rattle—that’s tappets.” (119)
Listen to the motor. Listen to the wheels.
Listen with your ears and with your hands on
the steering wheel; listen with the palm of your
Human and machine fuse in this passage as the
reader hears the music of the repetitive prose that
evokes the sounds of the jalopy.
MONTVILLE HS - OAKDALE, CT
Where such direct address may be politically impassioned as it is in the previous quote, Steinbeck’s narrative voice can also shift in tone to invite the reader
to enter the text and experience what the characters
experience:
Migrant children sit atop their automobile in California during the Great Depression.
Photograph by Dorothea Lange.
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Steinbeck’s title provides the first recognizable allusion in the novel, suggesting the novel’s connections
to America as a republic, to music, and to the Bible.
Suggested by Steinbeck’s first wife, Carol, in September
of 1938, the new title helped make the book real to
Steinbeck.98 The title derives from “The Battle Hymn of
the Republic,” an abolitionist song whose lyrics were
composed by Julia Ward Howe, an active leader in antislavery politics. The first stanza reads as follows:
Mine eyes have seen the glory
of the coming of the Lord:
He is trampling out the vintage
where the grapes of wrath are stored;
He hath loosed the fateful lightning
of His terrible swift sword:
His truth is marching on.99
Steinbeck felt so strongly about the appropriateness of the title’s allusion that he wanted the entire
song inside the cover of the novel, writing to his publisher about the song: “in reference to this book it has
a large meaning.”100 Echoing, therefore the earlier
horrid injustice of slavery, Steinbeck meant to provide
an image of a nation which must lift itself from current
injustices or face the wrath of an implacable vengeance
like that imaged in the “Battle Hymn.” Howe’s lyrics are
themselves an allusion to Revelations (14:19): “And the
angel thrust his sickle into the earth, and gathered the
vine of the earth, and cast it into the great winepress of
the wrath of God.”101
The strongest and most pervasive literary presence
in the novel, is, without question, the Bible. Echoes from
the Bible, both the Old and New Testaments, appear
structurally and thematically. The broad structure of the
novel suggests the Book of Exodus, as the Hebrews are
led by Moses out of Egyptian captivity, wandering until
they reach the Promised Land. Of course, in Steinbeck’s
novel, California fails miserably as a “promised land.”
The figure of Moses is invoked and inverted, as well,
as Tom acts as a kind of Moses, leading his family out
of the wasteland. Steinbeck locates other clues to this
inverted identity in Chapter 4 when Tom meets Jim
Casy who refers to his role in his former life as a preacher as a “Burning Busher.” (20) Moses hears the voice of
God in the burning bush; Tom hears Casy’s. And, Tom
takes on the mission and philosophy of the dead Casy
before he parts from his family.
Rose of Sharon’s dead baby serves as a negative
baby Moses, set afloat on the swollen river by Uncle
John, who commands the baby, “Go down an’ tell
‘em. Go down in the street an’ rot an’ tell ‘em that way.
That’s the way you can talk.” (448) Uncle John’s words
reflect the message of the African-American spiritual,
“Go Down Moses”:
Go down, Moses,
Way down in Egypt land,
Tell old Pharaoh,
Let my people go.
The mission of Rose of Sharon’s baby, though, rather
than to lead a people out of captivity, is to tell the ugly
truth at the heart of the Promised Land.
In the novel’s discourse, as noted in the section on
structure, Steinbeck echoes the language of the Bible in
many of the interchapters, and an important additional
feature of Steinbeck’s Biblical language is his use of the
jeremiad in Chapter 25. The jeremiad functions both
as a lament about the state of the world and a prophecy of coming doom. Steinbeck’s jeremiad echoes the
Book of Jeremiah and the Book of Lamentations where
the prophet Jeremiah foretells the destruction of the
Kingdom of Judah, as the Hebrews have strayed from
their covenant with Jehovah. Steinbeck writes:
The decay spreads over the State, and the
sweet smell is a great sorrow on the land. Men
who can graft the trees and make the seed fertile
and big can find no way to let the hungry people
eat their produce. Men who have created new
fruits in the world cannot create a system whereby their fruits may be eaten. And the failure
hangs over the State like a great sorrow. (348)
This chapter ends with the prediction, a direct
allusion to Revelations as well as to the source of the
title: “In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath
are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy with the
vintage.” (349) It is the people, Steinbeck insists, not a
wrathful Jehovah, who will take their vengeance.
In addition to these Biblical echoes, there are elements of the Christ figure in both Jim Casy and Tom
Joad. Casy, whose initials provide a link to the name
Jesus Christ, seems the more obvious of the two, offering himself up as the sacrificial lamb to be blamed for
the actions against the deputy sheriff in Hooverville.
Later, surrounded by “disciples,” Casy, now actively
unionizing, invites Tom into the circle of men to discuss
a course of action against the conglomerate of farm
owners. Then, Casy makes the ultimate sacrifice when
he’s caught by a group of men outside of the camp on
the cotton farm. “That’s him. That shiny bastard. That’s
him,” (386), the men shout when they find Casy. Just
before he’s clubbed to death, Casy echoes the dying
words of Christ, telling the men: “You don’ know what
you’re a-doin’.”(386)
Tom, too, is an unlikely Jesus—an ex-convict who’s
killed a man and kills again, grabbing the club that
felled Casy and using it to crush the head of Casy’s
killer. But it is Tom who speaks some of the most
powerful words of the novel, words very close to the
message of Christ: “…I’ll be all aroun’ in the dark. I’ll
be ever’where—wherever you look. Wherever they’s a
fight so hungry people can eat, I’ll be there. Wherever
they’s a cop beatin’ up a guy, I’ll be there.” (419)
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Literary and
Historical Allusion
For the first time in history, The Grapes of
Wrath brings together and makes real three
great skeins of American thought. It begins with
the transcendental oversoul, Emerson’s faith in
the common man, and his Protestant self-reliance. To this it joins Whitman’s religion of the
love of all men and his mass democracy. And it
combines these mystical and poetic ideas with
the realistic philosophy of pragmatism and its
emphasis on effective action. From this it develops a new kind of Christianity—not otherworldly
and passive, but earthly and active.103
Allusions to Steinbeck’s contemporaries, though
not as prevalent as those to the classical poets, the
Transcendentalists, or the Bible, are in the novel as
well. Steinbeck was heavily influenced by the montage
and collage technique used by John Dos Passos in his
U.S.A. trilogy (1930–36). Dos Passos exposed the state
of the nation in the first three decades of the twentieth
century in a vast, three-volume work, incorporating
mixed media: narrative, biographies of prominent
Americans, advertisements, “Newsreel” segments, and
“Camera Eye” passages, which offered autobiographical impressions of events that occur in the novel.
The tough, stark, journalistic appeal of Hemingway’s
style offered Steinbeck a model for the terse, staccato
prose of several of the interchapters. Faulkner’s use
of southern dialect in As I Lay Dying was instructive
for Steinbeck as he worked on the right intonation for
Okie speech, and the nature of the panoramic reach of
Joyce’s Ulysses offered a model for what Steinbeck proposed to do with an American migration of truly epic
proportions. Nor can we ignore the image of the Dust
Bowl as a waste land, so powerfully invoked by Eliot’s
groundbreaking poem The Waste Land (1922).
Additionally, historical figures find places among the
novel’s allusions. William Randolph Hearst comes into
the novel, not by name, but obviously identifiable, as a
figure for a scathing attack. “They’s a fella, newspaper
fella near the coast, got a million acres—” (206) a man
tells the Joads. “What in hell,” Casy replies, “can he
do with a million acres? What’s he want a million acres
for?” “Fat, sof’ fella,” the man replies, “with little mean
eyes an’ a mouth like a ass-hole. Scairt he’s gonna die.”
(206) Crowning the million acres was billionaire newspaper publisher Hearst’s multi-million dollar castle, La
Cuesta Encantada, ”The Enchanted Hill,” undergoing
continuous improvement and construction during the
thirties at the same time that thousands of migrants
were starving.
Gangster Pretty Boy Floyd gets softer treatment by
Steinbeck. Tom’s Ma knew his ma, and, she says:
They was good folks. He was full of hell, sure,
like a good boy oughta be…. He done a little
bad thing an’ they hurt ‘im, caught ‘im an hurt
him so he was mad…. An’ purty soon he was
mean-mad…. Finally they run him down an’
killed ‘im. (76)
Ma’s obvious concern for her own son who’s just
been released from prison is that he not turn out like
Pretty Boy. Floyd was born in Georgia but grew up
in Oklahoma, turning to robbery to survive the Great
Depression. He was a popular public enemy because
when he robbed a bank, he destroyed the bank’s
mortgage papers, freeing many poor home and farm
owners from crushing debt. By the time Steinbeck finished writing The Grapes of Wrath in 1938, Floyd was
dead, having been apprehended and killed by the FBI
in 1934.
There is one more interesting, and puzzling, allusion
to a contemporary figure in the novel. Bing Crosby’s
name appears in Chapter 15, the “hamburger stand”
chapter, when one of the truckers puts a nickel in the
jukebox. “Bing Crosby’s voice—golden. ‘Thanks for
the memory, of sunburn at the shore—You might have
been a headache, but you never were a bore—’.” (157)
The lyrics are right but the singer isn’t. Bob Hope, not
Bing Crosby, first sang the song in the 1938 film The
Big Broadcast of 1938. The movie brings together two
divorced characters who meet to reminisce satirically
about the failure of their relationship. Steinbeck and
his wife Carol may well have seen the film, but it is odd
that Steinbeck attached Crosby—who didn’t record the
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Tightly linked to the Bible are additional literary
echoes that should be mentioned: allusions to William
Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience and John
Milton’s Paradise Lost. Steinbeck links Tom to Blake’s
“The Lamb” by approximating the language of the
poem in Tom’s Christmas card from Granma, “Jesus
meek an’ Jesus mild.” Blake’s wrathful prophecies in
poetic prose-poems like The Marriage of Heaven and
Hell also inspire the lyrical wrath of many of the novel’s
interchapters. Milton’s Paradise Lost provides another
significant model, for the imagery of the Garden of
Eden lost by mankind surfaces in the descriptions
of California, the negative of the Promised Land.
Steinbeck’s earlier “strike” novel, In Dubious Battle,
takes its title from the scene in Paradise Lost where
the fallen angels join battle with God. The “dubious”
nature of the outcome for the migrants must have been
much on Steinbeck’s mind as he wrote The Grapes
of Wrath, coupled with his knowledge of Milton as a
“wrathful” pamphleteer in support of just causes.
Also important to Steinbeck’s development of an
overarching philosophical standpoint in the novel are
the Transcendentalist writers Ralph Waldo Emerson
and Walt Whitman. As early as 1941, critics had begun
to associate the novel with the transcendental pantheism of Emerson and Whitman.102 The early Steinbeck
critic Fredric Carpenter emphasizes what he believes to
be a unique feature of the novel and makes an eloquent
case for Steinbeck’s use of Emerson and Whitman in
the formation of his own system of beliefs:
Metaphor, Figurative Language,
Motif, and Symbolism
The most pervasive phenomenon in the first section
of the novel is the presence of dust as a result of an
extended and severe drought. Dust becomes an apocalyptic metaphor for the greater wasteland it covers:
Little by little the sky was darkened by the
mixing dust, and the wind felt over the earth,
loosened the dust, and carried it away. The wind
grew stronger. The rain crust broke and the dust
lifted up out of the fields and drove gray plumes
into the air like sluggish smoke…. ” (2)
Gray, linked most frequently to the dust, operates
as a color and a metaphor, becoming a recurring motif
in the novel. Steinbeck describes Tom walking to his
family home,
The sun was hot, and no wind stirred the
sifted dust. The road was cut with furrows where
dust had slid and settled back into the wheel
tracks. Joad took a few steps, and the flourlike
dust spurted up in front of his new yellow shoes,
and the yellowness was disappearing under gray
dust.” (17)
In sharp contrast to the blanket of gray dust covering the Oklahoma farmland in Chapter 1 is Steinbeck’s
lyrical description of California in Chapter 25. The
chapter bursts with the colors of the harvest—white,
pink, red, and green: “The full green hills are round and
soft as breasts.” (346) A fertile countryside soon turns,
though, to rot as the small farmers can’t afford to pick
and send the fruit to the cannery. “And the yellow fruit
falls heavily to the ground and splashes on the ground.
The yellowjackets dig into the soft meat, and there is a
smell of ferment and rot.” (348)
An important example of Steinbeck’s use of figurative language is the extended metaphor, sustained
throughout a chapter or a large portion of text, which
frequently appears in the interchapters. Chapter 3,
the well known “turtle” chapter, is not only heavily
symbolic, but also contains an extended metaphor for
migration. The focus of the chapter is the movement
of a large land turtle from one side of the highway to
the other; Steinbeck’s interest in science and nature is
clearly evident in this chapter as he positions the narration at the turtle’s level to examine him in microscopic
detail:
And over the grass at the roadside a land
turtle crawled, turning aside for nothing, dragging his high-domed shell over the grass: His
A dust storm approaches Stratford, TX, in April 1935.
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song until his 1956 album Songs I Wish I Had Sung the
First Time Around—and not Hope, to the song.
Every detail of this description suggests a feature
of the Joads’ migration westward—determined, sustained movement with a high load on top, crawling
slowly toward their destination. Furthermore, the turtle
encounters difficulties in climbing the embankment
onto the cement of the highway, where he risks being
smashed by one driver who avoids him and another
who deliberately hits him.
Steinbeck also creates an extended metaphor linking the Bank, the Company, and the tractor, which will
drive the tenant farmers off their land, to the “monster”
in Chapter 5. “The Bank—or the Company—needs—
wants—insists—must have—as though the Bank or the
Company were a monster, with thought and feeling,
which had ensnared them.” (31–32) The devouring
“monster” which must be fed becomes a recurring
motif in the chapter, for the tractors, which follow the
emissaries of the company who tell the tenant farmers
to go, are “Snubnosed monsters, raising the dust and
sticking their snouts into it, straight down the country,
across the country, through fences, through dooryards,
in and out of gullies in straight lines…. They ignored
hills and gulches, water courses, fences, houses.” (35)
Metaphors abound in the text in both extended and
non-extended form; for example, the colorful dialect of
the “Okies” provides many rich samples. Muley Graves,
whose very name is metaphoric, is a self-proclaimed
“ol’ graveyard ghos’” (52), who haunts the spaces left
vacant in the wake of migration. Describing his son Al,
Pa says, “he’s a-billygoatin’ aroun’ the country. Tomcattin’ hisself to death.” (82)
The westward journey of the novel also suggests
a prevailing motif of homelessness, which raises the
literal fact of homelessness to the metaphoric and
symbolic level of widespread dispossession. The Joads
no longer have a home in Oklahoma, their tent and
the Hudson Super Six are the only “homes” they
have on the road, and they find shelter only in temporary camps, a boxcar, and a barn once they arrive in
California. They hope for, but never attain, one of the
“little white houses in among the orange trees” (91) of
Ma’s dreams. Tom senses the homelessness so intently
that he remembers the prison as a kind of home. Tom
tells Casy, “Las’ night, thinkin’ where I’m gonna sleep, I
got scared. An’ I got thinkin’ about my bunk, an’ I wonder what the stir-bug I got for a cell mate is doin’…. An’
this mornin’ I didn’t know what time to get up. Jus’ laid
there waitin’ for the bell to go off.” (26)
Beyond functioning as an extended metaphor, the
turtle in Chapter 3 serves as a symbol for the Oklahoma
migrants. Steinbeck even suggests resemblance to
Tom when he writes, “The old humorous eyes looked
ahead, and the horny beak opened a little. His yellow
toe nails slipped a fraction in the dust.” (16) In the
next chapter, Tom removes his new, yellow shoes and
“worked his damp feet comfortably in the hot dry dust
until little spurts of it came up between his toes.” (17) In
Chapter 2, the description of Tom’s hands even seems
to foreshadow similarities to the turtle’s appearance:
“His hands were hard, with broad fingers and nails as
thick and ridged as little clam shells.” (6) But Steinbeck
is not done with the turtle at the end of Chapter 3,
for in Chapter 4, Tom spies the turtle’s high-domed
shell, picks it up, and wraps it in his coat to take along.
Shortly after Tom meets Casy, Casy notices the turtle
squirming in Tom’s coat, and Tom tells him he means
to take the turtle to his little brother.
By Chapter 6, the turtle is gone—his function in
foreshadowing the plodding, determined flight of
the migrants complete. Tom unwraps him and sets
him free, and Tom and Casy watch as the turtle heads
“southwest as it had been from the first.” (44) “Where
the hell you s’pose he’s goin?” Tom asks Casy. “I seen
turtles all my life. They’re always goin’ someplace. They
always seem to want to get there.” (44)
The Dust Bowl in drought further symbolizes a land
laid waste by poor farm management and forces of
nature. The dust-coated, sterile farmlands serve as
an opening framing device to counterpoint the closing framing device of the flood at the conclusion of
the novel. Steinbeck suggests, through the use of the
flood, the symbolism of purification and cleansing,
perhaps offering in a novel which ends open-endedly,
some measure of hope for the future of the remaining
Joads.
Themes and Symbolism
California functions symbolically on a number of
levels, as it is intricately entwined in the book’s multiple themes. It is, in the imagination of the “Okie”
migrants, the Promised Land of the Israelites and the
Garden of Eden before the fall of humankind. In this
capacity, the state acts as the goal of a quest of epic
proportions. The quest theme had always been important in Steinbeck’s fiction, and here it takes on a special
resonance as the migrants’ quest, at the profoundest
level, is a quest not for the Holy Grail, but for a home.
The quest theme also offers an exceptional vehicle for
the depiction of westward migration, and the dreams
of the migrant “Okies” echo those of decades of pioneers driven west in the hope of a better life. However,
California—the endpoint of “westering” and the imagined land of plenty—also reveals the rottenness at its
core once the Joads experience the reality of life there.
The symbolic serpent which the Joads later find at the
heart of the Garden of Eden is foreshadowed when
Tom, driving down from the Tehachapi mountains into
the San Joaquin Valley, sees a rattlesnake in the road
and “hit it and broke it and left it squirming.” (230)
California is also the place where, instead of finding
hope fulfilled, the migrants find instead injustice and
inequality that not only matches, but surpasses the
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hard legs and yellow-nailed feet threshed slowly through the grass, not really walking, but
boosting and dragging his shell along. (14)
Surely many of the most powerful and profound
statements of the novel’s philosophy come from Jim
Casy. He is Steinbeck’s voice as Tom is Steinbeck’s
action hero. Casy offers a clear expression, for example,
for Steinbeck’s rather cloudy theory of non-teleological
thinking: “There ain’t no sin and there ain’t no virtue.
There’s just stuff people do. It’s all part of the same
thing.” (23) As Steinbeck would explain later in The Log
from the Sea of Cortez, “Non-teleological thinking concerns itself primarily not with what should be, or could
be, or might be, but rather with what actually ‘is’—
attempting at most to answer the already sufficiently
difficult questions what or how, instead of why.”104 Even
though he acknowledges that human beings are wired
to ask why, Steinbeck does make a valiant effort to
present what “is” in The Grapes of Wrath. Casy provides as well the most eloquent example of Steinbeck’s
version of the Emersonian “over-soul”:
“Maybe,” I figgered, “maybe it’s all men
an’ all women we love; maybe that’s the Holy
Sperit—the human sperit—the whole shebang.
Maybe all men got one big soul ever’body’s a
part of.” Now I sat there thinkin’ it, an’ all of a
suddent—I knew it. I knew it so deep down that
it was true, and I still know it. (24)
The greatest theme of all is this very notion of the
connectedness of all humankind—that the immediate
family is only a unit in the larger human family—and
that which affects the unit affects the whole. This is the
mature fictional expression of Steinbeck’s earlier theory
of the phalanx. Rose of Sharon’s literal and metaphoric
activity of breastfeeding at the novel’s end offers the
ultimate expression of this theme; her life-giving and
selfless action suggests the hope that it is love which
will sustain human nature and allow it, finally, to rise
above its own fallen nature.
Contemporary
Reviews of the Novel
Cover of the first edition of
The Grapes of Wrath.
The evidence shows that contemporary reviews of
the novel were widely positive, although there were,
without question, dissenting voices to the majority
opinion. Some critics praised the social consciousness
of the novel but found it artistically weak, while others
praised its artistry but disliked the message. Negative
reviews tended to paint the novel as propaganda.
Jesuit priest Arthur Spearman wrote, for example, that
“The Grapes of Wrath may be summed up as a brief,
written in terms of human misery, for the adoption of
the philosophy of life called Communism.”105 An interesting point to add to the discussion of this review is
that it was published in a Hearst newspaper, the San
Francisco Examiner. Hearst had total control of what
was printed in all of his newspapers, and in the 1930s,
Hearst was passionately opposed to Communism,
leaning instead toward fascism, soliciting and publishing columns by Mussolini and Hitler in his papers.
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injustice of the destruction of their homes and farms
in the Dust Bowl states. As part of his notion of the
“phalanx,” Steinbeck advocates for the militant actions
of the migrants who must unionize and strike if they
are to secure wages sufficient to feed their families.
Out of this enormous pitched battle between the great
land owners and the migrant workers erupts a swelling
rage, Steinbeck’s “wrath.” The “grapes” of “wrath”
suggest not only the fertility of the harvest that cannot
be picked, but also the wrath of vengeance to come.
Steinbeck even insists, in the Darwinian sense, that it
is not the great landowners who will prevail, but the
dispossessed. In this light, Steinbeck writes, “when a
majority of the people are hungry and cold they will
take by force what they need…repression works only
to strengthen and knit the repressed.” (238) Thus,
the novel operates as a prophecy, warning against
the day when the migrants will no longer accept
their utter domination, but it also raises the hope of
renewal and new life emblematized by Rose of Sharon’s
breastfeeding.
writing. Hemingway, Caldwell, Faulkner, Dos Passos in
the novel, and MacLeish in poetry are those whom we
easily think of in their similarity of theme and style.”110
An anonymous reviewer for Time wrote, arguably,
the most insightful and best summation of the novel
at the time: “The publishers believe it is ‘perhaps the
greatest modern American novel, perhaps the greatest
single creative work this country has ever produced.’ It
is not. But it is Steinbeck’s best novel, i.e., his toughest
and tenderest, his roughest written and most mellifluous, his most realistic and, in its ending, his most
melodramatic, his angriest and most idyllic. It is ‘great’
in the way that Uncle Tom’s Cabin was great—because
it is inspired propaganda, half tract, half human-interest
story, emotionalizing a great theme.….”111
It was, finally, the voice of Eleanor Roosevelt, writing
in her syndicated column “My Day,” which did more
than any other to silence the novel’s critics. “Now I
must tell you that I have just finished a book which is
an unforgettable experience in reading,” she told her
readers on June 28. “‘The Grapes of Wrath’ by John
Steinbeck both repels and attracts you…. Somewhere
I saw the criticism that this book was anti-religious, but
somehow I cannot imagine thinking of ‘Ma’ without,
at the same time, thinking of the love that ‘passeth all
understanding.’ The book is coarse in spots, but life is
coarse in spots, and the story is very beautiful in spots
just as life is…. Even from life’s sorrow some good must
come,” she concludes, “What could be a better illustration than the closing chapter of this book?”112
From Novel to Film
William Randolph Hearst, the famous
newspaper magnate, is discussed by
the characters in The Grapes of Wrath.
The immense, immediate popularity of the novel
led to enormous pressure in Hollywood to produce a
film version. Steinbeck was adamant after he sold the
film rights to the novel that his message remain intact.
Initially concerned that Darryl Zanuck might water
down the politics of his novel, Steinbeck was placated
when Zanuck insisted that he believed in the novel and
that a detective agency he’d hired to investigate the
truth of Steinbeck’s portrayal had found that conditions among the migrants were much worse than even
Steinbeck had claimed.113 Furthermore, Steinbeck’s
concerns were further allayed once he met Nunnally
Johnson, the screenwriter for the film. Johnson assured
Steinbeck that he would do the story “straight,” building Steinbeck’s confidence in him to the point that
Steinbeck told him: “A novel and a screenplay are two
different things. Do whatever you wish with the book.
I’ve already made my statement. Now it’s up to you to
make yours.”114 It was not, however, Johnson’s vision
alone that would shape the film—that vision was also
in the hands of the director, John Ford.
As is the case with many film adaptations of novels,
the film version of The Grapes of Wrath has largely
been examined for its faithfulness to the novel, for what
it kept in as well as what was left out. Most important
among the changes from text to film is the exclusion of
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Another reviewer, Burton Rascoe, attacked the
novel’s unity, “The book has beautiful and, even magnificent, passages in it; but it is not well organized; I
can’t quite see what the book is about, except that
there are ‘no frontiers left and no place to go.’”106
Philip Rahv writes, “But the novel is far too didactic and
long-winded. In addition to the effects that are peculiar
to his own manner, Mr. Steinbeck has assembled in
this one book all the familiar faults of the ‘proletarian’
mode.”107
Balancing these and other negative views were
numerous reviews which sang the novel’s praises.
Charles Poore wrote, “here, his [Steinbeck’s] counterpoint of the general and the particular—the full
sweep of the migration and the personal affairs of all
of the Joads—has the true air of inevitability.”108 Clifton
Fadiman, a well-known reviewer for the New Yorker,
wrote: “What sticks with me is that here is a book, nonpolitical, non-dogmatic, which dramatizes so that you
can’t forget it, the terrible facts of a wholesale injustice
committed by society.”109 Noting his similarity to other
great writers of the decade, Peter Monro Jack wrote,
“There are a few novelists writing as well as Steinbeck
and perhaps a very few who write better; but it is most
interesting to note how very much alike they are all
the novel’s final scene, possibly due largely to fears that
it would not pass the censors. Also, Rose of Sharon’s
dead baby disappears in the film, as do the Wilsons
and the Wainwrights. Naturally the action required
compacting to fit within the film’s timeframe, and the
film’s translation of the novel meant that Johnson and
Ford had to select plot elements that would advance
the film story most compellingly. Needless to say,
many of the philosophical portions of the interchapters
would not easily translate into a film story.
In a convincing article that argues for the film’s visual
artistry, Vivian Sobchack claims that criticism of the film
has largely ignored its visual presence in favor of examining the film as an adaptation of a novel. Rather than
look only at the film plot, or what happens, Sobchack
contends, critics need to attend to what the film
sees.115 Early criticism of the film tended to highlight its
documentary realism, aligning it with the work of Pare
Lorentz or Dorothea Lange; however, Sobchack argues,
John Ford’s film is essentially different from Steinbeck’s
novel in that it is a “politically conservative and poetic
work whose major theme is the value and resilience of
the American family.”116 This assessment of the film,
Conclusion: The Place of The
Grapes of Wrath in the Discourse
of the Great Depression
The Grapes of Wrath is widely considered Steinbeck’s
masterpiece; in fact, many critics argue that none
of his work that followed attained this mastery of
form and theme, and critics have likewise contended
that Steinbeck was awarded the Nobel Prize for fiction largely on the strength of this one great novel.
Although much was written during and about the Great
Depression—documentaries, “proletarian” novels, and
poetry—no other single work captures life in the
moment as does this novel. It is the mythic tale of the
Great Depression, giving symbolic expression to the
dispossession and homelessness that were the reality
of the times.
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A still from the film version of The
Grapes of Wrath, depicting the Joad
family as they prepare to leave Oklahoma
in search of a better life in California.
she continues, is a result of apprehending the visual
imagery rather than the content alone. John Ford,
claims Sobchack, made a film consistent with his “own
values and personal vision.”117 For Sobchack, the visual
interest in the film is on the Joads as “an isolated and
universal family unit which transcends the particularity
and specificity of time and place.”118
The film accomplishes this aim in several ways: 1)
by closing in on the Joads, rather than moving out to
the presence of thousands of migrants; 2) by ignoring the land imagery of the novel and omitting wide
open spaces; 3) by the tight framing of shots of the
Joads filmed in interior spaces; 4) by “tableaux-like
posturing of the characters”119; and 5) by chiaroscuro
lighting that highlights points of light in a film whose
background is largely dark. Ford creates a visual tale
which, in Sobchack’s view, attains mythic proportions.
As critic Warren French noted, Ford aimed at “abstracting the Joads from any particular context and treating
them as ageless figures of dispossessed wanderers.”120
Ultimately, for Sobchack, the tone of the film takes on
the abstractness of the interchapters while at the same
time applying it to the concreteness of the Joads. Ma
Joad’s final affirmation at the end of the film underscores Ford’s articulation of the family as the basic
unit of community: “We’ll go on forever, Pa. We’re the
people.”121
SECTION
III:
Introduction: Relationship
to the Theme and to The
Grapes of Wrath
T
he disaster that was the Great Depression in
America was impossible for writers and artists
to ignore; hence the rise in proletarian, or working-class literature, a genre whose quintessential
expression may well be Steinbeck’s The Grapes of
Wrath. The writers whose works serve here as supplemental readings on the theme of the Great Depression,
however, responded to their historical moment of the
1930s in a variety of ways—from full engagement and
membership in the Communist Party USA to a refusal
to associate with leftist causes and a determination to
remain, in the creation of art, as aloof as possible from
the politics of the moment.
Of all of the writers examined in these pages,
Meridel Le Sueur was the most avowedly radical. Le
Sueur remained a member of the Communist Party
USA all of her life and helped develop “reportage,” a
sub-genre of proletarian literature. Le Sueur published
regularly in the leftist journal New Masses and worked
on its staff; she worked on the New Deal’s Federal
Writers’ Project; and, in 1935, she was the only woman
who spoke at the American Writers’ Congress and
the only female member of the Congress’ Presiding
Committee. At the American Writers Congress of 1937,
Le Sueur found herself in the company of such distinguished male writers as Van Wyck Brooks, Malcolm
Cowley, Erskine Caldwell, Ernest Hemingway, Langston
Hughes, Upton Sinclair, and Archibald MacLeish; and
while there she was elected a vice president of the
League of American Writers.
Following the publication of her 1940 collection
Salute to Spring, critic Alfred Kazin wrote, “Le Sueur
is in some respects the most intense and self-consciously workmanlike artist proletarian literature has
produced.”122 Le Sueur herself acknowledged that her
art came before adherence to the Communist Party
line, and her themes of solidarity among the working
class and the belief in dignity and the unquenchable
human spirit anticipate Steinbeck’s themes in The
Grapes of Wrath.
Carl Sandburg’s leftist affiliations were more radical
in the 1920s than in the 1930s, when, as an older man
with a family to support, he chose a more moderate
political position. By the thirties, Sandburg was too
well known and self-supporting to be a candidate for
the Federal Writers’ Project, but he never lost his sense
of solidarity with the working classes and their suffering
during the Great Depression. When asked about his
political affiliations, Sandburg replied:
I belong to everything and nothing. If I must
characterize the element I am most often active
with, I would say I am with all rebels everywhere
all the time as against all people who are satisfied. I am for any and all immediate measures
that will curb the insanity of any person or
institution cursed with a thirst for more things,
utilities and properties than he, she or it is able
to use, occupy and employ to the advantage of
the race.123
Concerned, as Le Sueur had been, about unsettling
and tipping the delicate balance of art and politics
toward propaganda, Sandburg emerges as the public poet of the thirties, giving poetic expression to
the themes of the dispossessed, as Le Sueur had, in
advance of Steinbeck.
Langston Hughes, like Sandburg, was politically
radical but stopped just short of affiliating himself
with the Communist Party USA. Hughes, though, was
sufficiently radical to attract the attention of Senator
Joseph McCarthy’s Permanent Subcommittee on
Investigations in 1953 and was required to testify about
his political affiliations in March 1953. Hughes insisted,
in a prepared statement to the committee, that his
radical poetry, especially “Goodbye Christ,” had been
misinterpreted and misunderstood:
“And behind the poem,” Hughes continued,
“is a pity and a sorrow that this should be taken
by some as meaning to them that Christianity
and religion in general has no value. Because of
the publication of this poem—which more than
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Shorter Selections
Hughes’s dilemma, how to defend his poetry and
his politics, put him at risk, as it had Le Sueur. Both
writers suffered for their devotion to causes which they
believed were just, and both suffered the backlash of an
intensive Cold War reaction against communism during
the 1950s. Hughes’s sense of political engagement
was enhanced by his passion to right the wrongs of
racial injustice and his sense of the core of his poetry—
Hughes said that it was “the Negro people who have
given me the materials out of which my poems and
stories, plays and songs, have come; and who, over
the years, have given me as well their love and understanding and support. Without them, on my part, there
would have been no poems….”125 Thus, Hughes’s work
expands Steinbeck’s portrait of the dispossessed farm
worker to add those disenfranchised by virtue of their
racial “otherness.”
Like Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston was an important
participant in a modernist aesthetic produced by the
flowering of “Negro” art in the Harlem Renaissance
movement of the twenties and thirties. Although her
work was political to its very core and as passionately devoted to the black experience in America as
was Hughes’s, Hurston was defiant about the artistry,
strength, and complexity of her portrayal of “Negro”
life. “But I am not tragically colored,” she wrote,
adding:
Staff members of the Federal
Writers’ Project, a governmentsponsored program that at its
peak supported about 6,500
writers throughout the country.
“There is no great sorrow dammed up in my
soul, nor lurking behind my eyes. I do not mind
at all. I do not belong to the sobbing school of
Negrohood who hold that nature somehow has
given them a lowdown dirty deal and whose feelings are all hurt about it. Even in the helter-skirmish that is my life, I have seen that the world is
to the strong regardless of a little pigmentation
more or less. No, I do not weep at the world—I
am too busy sharpening my oyster knife.”126
Hurston’s honing her knife to find the hidden treasure at the heart of the world’s oyster also operates as
a metaphor for the continual sharpening of her craft. In
her work and in her life, Hurston utterly rejected a view
of African Americans as perpetually victimized; rather,
she celebrated black life and felt that she could, at
times, transcend it.
“At certain times,” she wrote, “I have no race,
I am me…. The cosmic Zora emerges. I belong
to no race nor time. I am the eternal feminine
with its string of beads.”127
And while Hurston’s characters in the thirties may
seem far less touched by the Great Depression than
Steinbeck’s, they are, nonetheless, working class, with
the same values as the Joads—the belief in love, community, the family, and the dignity of the human spirit.
William Faulkner’s political views, in the company
of the writers studied here, seem to be the most submerged in his art, barely glimpsed in troubled moments
in his texts. Yet Faulkner, along with the other writers,
lived through the Great Depression and could hardly
keep it from surfacing in his work. Faulkner clearly situates himself within the camp of high modernists; this
view is especially visible in his critique of those writers,
like Sandburg, whose art, in his view, slid over the edge
into propaganda. But Faulkner’s grasp of the supremacy and purity of aesthetics is always tenuous, as the
ambiguity in his work amply demonstrates.
In his fiction of the 1930s, Faulkner clearly demonstrates his awareness of the plight of the southern
sharecropper, but his own social position as landowner
and farmer complicates the level of his response. His
protagonist in “Barn Burning,” Colonel Sartoris Snopes,
embodies this very conflict and ambiguity; for “Sarty”
is named for a southern aristocrat and Confederate
hero but is born into the lower, sharecropping Snopes
family. His very name indicates that he’s caught in the
middle between two cultural and ethical codes. Yet, filtered through Sarty’s interior monologue, the narrator
is able to achieve an aesthetic distance from the actual
burning of Major de Spain’s barn, which Sarty never
sees, heightening the formal complexity of the text.
While Faulkner’s narrator in the story drops numerous hints of what Sarty might think or how he will
assess the events of the story later in life, Sarty fades
from Faulkner’s canon after this story, appearing only
anonymously in the summary of the events in “Barn
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fifteen years ago I withdrew from publication and
which has since been used entirely without my
permission by groups interested in fomenting
racial and social discord, I have been termed on
occasion, a Communist or an atheist.”124
More importantly, though, for his own evolving body
of work was Terkel’s involvement with the oral history
projects compiled by the Federal Writers’ Project—
Terkel points particularly to collections of American
folklore and narratives of former slaves compiled by the
writers Benjamin Botkin, Jack Conroy, and Zora Neale
Hurston as models for his own work.130 In addition to
working with the Federal Writers’ Project, Terkel acted
and wrote for the radio. In this capacity, Terkel came to
know many of the jazz greats of the twentieth century;
Mahalia Jackson’s career was launched, in part, on
Terkel’s radio show, and they remained friends until her
death in 1972. Country blues singer, Big Bill Broonzy,
a huge influence on younger blues musicians, was
another friend and inspiration.
In 1950, Terkel’s work on the radio had become
so popular that for three years he hosted a television
show, “Studs’ Place,” which offered folk music and talk.
But Terkel’s leftist politics brought him to the attention
of the McCarthy Committee on Un-American Activities,
and he became one of many artists blacklisted from
television and film work because of his politics in the
1930s. Terkel admitted that his passionate beliefs
made it difficult for him to be totally objective: “Then
came television in the 1950s,” Terkel said, “Don’t make
Studs Terkel (1912–2008) and
Hard Times: An Oral History
of the Great Depression
“No one has done more to expand the American
library of voices than Studs Terkel. He has quite literally defined the art of the oral history.”128
—President Bill Clinton, upon awarding the National
Humanities Medal to Studs Terkel in 1997
Louis “Studs” Terkel was a young man in Chicago
during the early years of the Great Depression, matriculating at the University of Chicago and graduating in
1934 with a degree in law. Terkel never practiced as a
lawyer, though, choosing instead to join the Federal
Writers’ Project component of the Works Progress
Administration. Terkel not only had the opportunity to
work on the famous state guides produced by the project, but also wrote radio scripts on a variety of issues,
including national concerns like homelessness and the
work week as well as informational and educational
programs. Terkel recalls in an interview, for example,
working with curators at the Art Institute of Chicago to
develop radio programs on the work of painters like
Daumier, Van Gogh, and Albert Pinkham Ryder.129
Photograph of author and
activist Studs Terkel.
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Burning” that appears in the first book of The Hamlet
(1940). This fact may well signal that despite his obvious
intelligence, Sarty is too young and too sympathetic a
character to serve as an adequate and ongoing vehicle
for Faulkner’s vision of the rise of the Snopes clan.
It is not possible to align oneself, as a reader, in
sympathy with the many members of Faulkner’s Snopes
family. They migrate and infiltrate, consuming the land
and compromising, as Faulkner depicts them, and as
other characters view them, the integrity of the South.
Unlike Steinbeck, Faulkner leans toward sympathy with
the southern landowner and not with the migrant wave
of sharecroppers who seek land to farm in a South sunk
in a depression long before 1929. Steinbeck’s Joads, on
the other hand, are always the focus of the reader’s and
the author’s sympathy, constantly demonstrating their
strength and unity in adversity, victims refusing to give
in to forces beyond their control.
Studs Terkel, writing more than thirty years later
than any of the other authors, recalls the Joads in his
compendium of voices from the Great Depression,
Hard Times, using their collective vision and their
plight to help in the work of reconstructing the past
through memory. His interviewees echo again and
again the themes of Steinbeck’s novel. The voices of
“Yip” Harburg and Cesar Chavez rise from the group.
Harburg delivers an anthem that sings of the dignity of
the hundreds of thousands of people like the Joads,
while Chavez offers a story of a Mexican-American farm
working family that parallels the story of the Joads’
towering strength in the face of adversity.
Yip Harburg, popular song lyricist
and author of “Brother Can You
Spare a Dime?” and many other
well-known popular standards.
glamorous people. But who were those millions down
through the centuries—the anonymous many?”133
In 1989, Terkel recorded several passages from The
Grapes of Wrath for National Public Radio (NPR), one of
them Tom Joad’s famous “I’ll be ever’where” speech.
The Grapes of Wrath, Terkel told Susan Stamberg of
NPR, is “an anthem to what I call the human community.”134 When he was interviewed on NPR on October 24,
2005, Terkel spoke eloquently of his belief in the human
community. “My own beliefs,” Terkel said, “came into
being during the most traumatic moment in American
history: The Great American Depression of the 1930s. I
was 17 at the time, and I saw on the sidewalks pots and
pans and bedsteads and mattresses. A family had just
been evicted and there was an individual cry of despair
multiplied by millions….this is my belief,” Terkel continued, “that it’s the community in action that accomplishes more than any individual does, no matter how
strong he may be.”135
Pointing to Thomas Paine, as Steinbeck does in The
Grapes of Wrath,136 Terkel writes, “He sees his species
not with the inhuman idea of a natural enemy…. He
sees his species as kindred.”137 In a situation where truth
has “the liberty of appearing,” man, argues Terkel, following Paine, “becomes what he ought to be.” “And
that happens to be my belief,” concludes Terkel, “and
I’ll put it into three words: community in action.”138
There is a shared theme that exists, therefore,
between Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath and Terkel’s
Hard Times despite the fact that thirty-one years
separate their respective publications—it is the belief
in the greatness of the human family. In 1986, Terkel
added a Foreword to a new edition of Hard Times;
Steinbeck’s novel was much on his mind. In the midst of
ebullient headlines about the prosperity of the nation,
Terkel sensed deep-rooted similarities to the Great
Depression, especially in the case of the family farmer,
and he pointed to a recent case of murder-suicide by
a small Iowa farmer. “Who do I shoot? cried out Muley
Graves,” Terkel quotes from The Grapes of Wrath,
“Muley was a small farmer of the Thirties. The Iowan
was a small farmer of the Eighties. Though a half-century separates them, their tether’s end was commonly
caused: neither could meet the payments.”139 “Then
and now” is the phrase that Terkel uses to raise the
alarm about similarities in the economic environment
of 1986 to that of the 1930s. The conclusion to his
foreword insists on remembering the past to understand the present and prepare for the future: “Ours,
the richest country in the world, may be the poorest
in memory. Perhaps the remembrances of survivors of
a time past may serve as a reminder to others. Or to
themselves.”140
Hard Times records the memories of more than 160
people who either lived through the Great Depression
or knew it through the shared memories of their parents or grandparents. Terkel arranged the collection
into five books, each divided into chapters whose titles
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waves, they say, meaning be quiet, don’t rock the boat.
We’ve got to make waves if something is wrong, you’ve
got to rock the boat, otherwise we’ll get nowhere.”131
Terkel lists among his heroes “Battling Bob” La Follette,
the Progressive Party’s candidate for President in 1924.
Terkel understood that early in his career La Follette
had been a champion for the underdog, and the La
Follette Commission report Violations of Free Speech
and Rights of Labor (1940) serves as factual support
both for Terkel’s beliefs about the Great Depression
and Steinbeck’s fictional representation of the plight of
the migrant worker.
In 1997, Terkel was awarded the National Humanities
Medal for “significant contributions to the nation’s
cultural life.”132 Among his many achievements are
an impressive list of oral histories in addition to Hard
Times: Giants of Jazz (1957), Working: People Talk
About What They Do All Day and How They Feel
About What They Do (1974), “The Good War”: An
Oral History of World War II (1984), and Race: How
Blacks and Whites Think and Feel About the American
Obsession (1992). The predominant subject of many of
these works is announced in their titles; Terkel was able
to get ordinary people, largely, to reveal deep ambivalence about difficult subjects like race, or the war, or
even their daily working lives. Armed with only a tape
recorder, Terkel found a way to get people to open up
to him and to share their memories. For Terkel, history
isn’t only about the rich and famous, rather, his method
of writing history is from the bottom up. In an interview,
Terkel explained: “Who were the people we have a history of? They are generals, presidents, big shots, and
“It’s the question Pa Joad asked of Preacher
Casy, when the ragged man, in a transient camp,
poured out his California agony. Pa said, ‘S’pose
he’s tellin’ the truth—that fella?’ The preacher
answered, ‘He’s tellin’ the truth, awright. The
truth for him. He wasn’t makin’ nothin’ up.’ ‘How
about us?’ Tom demanded. ‘Is that the truth
for us?’ ‘I don’ know,’ said Casy…the preacher
spoke for the people in this book, too. In their
rememberings are their truths.”142
SEL EC T ED W ORK :
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W
“The Song,” Interview with
Yip Harburg, from Hard
Times: An Oral History
of the Great Depression
(1970) by Studs Terkel
Published by Pantheon Books. Reprinted by permission of
Donadio & Olson, Inc. Copyright 1970 Studs Terkel.
The Song
Once in khaki suits,
Gee, we looked swell,
Full of that Yankee Doodle-de-dum.
Half a million boots went sloggin’ through Hell,
I was the kid with the drum.
Say, don’t you remember, they called me Al—
It was Al all the time.
Say, don’t you remember I’m your pal—
Brother, can you spare a dime.1
E. Y. (Yip) Harburg
Song lyricist and writer of light verse. Among the works in which his
lyrics were sung are: Finian’s Rainbow, The Bloomer Girl, Jamaica,
The Wizard of Oz and Earl Carroll’s Vanities.
I NEVER LIKED the idea of living on scallions in a
left bank garret. I like writing in comfort. So I went
into business, a classmate and I. I thought I’d retire
in a year or two. And a thing called Collapse, bango!
socked everything out. 1929. All I had left was a
pencil.
Luckily, I had a friend named Ira Gershwin, and he
said to me, “You’ve got your pencil. Get your rhyming
dictionary and go to work.” I did. There was nothing
else to do. I was doing light verse at the time, writing
a poem here and there for ten bucks a crack. It was an
era when kids at college were interested in light verse
and ballads and sonnets. This is the early Thirties.
I was relieved when the Crash came. I was released.
Being in business was something I detested. When I
found that I could sell a song or a poem, I became me,
I became alive. Other people didn’t see it that way.
They were throwing themselves out of windows.
Someone who lost money found that his life was
gone. When I lost my possessions, I found my creativity. I felt I was being born for the first time. So for me
the world became beautiful.
With the Crash, I realized that the greatest fantasy
of all was business. The only realistic way of making a
living was versifying. Living off your imagination.
We thought American business was the Rock of
Gibraltar. We were the prosperous nation, and nothing could stop us now. A brownstone house was
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suggest keynotes for the reflections that are recorded
there. “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” the
third chapter of Book One, for example, records the
reflections of several men and women of the Beatles
generation—in their teens and early twenties in 1970—
who have heard about the Great Depression from their
grandparents. The lines from the Lennon/McCartney
song that Terkel chooses as an epigraph to the section
suggest the span of a generation and the theme of
recalling the past: “It was twenty years ago today,/Sgt.
Pepper taught the band to play….”141
Terkel skillfully weaves several musical themes
through the chapters, using lines from “Yip” Harburg’s
“Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?,” Billie Holliday’s
“God Bless The Child,” and “The Farmer Is the Man,”
whose titles clearly suggest the dominant ideas of the
sections which they head. Other chapter headings
reflect an event that serves as the catalyst for shared
memory—“Three Strikes,” “The March”—or the professions of those interviewed—“At the Clinic,” “The
Gentleman from Kansas”—or the topic of the section—“Concerning the New Deal,” “The Doctor, Huey
and Mr. Smith,” “Evictions, Arrests, and Other Running
Sores.”
The people Terkel chose for this collection range
from several recognizable names to the many unknown.
Among the known are Senator Russell Long (Democrat,
Louisiana), the son of Louisiana Governor Huey Long,
who was assassinated in 1935 at the Capitol Building
in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Long reminisces about his
father, who lived, he believed “thirty years ahead of
his time.” Other recognizable names include theater
critic Pauline Kael, actress Myrna Loy, singer Country
Joe McDonald, farm worker activist César Chávez, and
author José Yglesias. But these are the minority—their
voices are no more important than those of the vast
majority of unknowns, also telling their stories.
Terkel doesn’t explain the details of his working
methodology in the interviews, nor does he offer an
introduction that outlines when and where the interviews were conducted, how selections were made, or
what editing policies he employed. He does offer a
“Personal Memoir” by way of introduction, which alternates between the collective and the personal. Terkel
balances italicized passages that provide impressionistic samplings of the memoirs collected in the book and
blocks of text in normal print that recount Terkel’s own
memories of the Great Depression. At the beginning,
Terkel raises the question of validity—how does one
find truth in the flow of memories? Once again invoking
Steinbeck, Terkel writes:
the network radio people were told to lay low on the
song. In some cases, they tried to ban it from the air.
But it was too late. The song had already done its
damage.
NOTES:
1. “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” words by E. Y. Harburg, music
by Jay Gorney. Copyright 1932 by Harms, Inc. Used by permission
of Warner Bros—Seven Arts Music. All rights reserved.
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SEL EC T ED W ORK :
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“Cesar Chavez,” from
Hard Times: An Oral
History of the Great
Depression (1970)
by Studs Terkel
Published by Pantheon Books. Reprinted by permission of
Donadio & Olson, Inc. Copyright 1970 Studs Terkel.
Cesar Chavez
Like so many who have worked from early childhood, particularly
in the open country, he appears older than his forty-one years. His
manner is diffident, his voice soft. He is president of the United
Farm Workers of America (UFWA). It is, unlike craft and industrial
unions, a quite new labor fraternity, in contrast to these others,
agricultural workers—those who “follow the crops”—had been
excluded from many of the benefits that came along with the New
Deal.
OH, I REMEMBER having to move out of our
house. My father had brought in a team of horses and
a wagon. We had always lived in that house, and we
couldn’t understand why we were moving out. When
we got to the other house, it was a worse house, a
poor house. That must have been around 1934. I was
about six years old.
It’s known as the North Gila Valley, about fifty miles
north of Yuma. My dad was being turned out of his
small plot of land. He had inherited this from his father,
who had homesteaded it. I saw my two, three other
uncles also moving out. And for the same reason. The
bank had foreclosed on the loan.
If the local bank approved, the Government would
guarantee the loan and small farmers like my father
would continue in business. It so happened the president of the bank was the guy who most wanted our
land. We were surrounded by him: he owned all the
land around us. Of course, he wouldn’t pass the loan.
One morning a giant tractor came in, like we had
never seen before. My daddy used to do all his work
with horses. So this huge tractor came in and began
to knock down this corral, this small corral where my
father kept his horses. We didn’t understand why. In
the matter of a week, the whole face of the land was
changed. Ditches were dug, and it was different. I
didn’t like it as much.
We all of us climbed into an old Chevy that my dad
had. And then we were in California, and migratory
workers. There were five kids—a small family by those
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forever. You gave it to your kids and they put marble
fronts on it. There was a feeling of continuity. If you
made it, it was there forever. Suddenly the big dream
exploded. The impact was unbelievable.
I was walking along the street at that time, and
you’d see the bread lines. The biggest one in New
York City was owned by William Randolph Hearst. He
had a big truck with several people on it, and big cauldrons of hot soup, bread. Fellows with burlap on their
shoes were lined up all around Columbus Circle, and
went for blocks and blocks around the park, waiting.
There was a skit in one of the first shows I did,
Americana. This was 1930. In the sketch, Mrs. Ogden
Reid of the Herald Tribune was very jealous of Hearst’s
beautiful bread line. It was bigger than her bread line.
It was a satiric, volatile show. We needed a song for
it.
On stage, we had men in old soldiers’ uniforms,
dilapidated, waiting around. And then into the song.
We had to have a title. And how do you do a song so
it isn’t maudlin? Not to say: my wife is sick, I’ve got six
children, the Crash put me out of business, hand me a
dime. I hate songs of that kind. I hate songs that are
on the nose. I don’t like songs that describe a historic
moment pitifully.
The prevailing greeting at that time, on every
block you passed, by some poor guy coming up, was:
“Can you spare a dime?” Or: “Can you spare something for a cup of coffee?”…“Brother, Can You Spare
a Dime?” finally hit on every block, on every street. I
thought that could be a beautiful title. If I could only
work it out by telling people, through the song, it isn’t
just a man asking for a dime.
This is the man who says: I built the railroads. I built
that tower. I fought your wars. I was the kid with the
drum. Why the hell should I be standing in line now?
What happened to all this wealth I created?
I think that’s what made the song. Of course,
together with the idea and meaning, a song must
have poetry. It must have the phrase that rings a bell.
The art of song writing is a craft. Yet, “Brother, Can
You Spare a Dime?” opens up a political question.
Why should this man be penniless at any time in his
life, due to some fantastic thing called a Depression
or sickness or whatever it is that makes him so
insecure?
In the song the man is really saying: I made an
investment in this country. Where the hell are my
dividends? Is it a dividend to say: “Can you spare a
dime?” What the hell is wrong? Let’s examine this
thing. It’s more than just a bit of pathos. It doesn’t
reduce him to a beggar. It makes him a dignified
human, asking questions—and a bit outraged, too, as
he should be.
Everybody picked the song up in ‘30 and ‘31.
Bands were playing it and records were made.
When Roosevelt was a candidate for President, the
Republicans got pretty worried about it. Some of
That piece of land he wanted…?
No, never. It never happened. He stopped talking
about that some years ago. The drive for land, it’s a
very powerful drive.
When we moved to California, we would work after
school. Sometimes we wouldn’t go. “Following the
crops,” we missed much school. Trying to get enough
money to stay alive the following winter, the whole
family picking apricots, walnuts, prunes. We were
pretty new, we had never been migratory workers.
We were taken advantage of quite a bit by the labor
contractor and the crew pusher.1 In some pretty silly
ways. (Laughs.)
Sometimes we can’t help but laugh about it. We
trusted everybody that came around. You’re traveling
in California with all your belongings in your car: it’s
obvious. Those days we didn’t have a trailer. This is
bait for the labor contractor. Anywhere we stopped,
there was a labor contractor offering all kinds of jobs
and good wages, and we were always deceived by
them and we always went. Trust them.
Coming into San Jose, not finding—being lied to,
that there was work. We had no money at all, and had
to live on the outskirts of town under a bridge and
dry creek. That wasn’t really unbearable. What was
unbearable was so many families living just a quarter
of a mile. And you know how kids are. They’d bring
in those things that really hurt us quite a bit. Most of
those kids were middle-class families.
We got hooked on a real scheme once. We were
going by Fresno on our way to Delano. We stopped at
some service station and this labor contractor saw the
car. He offered a lot of money. We went. We worked
the first week: the grapes were pretty bad and we
couldn’t make much. We all stayed off from school in
order to make some money. Saturday we were to be
paid and we didn’t get paid. He came and said the
winery hadn’t paid him. We’d have money next week.
He gave us $10. My dad took the $10 and went to
the store and bought $10 worth of groceries. So we
worked another week and in the middle of the second
week, my father was asking him for his last week’s pay,
and he had the same excuse. This went on and we’d
get $5 or $10 or $7 a week for about four weeks. For
the whole family.
So one morning my father made the resolution no
more work. If he doesn’t pay us, we won’t work. We
got in a car and went over to see him. The house was
empty. He had left. The winery said they had paid him
and they showed us where they had paid him. This
man had taken it.
Labor strikes were everywhere. We were one of the
strikingest families, I guess. My dad didn’t like the conditions, and he began to agitate. Some families would
follow, and we’d go elsewhere. Sometimes we’d come
back. We couldn’t find a job elsewhere, so we’d come
back. Sort of beg for a job. Employers would know
and they would make it very humiliating….
Did these strikes ever win?
Never.
We were among these families who always honored somebody else’s grievance. Somebody would
have a personal grievance with the employer. He’d say
I’m not gonna work for this man. Even though we were
working, we’d honor it. We felt we had to. So we’d
walk out, too. Because we were prepared to honor
those things, we caused many of the things ourselves.
If we were picking at a piece rate and we knew they
were cheating on the weight, we wouldn’t stand for it.
So we’d lose the job, and we’d go elsewhere. There
were other families like that.
Sometimes when you had to come back, the contractor knew this…?
They knew it, and they rubbed it in quite well. Sort
of shameful to come back. We were trapped. We’d
have to do it for a few days to get enough money to
get enough gas.
One of the experiences I had. We went through
Indio, California. Along the highway there were signs
in most of the small restaurants that said “White Trade
Only.” My dad read English, but he didn’t really know
the meaning. He went in to get some coffee—a pot
that he had, to get some coffee for my mother. He
asked us not to come in, but we followed him anyway. And this young waitress said, “We don’t serve
Mexicans here. Get out of here.” I was there, and I saw
it and heard it. She paid no more attention. I’m sure
for the rest of her life she never thought of it again.
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standards. It must have been around ‘36. I was about
eight. Well, it was a strange life. We had been poor,
but we knew every night there was a bed there, and
that this was our room. There was a kitchen. It was sort
of a settled life, and we had chickens and hogs, eggs
and all those things. But that all of a sudden changed.
When you’re small, you can’t figure these things out.
You know something’s not right and you don’t like it,
but you don’t question it and you don’t let that get
you down. You sort of just continue to move.
But this had quite an impact on my father. He had
been used to owning the land and all of a sudden
there was no more land. What I heard…what I made
out of conversations between my mother and my
father—things like, we’ll work this season and then
we’ll get enough money and we’ll go and buy a piece
of land in Arizona. Things like that. Became like a
habit. He never gave up hope that some day he would
come back and get a little piece of land.
I can understand very, very well this feeling. These
conversations were sort of melancholy. I guess my
brothers and my sisters could also see this very sad
look on my father’s face.
NOTES:
1. “That’s a man who specializes in contracting human beings to do
cheap labor.”
Hard Times
The chapter that contains E. Y. (Yip) Harburg’s memories is simply titled “The Song.” Harburg’s “Brother,
Can You Spare a Dime?” became the anthem of the
Great Depression, but Harburg also wrote lyrics for
songs in the films Finian’s Rainbow, Jamaica, and The
Wizard of Oz. Harburg remembers that the inspiration of composer Ira Gershwin got him working, but
also recalls that, paradoxically, the work and the Great
Depression gave him freedom. Harburg believes that
only through losing his possessions did he find his creativity. “So for me,” he told Terkel, “the world became
beautiful.”
Remembering the bread lines, Harburg writes about
the biggest one in New York, run by William Randolph
Hearst. “Fellows with burlap on their shoes were lined
up all around Columbus Circle, and went for blocks
and blocks around the park, waiting.” A satiric skit in a
show Harburg did caricatured another wealthy person,
Mrs. Ogden Reid, and her jealousy of Hearst’s “beautiful” bread line and offered Harburg the opportunity to
reach for a song that would do more than tell people
about a man asking for a dime. “This is the man who
says: I built the railroads. I built that tower. I fought
your wars…. Why the hell should I be standing in line
now?” The song, Harburg felt, matched the artistry of
song with a political message—that from an investment in the country should come a dividend, and the
man asking for a dime is not a beggar but a “dignified
human, asking questions—and a bit outraged, too, as
he should be.”
By the time Roosevelt was running for President,
Harburg concludes, the song was everywhere, and try
though they might, the Republicans could not suppress it. “The song had already done its damage.” In
1973, Terkel selected several interviews from the book
Photograph of labor leader and
civil rights activist César Chávez.
n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n
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But every time we thought of it, it hurt us. So we got
back in the car and we had a difficult time trying—in
fact, we never got the coffee. These are sort of unimportant, but they’re…you remember ‘em very well.
One time there was a little diner across the tracks
in Brawley. We used to shine shoes after school.
Saturday was a good day. We used to shine shoes for
three cents, two cents. Hamburgers were then, as I
remember, seven cents. There was this little diner all
the way across town. The moment we stepped across
the tracks, the police stopped us. They would let us
go there, to what we called “the American town,” the
Anglo town, with a shoe shine box. We went to this
little place and we walked in.
There was this young waitress again. With either
her boyfriend or someone close, because they were
involved in conversation. And there was this familiar
sign again, but we paid no attention to it. She looked
up at us and she sort of—it wasn’t what she said, it
was just a gesture. A sort of gesture of total rejection. Her hand, you know, and the way she turned her
face away from us. She said: “Wattaya want?” So we
told her we’d like to buy two hamburgers. She sort of
laughed, a sarcastic sort of laugh. And she said, “Oh,
we don’t sell to Mexicans. Why don’t you go across to
Mexican town, you can buy ‘em over there.” And then
she turned around and continued her conversation.
She never knew how much she was hurting us. But
it stayed with us.
We’d go to school two days sometimes, a week,
two weeks, three weeks at most. This is when we were
migrating. We’d come back to our winter base, and if
we were lucky, we’d get in a good solid all of January,
February, March, April, May. So we had five months
out of a possible nine months. We started counting
how many schools we’d been to and we counted
thirty-seven. Elementary schools. From first to eighth
grade. Thirty-seven. We never got a transfer. Friday
we didn’t tell the teacher or anything. We’d just go
home. And they accepted this.
I remember one teacher—I wondered why she was
asking so many questions. (In those days anybody
asked questions, you became suspicious. Either a cop
or a social worker.) She was a young teacher, and she
just wanted to know why we were behind. One day
she drove into the camp. That was quite an event,
because we never had a teacher come over. Never. So
it was, you know, a very meaningful day for us.
This I remember. Some people put this out of their
minds and forget it. I don’t. I don’t want to forget it. I
don’t want it to take the best of me, but I want to be
there because this is what happened. This is the truth,
you know. History.
like the Joads, the Chávez family felt the hateful nature
of racism when they encountered, in restaurants on
the highway, signs that read “White Trade Only” and
employees who refused to serve Mexicans. But Chávez
also remembers an act of kindness, a teacher who took
the trouble to drive out to the migrant camp to find
out what the conditions were like there for the children.
“This I remember,” Chávez closes. “Some people put
this out of their minds and forget it. I don’t. I don’t want
to forget it. I don’t want it to take the best of me, but I
want to be there because this is what happened. This
is the truth, you know. History.”
Meridel Le Sueur (1900–96)
and “Women on the Breadlines”
“I am not a writer, just a recorder. The greatest
poetry is in the people.”145
— Meridel Le Sueur
While many similarities exist between the experiences Meridel Le Sueur records in “Women on the
Breadlines” and the memories of Studs Terkel, Yip
Harburg, and César Chávez, Le Sueur’s is not a memoir
of the past but a text written in the present tense as
events happen—“I am sitting in the city free employment bureau.” Whereas Terkel looks back in 1970 to
Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath for similarities in
message, Le Sueur, writing earlier in the 1930s, looks
ahead, in works like this piece and “We Are Marching,”
toward the leftist activism of Steinbeck’s novel. Le
Photograph of author and
activist Meridel Le Sueur.
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to broadcast on his radio show; one of them is the
interview with Harburg, who plays the guitar and sings
“Brother, Can You Spare a Dime” softly throughout
while, in a voice-over, he offers his memories.143 The
conjunction of song and message create a compelling
cry for human dignity.
While the recording of the interview with Harburg
is only two and a half minutes, the recording of the
interview with César Chávez is done in two parts and
lasts for more than thirty minutes. Terkel introduces the
interview by telling the listener that Chávez has come
to Chicago for a labor union organizational meeting,
and, since the interview follows the meeting, voices
are still heard in the background. This recorded version appears to be the full and actual interview with
Chávez, so it is possible for the reader, in looking at the
text while listening to the interview, to get the flavor of
Chávez’s language and to identify where Terkel cut and
edited. This interview offers the opportunity to observe
Terkel working behind the scenes and compacting
the interview into a text that would maximize Chávez’s
message.
The Chávez interview is remarkable for the similarity
of his family’s experiences in Arizona to those of the
Joads. Chávez begins the interview with the memory of
his family being forced to move. “That must have been
1934. I was about six years old.”144 Unfortunately for the
Chávez family, the bank president wanted their land to
add to his own and so refused to approve a government loan that would have allowed Chávez’s father to
stay in business. They, like the Joads, were “tractored
out.” “One morning a giant tractor came in,” Chávez
muses, “like we had never seen before. My daddy used
to do all his work with horses. So this huge tractor came
in and began to knock down this corral, this small corral
where my father kept his horses. We didn’t understand
why.”
By 1936, according to Chávez, the family had
become part of the flood of migratory workers moving
to California, always dreaming of returning to buy land
in Arizona. Chávez remembers, “We all of us climbed
into an old Chevy that my dad had. And then we were
in California, and migratory workers. There were five
kids—a small family by those standards. It must have
been around ’36. I was eight.” As Chávez speaks, the
reader (and listener) feels his pain at the impact of this
injustice on his father’s sense of dignity. In California,
Chávez tells of the abuses against farm workers that
the family endured. Like the Joads, they found no
work. “We had no money at all, and had to live on the
outskirts of town under a bridge and dry creek.” Like
the Joads, they were approached by labor contractors
to pick grapes for lots of money, only to find that they
couldn’t make much money at all.
Like the Joads, the Chávez family experienced what
it was to live in the midst of strikes: “We were one of
the strikingest families,” Chávez says. But the strikes
were never won, and conditions did not improve. And,
mittee investigating un-American activities. With the
easing of tensions between the Soviet Union and the
United States yielding a freer political atmosphere in
the 1960s, Le Sueur’s work attracted renewed interest,
especially on the part of feminist scholars. She was
finally able to publish a novel, The Girl, written and
published in brief sections during the 1930s but not in
its entirety until 1978. Another small collection of her
work, Corn Village, was published in 1970, and Salute
to Spring was reissued. In 1982, Elaine Hedges edited
a comprehensive anthology of Le Sueur’s work from
1927–80 titled Ripening: Selected Work. Describing
the collection, Blanche Gelfant wrote in her review for
The New York Times: “‘Ripening’ inspires belief in the
power of a writer—and a woman—to prevail against
poverty, persecution and public neglect.”148
While Le Sueur worked in several genres—fiction,
poetry, nonfiction—she is especially known for her
effective use of the genre of “reportage.” Documentary
reportage emerged as a genre during the 1930s and
sought to capture the experience of life in the Great
Depression while engaging in a sharp critique of the
Depression’s effects on human beings. Reportage
operates as imaginative nonfiction. It incorporates
the realism of journalistic expression and its power
of observation with fictional elements, including the
depiction of character, the use of figurative language,
and the development of narrative structure. As a new
genre, reportage offered writers the opportunity to
develop an “aesthetic [which] could emerge with a
critical sociopolitical commentary.”149 Le Sueur, argues
critic James Boehnlein, not only wrote “some of the
most important and influential reportage of the day,”
but also evoked a “class and gender debate in significant, feminist ways.”150
SEL EC T ED W ORK :
S
W
“Women on the
Breadlines” (1932)
By Meridel Le Sueur
Women on the Breadlines
By Meridel Le Sueur
From Ripening: Selected Work, Second Edition, by Meridel Le Sueur,
Edited by Elaine Hedges, published by The Feminist Press at the
City University of New York. Originally printed in New Masses
(January 1932).
I am sitting in the city free employment bureau. It’s
the woman’s section. We have been sitting here now
for four hours. We sit here every day, waiting for a job.
There are no jobs. Most of us have had no breakfast.
Some have had scant rations for over a year. Hunger
makes a human being lapse into a state of lethargy,
especially city hunger. Is there any place else in the
world where a human being is supposed to go hungry amidst plenty without an outcry, without protest,
where only the boldest steal or kill for bread, and the
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Sueur’s name raises little recognition now; she is rarely
anthologized or widely taught, but she was one of the
most prominent leftist women writers of the 1930s.
Le Sueur came from a long line of women who were
political activists, including a grandmother who was
one of the earliest settlers of the Oklahoma territory
and prominent in the temperance league, and a mother who lectured widely on women’s rights, birth control,
and suffragism, and who, with her second husband, was
an active socialist. Born in Murray, Iowa, on February
22, 1900, Le Sueur had, through the influence of her
parents, the advantage of knowing prominent socialist activists like Lincoln Steffens, Helen Keller, Mabel
Dodge, Theodore Dreiser, Carl Sandburg, and Woody
Guthrie. Le Sueur traveled widely and held a number of
jobs during her late teens and early twenties, including
a stint in Hollywood as a bit player in silent pictures.
She joined the Communist Party in 1924 and remained
a member until her death in 1996.
For Le Sueur, belonging to the Party provided reinforcement for her deep belief in a “communal sensibility,” and her decision to have children, though frowned
upon by other women who were also Communist Party
activists, was a choice that conformed to her belief.
“I cannot help but feel the superiority of this kind of
collective feeling,” Le Sueur wrote about her relationship to her daughters, “to anything I feel for myself
alone.”146 Her story “Annunciation,” written about
her own pregnancy, is considered a minor American
masterpiece.147
During the 1930s, Le Sueur suffered, along with
millions of women, from the disastrous effects of the
Great Depression. Yet at the same time, she was able
to get her work published in the leftist publication
New Masses, among others, to work on the staff of
New Masses, and to find employment with the Federal
Writers’ Project. She felt that during the 1930s she
became the biographer of ordinary men and women,
and she received much acclaim from fellow writers. Her
short stories appeared in annual collections of the best
short stories in the late 1930s, and “I Was Marching,”
an account of a truck drivers’ strike in Minneapolis, was
reprinted three times during the 1930s, establishing it
as a classic of the genre of “reportage.” The culmination of her work of the 1930s was the publication of a
collection of reportage and short fiction entitled Salute
to Spring (1940). The book jacket included accolades
from such established writers as Sinclair Lewis and Carl
Sandburg.
While she continued to write and publish in the
early 1940s and demonstrated her support of American
involvement in World War II, the beginning of the Cold
War in 1947 was also the beginning of a dark time for
Le Sueur. She was blacklisted for her involvement with
the Communist Party, largely prevented from publishing her work, and denied employment. Her phone
was tapped, her house was bugged, and she was
subpoenaed to appear before the Senate subcom-
Bernice sits next to me. She is a Polish woman of
thirty-five. She has been working in people’s kitchens
for fifteen years or more. She is large, her great body
in mounds, her face brightly scrubbed. She has a
peasant mind and finds it hard even yet to understand
the maze of the city where trickery is worth more than
brawn. Her blue eyes are not clever but slow and
trusting. She suffers from loneliness and lack of talk.
When you speak to her, her face lifts and brightens as
if you had spoken through a great darkness, and she
talks magically of little things as if the weather were
magic, or tells some crazy tale of her adventures on
the city streets, embellishing them in bright colors
until they hang heavy and thick like embroidery. She
loves the city anyhow. It’s exciting to her, like a bazaar.
She loves to go shopping and get a bargain, hunting
out the places where stale bread and cakes can be
had for a few cents. She likes walking the streets looking for men to take her to a picture show. Sometimes
she goes to five picture shows in one day, or she sits
through one the entire day until she knows all the
dialog by heart.
She came to the city a young girl from a Wisconsin
farm. The first thing that happened to her, a charlatan
dentist took out all her good shining teeth and the
fifty dollars she had saved working in a canning factory. After that she met men in the park who told her
how to look out for herself, corrupting her peasant
mind, teaching her to mistrust everyone. Sometimes
now she forgets to mistrust everyone and gets taken
in. They taught her to get what she could for nothing,
to count her change, to go back if she found herself
cheated, to demand her rights.
She lives alone in little rooms. She bought seven
dollars’ worth of second-hand furniture eight years
ago. She rents a room for perhaps three dollars a
month in an attic, sometimes in a cold house. Once
the house where she stayed was condemned and
everyone else moved out and she lived there all winter alone on the top floor. She spent only twenty-five
dollars all winter.
She wants to get married but she sees what happens to her married friends, left with children to support, worn out before their time. So she stays single.
She is virtuous. She is slightly deaf from hanging out
clothes in winter. She had done people’s washing and
cooking for fifteen years and in that time saved thirty
dollars. Now she hasn’t worked steady for a year and
she has spent the thirty dollars. She had dreamed of
having a little house or a houseboat perhaps with a
spot of ground for a few chickens. This dream she will
never realize.
She has lost all her furniture now along with the
dream. A married friend whose husband is gone gives
her a bed for which she pays by doing a great deal of
work for the woman. She comes here every day now,
sitting bewildered, her pudgy hands folded in her lap.
She is hungry. Her great flesh has begun to hang in
folds. She has been living on crackers. Sometimes a
box of crackers lasts a week. She has a friend who’s
a baker and he sometimes steals the stale loaves and
brings them to her.
A girl we have seen every day all summer went
crazy yesterday at the YW. She went into hysterics,
stamping her feet and screaming.
She hadn’t had work for eight months. “You’ve got
to give me something,” she kept saying. The woman
in charge flew into a rage that probably came from
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timid crawl the streets, hunger like the beak of a terrible bird at the vitals?
We sit looking at the floor. No one dares think of
the coming winter. There are only a few more days of
summer. Everyone is anxious to get work to lay up
something for that long siege of bitter cold. But there
is no work. Sitting in the room we all know it. That is
why we don’t talk much. We look at the floor dreading to see that knowledge in each other’s eyes. There
is a kind of humiliation in it. We look away from each
other. We look at the floor. It’s too terrible to see this
animal terror in each other’s eyes.
So we sit hour after hour, day after day, waiting for
a job to come in. There are many women for a single
job. A thin sharp woman sits inside the wire cage
looking at a book. For four hours we have watched
her looking at that book. She has a hard little eye. In
the small bare room there are half a dozen women
sitting on the benches waiting. Many come and go.
Our faces are all familiar to each other, for we wait
here everyday.
This is a domestic employment bureau. Most of
the women who come here are middle-aged, some
have families, some have raised their families and are
now alone, some have men who are out of work. Hard
times and the man leaves to hunt for work. He doesn’t
find it. He drifts on. The woman probably doesn’t
hear from him for a long time. She expects it. She
isn’t surprised. She struggles alone to feed the many
mouths. Sometimes she gets help from the charities.
If she’s clever she can get herself a good living from
the charities, if she’s naturally a lick-spittle, naturally
a little docile and cunning. If she’s proud then she
starves silently, leaving her children to find work, coming home after a day’s searching to wrestle with her
house, her children.
Some such story is written on the faces of all these
women. There are young girls too, fresh from the
country. Some are made brazen too soon by the city.
There is a great exodus of girls from the farms into the
city now. Thousands of farms have been vacated completely in Minnesota. The girls are trying to get work.
The prettier ones can get jobs in the stores when
there are any, or waiting on tables, but these jobs are
only for the attractive and the adroit. The others, the
real peasants, have a more difficult time.
“I guess she’ll go on the street now,” a thin woman
says faintly and no one takes the trouble to comment
further. Like every commodity now the body is dif-
ficult to sell and the girls say you’re lucky if you get
fifty cents.
It’s very difficult and humiliating to sell one’s
body.
Perhaps it would make it clear if one were to
imagine having to go on the street to sell, say, one’s
overcoat. Suppose you have to sell your coat so you
can have breakfast and a place to sleep, say, for fifty
cents. You decide to sell your only coat. You take it
off and put it on your arm. The street, that has before
been just a street, now becomes mart, something
entirely different. You must approach someone now
admit you are destitute and are now selling your
clothes, your most intimate possessions. Everyone will
watch you talking to the stranger showing him your
overcoat, what a good coat it is. People will stop and
watch curiously. You will be quite naked on the street.
It is even harder to try to sell one’s self, more humiliating. It is even humiliating to try sell to one’s labor.
When there is no buyer.
The thin woman opens the wire cage. There’s a job
for a nursemaid, she says. The old gnarled women,
like old horses, know no one will have them walk the
streets with the young so they don’t move. Ellen’s
friend gets up and goes to the window. She is unbelievably jaunty. I know she hasn’t had work since last
January. But has a flare of life in her that glows like
a tiny red flame and some tenacious thing, perhaps
only youth, keeps it burning bright. Her legs thin but
the runs in her old stockings are neatly mended clear
down flat shank. Two bright spots of rouge conceal
her pallor. A narrow belt is drawn tightly around her
thin waist, her long shoulders stoop and the blades
show. She runs wild as a colt hunting pleasure, hunting sustenance.
It’s one of the great mysteries of the city where
women go when they are out of work and hungry.
There are not many women in the bread line. There
are no flop houses for women as there are for men,
where a bed can be had for a quarter or less. You
don’t see women lying on the floor at the mission in
the free flops. They obviously don’t sleep in the jungle
or under newspapers in the park. There is no law I
suppose against their being in these places but the
fact is they rarely are.
Yet there must be as many women out of jobs in
cities and suffering extreme poverty as there are men.
What happens to them? Where do they go? Try to get
into the YW without any money or looking down at
heel. Charities take care of very few and only those
that are called “deserving.” The lone girl is under suspicion by the virgin women who dispense charity.
I’ve lived in cities for many months broke, without
help, too timid to get in bread lines. I’ve known many
women to live like this until they simply faint on the
street from privations, without saying a word to anyone. A woman will shut herself up in a room until it is
taken away from her, and eat a cracker a day and be
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days and days of suffering on her part, because she
is unable to give jobs, having none. She flew into a
rage at the girl and there they were facing each other
in a rage both helpless, helpless. This woman told me
once that she could hardly bear the suffering she saw,
hardly hear it, that she couldn’t eat sometimes and
had nightmares at night.
So they stood there, the two women, in a rage,
the girl weeping and the woman shouting at her. In
the eight months of unemployment she had gotten
ragged, and the woman was shouting that she would
not send her out like that. “Why don’t you shine your
shoes?” she kept scolding the girl, and the girl kept
sobbing and sobbing because she was starving.
“We can’t recommend you like that,” the harassed
YWCA woman said, knowing she was starving, unable
to do anything. And the girls and the women sat
docilely, their eyes on the ground, ashamed to look at
each other, ashamed of something.
Sitting here waiting for a job, the women have
been talking in low voices about the girl Ellen. They
talk in low voices with not too much pity for her,
unable to see through the mist of their own torment.
“What happened to Ellen?” one of them asks. She
knows the answer already. We all know it.
A young girl who went around with Ellen tells
about seeing her last evening back of a cafe downtown, outside the kitchen door, kicking, showing her
legs so that the cook came out and gave her some
food and some men gathered in the alley and threw
small coin on the ground for a look at her legs. And
the girl says enviously that Ellen had a swell breakfast
and treated her to one too, that cost two dollars.
A scrub woman whose hips are bent forward
from stooping with hands gnarled like watersoaked
branches clicks her tongue in disgust. No one saves
their money, she says, a little money and these foolish young things buy a hat, a dollar for breakfast, a
bright scarf. And they do. If you’ve ever been without
money, or food, something very strange happens
when you get a bit of money, a kind of madness.
You don’t care. You can’t remember that you had
no money before, that the money will be gone. You
can remember nothing but that there is the money
for which you have been suffering. Now here it is. A
lust takes hold of you. You see food in the windows.
In imagination you eat hugely; you taste a thousand
meals. You look in windows. Colours are brighter; you
buy something to dress up in. An excitement takes
hold of you. You know it is suicide but you can’t help
it. You must have food, dainty, splendid food and a
bright hat so once again you feel blithe, rid of that
ratty gnawing shame.
Mrs. Gray, sitting across from me, is a living
spokesman for the futility of labor. She is a warning.
Her hands are scarred with labor. Her body is a great
puckered scar. She has given birth to six children,
buried three, supported them all alive and dead,
bearing them, burying them, feeding them. Bred in
hunger they have been spare, susceptible to disease.
For seven years she tried to save her boy’s arm from
amputation, diseased from tuberculosis of the bone.
It is almost too suffocating to think of that long close
horror of years of child-bearing, child-feeding, rearing, with the bare suffering of providing a meal and
shelter.
Now she is fifty. Her children, economically insecure, are drifters. She never hears of them. She
doesn’t know if they are alive. She doesn’t know if she
is alive. Such subtleties of suffering are not for her. For
her the brutality of hunger and cold. Not until these
are done away with can those subtle feelings that
make a human being be indulged.
She is lucky to have five dollars ahead of her. That
is her security. She has a tumor that she will die of.
She is thin as a worn dime with her tumor sticking out
of her side. She is brittle and bitter. Her face is not the
face of a human being. She has borne more than it is
possible for a human being to bear. She is reduced to
the least possible denominator of human feelings.
It is terrible to see her little bloodshot eyes like a
beaten hound’s, fearful in terror.
We cannot meet her eyes. When she looks at any
of us we look away. She is like a woman drowning and
we turn away. We must ignore those eyes that are
surely the eyes of a person drowning, doomed. She
doesn’t cry out. She goes down decently. And we all
look away.
The young ones know though. I don’t want to
marry. I don’t want any children. So they all say. No
children. No marriage. They arm themselves alone,
keep up alone. The man is helpless now. He cannot
provide. If he propagates he cannot take care of his
young. The means are not in his hands. So they live
alone. Get what fun they can. The life risk is too horrible now. Defeat is too clearly written on it.
So we sit in this room like cattle, waiting for a
nonexistent job, willing to work to the farthest atom
of energy, unable to work, unable to get food and
lodging, unable to bear children—here we must sit in
this shame looking at the floor, worse than beasts at
a slaughter.
It is appalling to think that these women sitting so
listless in the room may work as hard as it is possible
for a human being to work, may labor night and day,
like Mrs. Gray wash streetcars from midnight to dawn
and offices in the early evening, scrub for fourteen
and fifteen hours a day, sleep only five hours or so, do
this their whole lives, never earn one day of security,
having always before them the future. The endless
labor, the bending back, the water-soaked earning
never more than a week’s wages, never having in their
hands more life than that.
It’s not the suffering of birth, death, love that the
young reject, but the suffering of endless labor without dream, eating the spare bitterness, being a slave
without the security of a slave.
n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n
“Women on the Breadlines”
“Women on the Breadlines” was Le Sueur’s first
published example of reportage, written for New
Masses in 1932. Her intention was to make you, the
reader, see, hear, and feel each event being observed
and reported. Le Sueur becomes a biographer for
the estimated three million unemployed women—an
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as quiet as a mouse so there are no social statistics
concerning her.
I don’t know why it is, but a woman will do this
unless she has dependents, will go for weeks verging
on starvation, crawling in some hole, going through
the streets ashamed, sitting in libraries, parks, going
for days without speaking to a living soul like some
exiled beast, keeping the runs mended in her stockings, shut up in terror in her own misery, until she
becomes too super-sensitive and timid to even ask
for a job.
Bernice says even strange men she has met in the
park have sometimes, that is in better days, given
her a loan to pay her room rent. She has always paid
them back.
In the afternoon the young girls, to forget the
hunger and the deathly torture and fear of being jobless, try to pick up a man to take them to a ten-cent
show. They never go to more expensive ones, but can
always find a man willing to spend a dime to have the
company of a girl for the afternoon.
Sometimes a girl facing the night without shelter
will approach a man for lodging. A woman always asks
a man for help. Rarely another woman. I have known
girls to sleep in men’s rooms for the night, on a pallet without molestation, and given breakfast in the
morning.
It’s no wonder these young girls refuse to marry,
refuse to rear children. They are like certain savage
tribes, who, when they have been conquered, refuse
to breed.
Not one of them but looks forward to starvation
for the coming winter. We are in a jungle and know it.
We are beaten, entrapped. There is no way out. Even
if there were a job, even if that thin acrid woman came
and gave everyone in the room a job for a few days,
a few hours, at thirty cents an hour, this would all be
repeated tomorrow, the next day and the next.
Not one of these women but knows that despite
years of labor there is only starvation, humiliation in
front of them.
This presentation of the plight of the unemployed woman, able as it is, and informative,
is defeatist in attitude, lacking in revolutionary
spirit and direction which characterize the usual
contribution to New Masses. We feel it is our
duty to add, that there is a place for the unemployed woman, as well as man, in the ranks of
the unemployed councils and in all branches of
the organized revolutionary movement. Fight for
your class, read The Working Woman, join the
Communist Party.152
Le Sueur was determined, even in the face of this
sort of opposition, to maintain the integrity of her literary style. Claiming that she was aware of the “male
supremacist” views of New Masses, Le Sueur responded “I fought them. I kept my lyrical style.”153 Elaine
Hedges, in her eloquent introduction to Ripening, adds
that, while Le Sueur did write pieces which conformed
more to the Party line, “she continued to write about
the suffering of women. For she saw suffering, not as
negative and passive, but as a source of solidarity.”154
Perhaps because of its apparent lack of an appropriate revolutionary spirit, “Women on the Breadlines”
was excluded from the Communist Party’s publication
of Le Sueur’s body of work of the 1930s, Salute to
Spring. The anthology appropriately ended with her
more activist account, “I Was Marching”; however, the
exclusion of “Breadlines” suggests that, despite its
overall support of her work, the Party had also acted as
A Federal Emergency Relief
Administration (FERA) camp
for unemployed Black women
in Atlanta, GA. July 1934.
a cultural censor.155 The apparent lack of faithfulness of
“Women on the Breadlines” to a hard-line Communist
Party message hardly matters to its readers today,
however. What speaks now is Le Sueur’s radical social
critique woven into a literary expression of the hunger,
homelessness, and dispossession suffered by countless
“invisible” women.
For many writers in the 1930s, certainly John
Steinbeck, and even to a lesser degree, Le Sueur
herself, “women workers [were] subordinate in the
times that tried only men’s souls.”156 Women’s roles as
nurturers of their families and their society, rather than
as independent workers, were assumed and broadly
accepted. Steinbeck’s Ma Joad and the evolving Rose
of Sharon are clear examples, and Le Sueur herself
believed deeply in the connectedness of motherhood
and the importance of nurturing. Yet “Women on the
Breadlines” unravels many widely held assumptions
about women’s roles and places in society both at the
time of its publication and now.
“Women on the Breadlines,” whose title suggests
that it is about women on the bread lines, is not about
that at all, because, Le Sueur writes, “There are not
many women in the bread line.”157 In an interview, Le
Sueur described her experience of breadlines which
were all men: “Here’s a bunch of men for two blocks—if
a woman joins them, or even a bunch of women, it
would be a very exposed place for jokes and hoots
and propositions and sexual approaches. Women just
didn’t go on them—even I didn’t.”158 Instead, Le Sueur
asks, where are the women?
There are no flop houses for women as there
are for men where a bed can be had for a quarter
or less. You don’t see women lying on the floor
at the mission in the free flops. They obviously
don’t sleep in the jungle or under newspapers in
the park. There is no law I suppose against their
being in these places but the fact is they rarely
are. Yet there must be as many women out of
jobs in cities and suffering extreme poverty as
there are men. What happens to them? Where
do they go?
Le Sueur’s observation points to a main theme of
this essay—that women during the Great Depression
were, to society at large, generally invisible. Le Sueur
will make the women she meets visible. The essay takes
place in the women’s section of a city employment
bureau, where women gather to wait for opportunities
in domestic service. But there are no jobs. The narrator
sits with the women, her voice becoming mingled with
theirs as her viewpoint shifts from “I” to “we.” The narrator is not just an observer, then, who asks the reader
to see with “her”; rather, the narrator is one with the
women, waiting in a misery of shame and with little
hope for the miracle of a job. “But there is no work.
Sitting in the room we all know it. That is why we don’t
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invisible but substantial percentage of an estimated
total unemployed of thirteen million in 1932. While
the essay151 seems to adhere to the Communist Party’s
literary guidelines, “Women on the Breadlines” was
printed with a reprimand by Whittaker Chambers, one
of the contributing editors of New Masses, who wrote:
thrown at her. “‘I guess she’ll go on the street now,’”
another woman says, making explicit what many of the
women are thinking.
But, the narrator insists, even the body is difficult to
sell as a commodity: “the girls say you’re lucky if you get
fifty cents.” The narrator aligns the selling of the body
with the selling of one’s only coat—it is an admission of
destitution to peddle your clothes on the street, leaving you “quite naked.” “It is even harder,” the narrator
claims, “to try to sell one’s self, more humiliating. It is
even humiliating to try to sell one’s labor. When there is
no buyer.” Every woman, the narrator concludes, after
a meditation on the invisibility of suffering, starving
women, “knows that despite years of labor there is only
starvation, humiliation in front of them.”
Mrs. Gray catches the narrator’s attention last—she
sits across from the narrator, “a living spokesman for
the futility of labor.” The most powerful metaphor in
the essay describes Mrs. Gray, who is a warning, her
“body is a great puckered scar.” She is fifty, she has
borne and supported children, and now she is alone,
living with a tumor which will kill her. “It is terrible,” the
narrator writes, “to see her little bloodshot eyes like a
beaten hound’s, fearful in terror.” The young women
in the room know, looking at her, that they don’t want
marriage or children, for men are helpless now—they
cannot provide. “So we sit,” says the narrator, “in this
room like cattle, waiting for a nonexistent job, willing to work to the farthest atom of energy, unable to
work, unable to get food and lodging, unable to bear
children—here we must sit in this shame looking at the
floor, worse than beasts at a slaughter.”
The narrator’s collectivist tone of defeat, however,
does not indicate absolute resignation without hope;
she does have a purpose for this incredibly bleak portrait, and that is to inspire the reader to action. Her
concluding words echo Karl Marx and insist on change:
“It’s not the suffering of birth, death, love that the
young reject, but the suffering of endless labor without
dream, eating the spare bread of bitterness, being a
slave without the security of a slave.” In the light of Le
Sueur’s conclusion, Whittaker Chambers’ observations
that all starving women need to do is fight for their
class, read Working Woman, and join the Party, seem
utterly shortsighted and beside the point. The point
for Le Sueur was, as she wrote in her journal, “in suffering we are fused.”159 And out of this fusion comes Le
Sueur’s remarkable ability to bring the lives of countless
invisible women, particularized in these three, to light,
writing “not stories, but epitaphs marking the lives of
women who…leave no statistics, no record, obituary or
remembrance.”160
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talk much. We look at the floor dreading to see that
knowledge in each other’s eyes.”
The narrator’s story, though part of a shared experience, is not the focus of the essay. Rather, the focus is
on three women who sit in the room waiting for work
with her: Bernice, the Polish woman; Ellen, a woman
who has had hysterics waiting in the room for a job;
and Mrs. Gray, who is the most painful example of the
dispossessed woman. The three women are all unattached; none seems to be supported by a man. The
narrator explains what has happened in a great number of cases, “Hard times and the man leaves to hunt
for work. He doesn’t find it. He drifts on. The woman
probably doesn’t hear from him for a long time…. She
struggles alone to feed the many mouths” (137).
The women described create a triptych, or threepart dimensional structure, in the essay. Bernice and
Mrs. Gray, act as bookends to Ellen’s enraged explosion
at the lack of work. Bernice initiates the set of portraits
of waiting women, and she is far more placid than Ellen,
as Le Sueur describes, she has a “peasant mind.” She’s
been working in kitchens for fifteen years, and she lacks
understanding of the downward spiral into which she’s
fallen. She’s large and “brightly scrubbed,” her “great
body in mounds” as she sits talking. She tells stories
of her adventures, embellishing them “in bright colors
until they hang heavy and thick like embroidery.” She’s
the example of the girl off the farm, one of the many
the narrator refers to who have left Minnesota farms to
find work in the city.
Bernice, like so many women, wants to get married
but at the same time has seen the reality of her married
friends, left to raise children alone. Bernice has sunk
from having her own “little rooms” and seven dollars’
worth of furniture to trading housework for a bed in the
home of a friend. “Her great flesh has begun to hang in
folds,” the narrator says, “She has been living on crackers. Sometimes a box of crackers lasts a week.” The
narrator’s description of her encounter with Bernice, as
with the other women, alternates between a style that
features the short, declarative sentences of reporting
with the vivid figurative detail of a distinctly feminine
image—language which hangs, like Bernice’s tales,
“heavy and thick like embroidery.”
In the center of the essay lies Ellen’s eruption the
day before, and it underscores a hunger whose effects
appear in the description of Bernice’s body. The girl
Ellen flies into a rage because she’s starving, and the
YWCA woman can do nothing to help beyond telling
Ellen that she can’t send her out in that state. Ellen,
though, is not in the unemployment office today, for
the women ask about her. “‘What happened to Ellen?’
one of them asks. She knows the answer already. We
all know it.” Ellen has begun to show her legs for food.
One of the girls has seen her, and a scrub woman,
whose hands are “gnarled like watersoaked branches”
reacts in disgust at the knowledge that Ellen has had a
fine breakfast with the coins that men in the alley have
“What waits for me in the future? I do not know. I
can’t even imagine, and I am glad for that. I have
touched the four corners of the horizon, for from
hard searching it seems to me that tears and laughter, love and hate make up the sum of life.”161
— Zora Neale Hurston
Zora Neale Hurston’s personal story is as poignant
as Le Sueur’s, for Hurston was the most accomplished
and prolific black woman writer between the 1930s
and the 1960s, an important part of the Harlem
Renaissance, and a student of renowned anthropologist Franz Boas; yet she died in obscurity, her final
resting place an unmarked grave. From the late 1940s
on, Hurston’s life was on a downward spiral, and when
she died in 1960, her work had been out of print since
1948. Slowly, though, beginning in 1965, Hurston’s
work began to resurface along with the rise of the Civil
Rights movement. Small publishing houses brought
out new editions of Hurston’s work, beginning with
Fawcett Publications’ 1965 edition of Their Eyes Were
Watching God. Then Alice Walker’s “In Search of Zora
Neale Hurston” in the magazine Ms. (1975) appeared
on the scene, and Hurston’s place within the literary canon and the university classroom was assured.
Alice Walker, author of The Color Purple, discovered
Hurston’s work in 1970, and, in 1973, went searching
for her grave. Walker found Hurston’s grave in the
midst of tall weeds and subsequently placed a gravestone upon which she had inscribed: “Zora Neale
Hurston/‘A Genius of the South’/1901–1960/Novelist,
Folklorist/Anthropologist.”162
Walker had everything right except the year of birth.
Hurston gave so many different years as her birth date
that, without birth records, it has been difficult to know
which birth year is accurate. A study of census records
for 1900, however, has finally yielded the information
that Hurston was nine in that year, so a number of
Hurston biographers now agree that 1891 must be
the actual year of Hurston’s birth. Hurston was always
rather guarded about her personal life, using different
dates to serve her own purposes of appearing younger
or older, but she was probably born on January 7, the
fifth of eight children, in the tiny town of Notasulga,
Alabama—not Eatonville, Florida, as she claimed in
her autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road (1942). Her
father, a former slave and sharecropper married “up”
when he wed Lucy Potts, who came from a landowning family. When Hurston’s family moved to Eatonville
a year after her birth, the town was self-governing and
all-black, incorporated in 1887, a place where whites
only passed through. Hurston’s experiences growing
up there inspired a sense of pride in the town she
claimed as her own.
Once her mother died in 1904, though, Hurston was
abandoned by a father who sent her off to a boarding
school and left her there, and neglected, along with
her siblings, by a stepmother who had little interest in
another woman’s children. After leaving the boarding
school and returning home to find how unwelcome she
was, Hurston moved to Baltimore, near an older brother, and attended high school and Howard University.
While at Howard, Hurston began publishing her work
in the literary magazine Stylus and studied under the
poet Georgia Douglas Johnson and the philosophy
professor Alain Locke.
By 1924, Hurston had published her short story
“Drenched in Light” in Charles Johnson’s literary journal Opportunity. In 1925, when she went to New York
without money or contacts, Hurston couldn’t have
arrived at a more auspicious time. There she met the
“new Negroes,” writers who would form the core of
Photograph of author and folklorist
Zora Neale Hurston in 1938.
Photograph by Carl van Vechten.
Library of Congress Prints and
Photographs Division.
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Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960)
and “The Gilded Six-Bits”
widely anthologized of her stories. The story brought
Hurston’s work to the attention of Bertram Lippincott
of Lippincott Publishers, who wrote to ask if she had
written a novel. Hurston had not, but she lied and told
Lippincott she had, producing Jonah’s Gourd Vine
within a few months. The novel was published in 1934,
was recommended as a Book-of-the-Month Club selection, and received favorable reviews. Lippincott also
published Hurston’s book of folktales, Mules and Men,
in 1935, with a foreword by Franz Boas.
With the help of a Guggenheim Fellowship to collect folklore, Hurston traveled to Haiti and Jamaica in
1936, gathering material for a second book of folklore,
published in 1938 as Tell My Horse. After a brief and
intense affair with a much younger man, Hurston produced her finest novel in just seven weeks; Their Eyes
Were Watching God, published by Lippincott in 1937,
depicts the emotional life of a strong and independent
female character, Janie Crawford. The novel reflects
Hurston’s engagement with the complexity of marital
relationships and renders the characters’ dialogue
in the rich, metaphoric dialect of her south Florida
culture.
In 1935, Hurston had worked in the Harlem unit of
the Federal Theater Project division of the WPA, and in
1938, she joined the Federal Writers’ Project for Florida
to work on the state guide.164 Strongly supported by
Eleanor Roosevelt, the Federal Writers’ Project (FWP)
was a New Deal program for unemployed writers and
artists. More importantly for black writers and artists,
hiring for the project was free from discrimination, so
Hurston joined the ranks of writers like Arna Bontemps,
Claude McKay, Ralph Ellison, Margaret Walker, and
Richard Wright. Wright and Walker were first published while working in the Chicago office of the FWP,
and Ralph Ellison might never have written his novel
Invisible Man without the material he accumulated
during this time. Hurston was hired as an editor for
the Florida state guide, but also spent much of her
time during the two years she worked with the project
doing fieldwork, collecting songs, stories, and slave
narratives.
By the end of the 1930s, Hurston had collected
enough material for a manuscript titled “The Florida
Negro,” which remains unpublished today. Hurston
had also produced her third novel, Moses, Man of the
Mountain (1939), a reworking of the legend of Moses
as fiction, folklore, and comedy. In the early 1940s,
Hurston’s publisher suggested that she consider writing an autobiography, and, even though she resisted
the idea, she published Dust Tracks on a Road in 1942,
called by many the “best fiction she ever wrote,”165 for
Hurston had no problem playing fast and loose with
the facts of her life.
Hurston’s last novel, Seraph on the Suwanee,
appeared in 1948 and sold well, but Hurston was
embroiled in a scandal when she was arrested and
charged with indecency with a minor. Hurston proved
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the Harlem Renaissance—Jean Toomer, Alice DunbarNelson, Claude McKay, Countee Cullen, Jessie Fauset,
Richard Wright, and Langston Hughes, among others.
Thousands of blacks were migrating north from the
South during the early decades of the twentieth century, many of them settling in New York’s Harlem.
The Harlem Renaissance movement began in 1917
as World War I was ending. It was formed with the
belief that blacks could demonstrate that they were
the intellectual and artistic equals of whites. The
movement lasted until about 1935, passing through
several phases, beginning with whites writing about
black people (Eugene O’Neill’s play Emperor Jones is
an example) and ending with a black artistic rebellion
determined to maintain the uniqueness of black artistic
expression while rejecting black stereotypes.
Hurston quickly became part of the circle forming
the Harlem Renaissance, won prizes for her writing,
and was admitted to Barnard College, where she had
the opportunity to study under Boas, who encouraged
her to do anthropological fieldwork in her own town
of Eatonville. While at Barnard, Hurston published
her story “Sweat” (1926) in an avant-garde magazine
entitled Fire!! The story, set in Eatonville, depicts a
volatile marriage in which Delia, the female protagonist, endures the hatred and brutality of an abusive
husband who finally attempts to kill her with the bite
of a poisonous snake that bites him instead. Hurston
employs the snake as a traditional symbol of evil while
also suggesting its phallic properties and constructs a
female character both strong and independent who
ultimately survives her husband’s murderous attempts.
In the late 1920s, with the support of a fellowship
and the encouragement of Boas, Hurston traveled
south to collect African-American lore, but found that
her Barnard accent set her apart from the country
subjects she wanted to interview, and they refused to
share their stories with her. Hurston learned from the
experience and returned later with the support of a
white benefactress, Charlotte Osgood Mason, who was
interested in “primitivism.” This time, between 1927
and 1931, Hurston was able to collect considerable
ethnographic material that remained under Mason’s
editorial control until Hurston severed their relationship
in 1931. In 1930, Hurston collaborated on a play, Mule
Bone: A Comedy of Negro Life, with Langston Hughes,
but creative differences resulted in a break with Hughes
and caused Hurston to file for sole copyright. By the fall
of 1931, Hurston was contacted by George Antheil, the
French composer, on behalf of Nancy Cunard and was
asked to contribute folklore for Nancy Cunard’s Negro:
An Anthology (1934).163 Antheil secured six essays for
the Cunard collection, but Hurston was unable to place
the entire body of her seventy folktale texts as a book
until the publication of Mules and Men (1935).
In 1933, Hurston would publish “The Gilded SixBits” in the literary magazine Story; it is considered
her finest example of short fiction and is the most
in “Court Order Can’t Make the Races Mix” that the
ruling could interfere with individual liberty, hasten the
end of traditionally black schools, and enforce a racial
proximity that, perhaps, neither blacks nor whites really
wanted.
SEL EC T ED W ORK :
S
W
“The Gilded Six-Bits,”
(1933) by Zora
Neale Hurston
The Gilded Six-Bits
By Zora Neale Hurston
It was a Negro yard around a Negro house in a
Negro settlement that looked to the payroll of the G.
and G. Fertilizer works for its support.
But there was something happy about the place.
The front yard was parted in the middle by a sidewalk
from gate to doorstep, a sidewalk edged on either
side by quart bottles driven neck down into the
ground on a slant. A mess of homey flowers planted
without a plan but blooming cheerily from their helter-skelter places. The fence and house were whitewashed. The porch and steps scrubbed white.
The front door stood open to the sunshine so that
the floor of the front room could finish drying after
its weekly scouring. It was Saturday. Everything clean
from the front gate to the privy house. Yard raked so
that the strokes of the rake would make a pattern.
Fresh newspaper cut in fancy edge on the kitchen
shelves.
Missie May was bathing herself in the galvanized
washtub in the bedroom. Her dark-brown skin glistened under the soapsuds that skittered down from
her washrag. Her stiff young breasts thrust forward
aggressively, like broad-based cones with the tips
lacquered in black.
She heard men’s voices in the distance and glanced
at the dollar clock on the dresser.
“Humph! Ah’m way behind time t’day! Joe gointer
be heah ‘fore Ah git mah clothes on if Ah don’t make
haste.”
She grabbed the clean mealsack at hand and dried
herself hurriedly and began to dress. But before she
could tie her slippers, there came the ring of singing
metal on wood. Nine times.
Missie May grinned with delight. She had not seen
the big tall man come stealing in the gate and creep
up the walk grinning happily at the joyful mischief he
was about to commit. But she knew that it was her
husband throwing silver dollars in the door for her to
pick up and pile beside her plate at dinner. It was this
way every Saturday afternoon. The nine dollars hurled
into the open door, he scurried to a hiding place
behind the Cape jasmine bush and waited.
Missie May promptly appeared at the door in
mock alarm.
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she was out of the country when alleged immoral acts
with a ten-year-old boy occurred, but she was never
able to escape the personal humiliation. In the 1950s,
she held various jobs, including maid, librarian, and
teacher, but did not hold onto any of them. Finally, in
1959, Hurston suffered a debilitating stroke and lived
for only three months in a welfare home before she
died in poverty on January 28, 1960.
Unlike many of her contemporaries in the 1930s,
Hurston did not join the Communist Party or adopt
a leftist political position, nor did she aggressively
seek to write “protest” literature or draw attention
to racial politics. Instead, Hurston believed deeply
in individualism and wrote to celebrate the positive
aspects of black life and culture. “I do not belong to
that sobbing school of Negrohood,” she wrote, “who
hold that nature somehow has given them a lowdown
dirty deal.”166 In elaborating on her race in an interview
for The New York Amsterdam News, Hurston argued
against stereotypical portrayals of “Negro life.” “There
is an over-simplification of the Negro,” Hurston argued,
“He is either pictured by the conservatives as happy,
picking his banjo, or by the so-called liberals as low,
miserable, and crying. The Negro’s life is neither of
these. Rather, it is in-between and above and below
these pictures.”167
Hurston’s political beliefs are complicated at best,
but they do suggest that she was largely out of step
with the prevailing views of the time.168 Hurston’s refusal
to advocate for Communism placed her in political
opposition to many artists in the Harlem Renaissance;
Hurston believed that communists misunderstood
blacks, considering them as downtrodden as Russian
peasants, when, in reality, blacks sought vertical social
movement as much as any other American.169 For
Hurston, then, the Communist Party distorted the race
as “a low, degraded mass, and impossible to be otherwise under constitutional government.”170
Hurston viewed Communism as destructive not
only in politics, but also in the arts. She attacked what
she called “social document fiction” and believed that
the effort to maintain the political position of the Party
resulted in work which ignored the “subtleties of black
life.”171 Hurston disagreed as well with the New Deal
welfare state. Her view of Roosevelt’s relief program
was that it was “the biggest weapon ever placed in the
hands of those who sought power and votes.”172 Yet
Hurston’s views seem rather disingenuous, given that
she participated not only in the Federal Theater Project
but also in the Federal Writers’ Project.
Hurston published a number of articles in magazines in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s that outlined her
conservative views; the title “Why the Negro Won’t
Buy Communism” in the American Legion Magazine
(1951), for example, offers insight into her perspective
on the Communist Party’s efforts to manipulate blacks.
In her later years, Hurston even opposed integration
and the ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, arguing
checked cloth on the table. Big pitcher of buttermilk
beaded with pale drops of butter from the churn. Hot
fried mullet, crackling bread, ham hock atop a mound
of string beans and new potatoes, and perched on the
windowsill a pone of spicy potato pudding.
Very little talk during the meal but that little consisted of banter that pretended to deny affection but
in reality flaunted it. Like when Missie May reached
for a second helping of the tater pone. Joe snatched
it out of her reach.
After Missie May had made two or three unsuccessful grabs at the pan, she begged, “Aw, Joe,
gimme some mo’ dat tater pone.”
“Nope, sweetenin’ is for us menfolks. Y’all pritty
lil frail eels don’t need nothin’ lak dis. You too sweet
already.”
“Please, Joe.”
“Naw, naw. Ah don’t want you to git no sweeter
than whut you is already. We goin’ down de road a
lil piece t’night so you go put on yo’ Sunday-go-tomeetin’ things.”
Missie May looked at her husband to see if he was
playing some prank. “Sho nuff, Joe?”
“Yeah. We goin’ to de ice cream parlor.”
“Where de ice cream parlor at, Joe?”
“A new man done come heah from Chicago and
he done got a place and took and opened it up for a
ice cream parlor, and bein’, as it’s real swell, Ah wants
you to be one de first ladies to walk in dere and have
some set down.”
“Do Jesus, Ah ain’t knowed nothin’ bout it. Who
de man done it?”
“Mister Otis D. Slemmons, of spots and places—
Memphis, Chicago, Jacksonville, Philadelphia and so
on.”
“Dat heavyset man wid his mouth full of gold
teeths?”
“Yeah. Where did you see ‘im at?”
“Ah went down to de sto’ tuh git a box of lye and
Ah seen ‘im standin’ on de corner talkin’ to some of
de mens, and Ah come on back and went to scrubbin’
de floor, and he passed and tipped his hat whilst Ah
was scourin’ de steps. Ah thought Ah never seen him
befo’.”
Joe smiled pleasantly. “Yeah, he’s up-to-date. He
got de finest clothes Ah ever seen on a colored man’s
back.”
“Aw, he don’t look no better in his clothes than
you do in yourn. He got a puzzlegut on ‘im and he so
chuckleheaded he got a pone behind his neck.”
Joe looked down at his own abdomen and said
wistfully: “Wisht Ah had a build on me lak he got. He
ain’t puzzlegutted, honey. He jes’ got a corperation.
Dat make ‘m look lak a rich white man. All rich mens
is got some belly on ‘em.”
“Ah seen de pitchers of Henry Ford and he’s a
spare-built man and Rockefeller look lak he ain’t
got but one gut. But Ford and Rockefeller and dis
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“Who dat chunkin’ money in mah do’way?” she
demanded. No answer from the yard. She leaped off
the porch and began to search the shrubbery. She
peeped under the porch and hung over the gate to
look up and down the road. While she did this, the
man behind the jasmine darted to the chinaberry tree.
She spied him and gave chase.
“Nobody ain’t gointer be chunkin’ money at me
and Ah not do ‘em nothin’,” she shouted in mock
anger. He ran around the house with Missie May at
his heels. She overtook him at the kitchen door. He
ran inside but could not close it after him before she
crowded in and locked with him in a rough-and-tumble. For several minutes the two were a furious mass
of male and female energy. Shouting, laughing, twisting, turning, tussling, tickling each other in the ribs;
Missie May clutching onto Joe and Joe trying, but not
too hard, to get away.
“Missie May, take yo’ hand out mah pocket!” Joe
shouted out between laughs.
“Ah ain’t, Joe, not lessen you gwine gimme whateve’ it is good you got in yo’ pocket. Turn it go, Joe,
do Ah’ll tear yo’ clothes.”
“Go on tear ‘em. You de one dat pushes de needles round heah. Move yo’ hand, Missie May.”
“Lemme git dat paper sak out yo’ pocket. Ah bet
it’s candy kisses.”
“Tain’t. Move yo’ hand. Woman ain’t got no business in a man’s clothes nohow. Go way.”
Missie May gouged way down and gave an upward
jerk and triumphed.
“Unhhunh! Ah got it! It ‘tis so candy kisses. Ah
knowed you had somethin’ for me in yo’ clothes. Now
Ah got to see whut’s in every pocket you got.”
Joe smiled indulgently and let his wife go through
all of his pockets and take out the things that he had
hidden for her to find. She bore off the chewing gum,
the cake of sweet soap, the pocket handkerchief as
if she had wrested them from him, as if they had not
been bought for the sake of this friendly battle.
“Whew! dat play-fight done got me all warmed
up!” Joe exclaimed. “Got me some water in de
kittle?”
“Yo’ water is on de fire and yo’ clean things is cross
de bed. Hurry up and wash yo’self and git changed
so we kin eat. Ah’m hongry.” As Missie said this, she
bore the steaming kettle into the bedroom.
“You ain’t hongry, sugar,” Joe contradicted her.
“Youse jes’ a little empty. Ah’m de one whut’s hongry.
Ah could eat up camp meetin’, back off ‘ssociation,
and drink Jurdan dry. Have it on de table when Ah git
out de tub.”
“Don’t you mess wid mah business, man. You git in
yo’ clothes. Ah’m a real wife, not no dress and breath.
Ah might not look lak one, but if you burn me, you
won’t git a thing but wife ashes.”
Joe splashed in the bedroom and Missie May
fanned around in the kitchen. A fresh red-and-white
cream? He say, ‘Ah have to hand it to you, Joe. Dat
wife of yours is jes’ thirty-eight and two. Yessuh, she’s
forte!’ Ain’t he killin’?”
“He’ll do in case of a rush. But he sho is got uh
heap uh gold on ‘im. Dat’s de first time Ah ever seed
gold money. It lookted good on him sho nuff, but it’d
look a whole heap better on you.”
“Who, me? Missie May, youse crazy! Where would
a po’ man lak me git gold money from?”
Missie May was silent for a minute, then she said,
“Us might find some goin’ long de road some time.
Us could.”
“Who would be losin’ gold money round heah?
We ain’t even seen none dese white folks wearin’ no
gold money on dey watch chain. You must be figgerin’
Mister Packard or Mister Cadillac goin’ pass through
heah.”
“You don’t know whut been lost ‘round heah.
Maybe somebody way back in memorial times lost
they gold money and went on off and it ain’t never
been found. And then if we wuz to find it, you could
wear some ‘thout havin’ no gang of womens lak dat
Slemmons say he got.”
Joe laughed and hugged her. “Don’t be so wishful
‘bout me. Ah’m satisfied de way Ah is. So long as Ah
be yo’ husband. Ah don’t keer ‘bout nothin’ else. Ah’d
ruther all de other womens in de world to be dead
than for you to have de toothache. Less we go to bed
and git our night rest.”
It was Saturday night once more before Joe could
parade his wife in Slemmons’s ice cream parlor again.
He worked the night shift and Saturday was his only
night off. Every other evening around six o’clock he
left home, and dying dawn saw him hustling home
around the lake, where the challenging sun flung a
flaming sword from east to west across the trembling
water.
That was the best part of life—going home to
Missie May. Their whitewashed house, the mock
battle on Saturday, the dinner and ice cream parlor
afterwards, church on Sunday nights when Missie
outdressed any woman in town—all, everything, was
right.
One night around eleven the acid ran out at the G.
and G. The foreman knocked off the crew and let the
steam die down. As Joe rounded the lake on his way
home, a lean moon rode the lake in a silver boat. If
anybody had asked Joe about the moon on the lake,
he would have said he hadn’t paid it any attention. But
he saw it with his feelings. It made him yearn painfully
for Missie. Creation obsessed him. He thought about
children. They had been married more than a year
now. They had money put away. They ought to be
making little feet for shoes. A little boy child would
be about right.
He saw a dim light in the bedroom and decided to
come in through the kitchen door. He could wash the
fertilizer dust off himself before presenting himself to
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Slemmons and all de rest kin be as many-gutted as
dey please, Ah’s satisfied wid you jes’ lak you is, baby.
God took pattern after a pine tree and built you
noble. Youse a pritty man, and if Ah knowed any way
to make you mo’ pritty still Ah’d take and do it.”
Joe reached over gently and toyed with Missie
May’s ear. “You jes’ say dat cause you love me, but
Ah know Ah can’t hold no light to Otis D. Slemmons.
Ah ain’t never been nowhere and Ah ain’t got nothin’
but you.”
Missie May got on his lap and kissed him and he
kissed back in kind. Then he went on. “All de womens
is crazy ‘bout ‘im everywhere he go.”
“How you know dat, Joe?”
“He tole us so hisself.”
“Dat don’t make it so. His mouf is cut crossways,
ain’t it? Well, he kin lie jes’ lak anybody else.”
“Good Lawd, Missie! You womens sho is hard to
sense into things. He’s got a five-dollar gold piece for
a stickpin and he got a ten-dollar gold piece on his
watch chain and his mouf is jes’ crammed full of gold
teeths. Sho wisht it wuz mine. And whut make it so
cool, he got money ‘cumulated. And womens give it
all to ‘im.”
“Ah don’t see whut de womens see on ‘im. Ah
wouldn’t give ‘im a wink if de sheriff wuz after ‘im.”
“Well, he tole us how de white womens in Chicago
give ‘im all dat gold money. So he don’t ‘low nobody
to touch it at all. Not even put day finger on it. Dey
told ‘im not to. You kin make ‘miration at it, but don’t
tetch it.”
“Whyn’t he stay up dere where dey so crazy ‘bout
‘im?”
“Ah reckon dey done made ‘im vast-rich and he
wants to travel some. He says dey wouldn’t leave ‘im
hit a lick of work. He got mo’ lady people crazy ‘bout
him than he kin shake a stick at.”
“Joe, Ah hates to see you so dumb. Dat stray nigger jes’ tell y’all anything and y’all b’lieve it.”
“Go ‘head on now, honey, and put on yo’ clothes.
He talkin’ ‘bout his pritty womens—Ah want ‘im to
see mine.”
Missie May went off to dress and Joe spent the time
trying to make his stomach punch out like Slemmons’s
middle. He tried the rolling swagger of the stranger,
but found that his tall bone-and-muscle stride fitted
ill with it. He just had time to drop back into his seat
before Missie May came in dressed to go.
On the way home that night Joe was exultant.
“Didn’t Ah say ole Otis was swell? Can’t he talk
Chicago talk? Wuzn’t dat funny whut he said when
great big fat ole Ida Armstrong come in? He asted
me, ‘Who is dat broad wid de forte shake?’ Dat’s a
new word. Us always thought forty was a set of figgers but he showed us where it means a whole heap
of things. Sometimes he don’t say forty, he jes’ say
thirty-eight and two and dat mean de same thing.
Know whut he told me when Ah wuz payin’ for our ice
on feeling so much, and not knowing what to do with
all his feelings, he put Slemmons’s watch charm in
his pants pocket and took a good laugh and went to
bed.
“Missie May, whut you cryin’ for?”
“Cause Ah love you so hard and Ah know you
don’t love me no mo’.”
Joe sank his face into the pillow for a spell, then he
said huskily, “You don’t know de feelings of dat yet,
Missie May.”
“Oh Joe, honey, he said he wuz gointer give me
dat gold money and he jes’ kept on after me—”
Joe was very still and silent for a long time. Then
he said, “Well, don’t cry no mo’, Missie May. Ah got
yo’ gold piece for you.”
The hours went past on their rusty ankles. Joe
still and quiet on one bed rail and Missie May wrung
dry of sobs on the other. Finally the sun’s tide crept
upon the shore of night and drowned all its hours.
Missie May with her face stiff and streaked towards
the window saw the dawn come into her yard. It was
day. Nothing more. Joe wouldn’t be coming home
as usual. No need to fling open the front door and
sweep off the porch, making it nice for Joe. Never no
more breakfast to cook; no more washing and starching of Joe’s jumper-jackets and pants. No more nothing. So why get up?
With this strange man in her bed, she felt embarrassed to get up and dress. She decided to wait till
he had dressed and gone. Then she would get up,
dress quickly and be gone forever beyond reach of
Joe’s looks and laughs. But he never moved. Red light
turned to yellow, then white.
From beyond the no-man’s land between them
came a voice. A strange voice that yesterday had
been Joe’s.
“Missie May, ain’t you gonna fix me no breakfus’?”
She sprang out of bed. “Yeah, Joe. Ah didn’t reckon you wuz hongry.”
No need to die today. Joe needed her for a few
more minutes anyhow.
Soon there was a roaring fire in the cookstove.
Water bucket full and two chickens killed. Joe loved
fried chicken and rice. She didn’t deserve a thing and
good Joe was letting her cook him some breakfast.
She rushed hot biscuits to the table as Joe took his
seat.
He ate with his eyes in his plate. No laughter, no
banter.
“Missie May, you ain’t eatin’ yo’ breakfus’.”
“Ah don’t choose none, Ah thank yuh.”
His coffee cup was empty. She sprang to refill it.
When she turned from the stove and bent to set the
cup beside Joe’s plate, she saw the yellow coin on the
table between them.
She slumped into her seat and wept into her arms.
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Missie May. It would be nice for her not to know that
he was there until he slipped into his place in bed and
hugged her back. She always liked that.
He eased the kitchen door open slowly and silently, but when he went to set his dinner bucket on the
table he bumped it into a pile of dishes, and something crashed to the floor. He heard his wife gasp in
fright and hurried to reassure her.
“Iss me, honey. Don’t git skeered.”
There was a quick, large movement in the bedroom. A rustle, a thud, and a stealthy silence. The light
went out.
What? Robbers? Murderers? Some varmint attacking his helpless wife, perhaps. He struck a match,
threw himself on guard and stepped over the doorsill
into the bedroom.
The great belt on the wheel of Time slipped and
eternity stood still. By the match light he could see
the man’s legs fighting with his breeches in his frantic
desire to get them on. He had both chance and time
to kill the intruder in his helpless condition—half in
and half out of his pants—but he was too weak to
take action. The shapeless enemies of humanity that
live in the hours of Time had waylaid Joe. He was
assaulted in his weakness. Like Samson awakening
after his haircut. So he just opened his mouth and
laughed.
The match went out and he struck another and lit
the lamp. A howling wind raced across his heart, but
underneath its fury he heard his wife sobbing and
Slemmons pleading for his life. Offering to buy it with
all that he had. “Please, suh, don’t kill me. Sixty-two
dollars at de sto’. Gold money.”
Joe just stood. Slemmons looked at the window,
but it was screened. Joe stood out like a roughbacked mountain between him and the door. Barring
him from escape, from sunrise, from life.
He considered a surprise attack upon the big
clown that stood there laughing like a chessy cat. But
before his fist could travel an inch, Joe’s own rushed
out to crush him like a battering ram. Then Joe stood
over him.
“Git into yo’ damn rags, Slemmons, and dat quick.”
Slemmons scrambled to his feet and into his vest
and coat. As he grabbed his hat, Joe’s fury overrode
his intentions and he grabbed at Slemmons with
his left hand and struck at him with his right. The
right landed. The left grazed the front of his vest.
Slemmons was knocked a somersault into the kitchen
and fled through the open door. Joe found himself
alone with Missie May, with the golden watch charm
clutched in his left fist. A short bit of broken chain
dangled between his fingers.
Missie May was sobbing. Wails of weeping without
words. Joe stood, and after a while he found out that
he had something in his hand. And then he stood
and felt without thinking and without seeing with his
natural eyes. Missie May kept on crying and Joe kept
The sun swept around the horizon, trailing its
robes of weeks and days. One morning as Joe came
in from work, he found Missie May chopping wood.
Without a word he took the ax and chopped a huge
pile before he stopped.
“You ain’t got no business choppin’ wood, and you
know it.”
“How come? Ah been choppin’ it for de last
longest.”
“Ah ain’t blind. You makin’ feet for shoes.”
“Won’t you be glad to have a lil baby chile, Joe?”
“You know dat ‘thout astin’ me.”
“Iss gointer be a boy chile and de very spit of
you.”
“You reckon, Missie May?”
“Who else could it look lak?”
Joe said nothing, but he thrust his hand deep into
his pocket and fingered something there.
It was almost six months later Missie May took to
bed and Joe went and got his mother to come wait
on the house.
Missie May was delivered of a fine boy. Her travail
was over when Joe come in from work one morning.
His mother and the old woman were drinking great
bowls of coffee around the fire in the kitchen.
The minute Joe came into the room his mother
called him aside.
“How did Missie May make out?” he asked quickly.
“Who, dat gal? She strong as a ox. She gointer
have plenty mo’. We done fixed her wid de sugar and
lard to sweeten her for de nex’ one.”
Joe stood silent awhile.
“You ain’t ask ‘bout de baby, Joe. You oughter be
mighty proud cause he sho is de spittin’ image of yuh,
son. Dat’s yourn all right, if you never git another one,
dat un is yourn. And you know Ah’m mighty proud
too, son, cause Ah never thought well of you marryin’
Missie May cause her ma used tuh fan her foot round
right smart and Ah been mighty skeered dat Missie
May wuz gointer git misput on her road.”
Joe said nothing. He fooled around the house till
late in the day, then, just before he went to work, he
went and stood at the foot of the bed and asked his
wife how she felt. He did this every day during the
week.
On Saturday he went to Orlando to make his market. It had been a long time since he had done that.
Meat and lard, meal and flour, soap and starch.
Cans of corn and tomatoes. All the staples. He fooled
around town for a while and bought bananas and
apples. Way after while he went around to the candy
store.
“Hello, Joe,” the clerk greeted him. “Ain’t seen you
in a long time.”
“Nope, Ah ain’t been heah. Been round in spots
and places.”
“Want some of them molasses kisses you always
buy?”
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Presently Joe said calmly, “Missie May, you cry
too much. Don’t look back lak Lot’s wife and turn to
salt.”
The sun, the hero of every day, the impersonal old
man that beams as brightly on death as on birth, came
up every morning and raced across the blue dome
and dipped into the sea of fire every morning. Water
ran downhill and birds nested.
Missie knew why she didn’t leave Joe. She couldn’t.
She loved him too much, but she could not understand why Joe didn’t leave her. He was polite, even
kind at times, but aloof.
There were no more Saturday romps. No ringing
silver dollars to stack beside her plate. No pockets to
rifle. In fact, the yellow coin in his trousers was like a
monster hiding in the cave of his pockets to destroy
her.
She often wondered if he still had it, but nothing
could have induced her to ask nor yet to explore
his pockets to see for herself. Its shadow was in the
house whether or no.
One night Joe came home around midnight and
complained of pains in the back. He asked Missie to
rub him down with liniment. It had been three months
since Missie had touched his body and it all seemed
strange. But she rubbed him. Grateful for the chance.
Before morning youth triumphed and Missie exulted.
But the next day, as she joyfully made up their bed,
beneath her pillow she found the piece of money with
the bit of chain attached.
Alone to herself, she looked at the thing with
loathing, but look she must. She took it into her hands
with trembling and saw first thing that it was no gold
piece. It was a gilded half dollar. Then she knew why
Slemmons had forbidden anyone to touch his gold.
He trusted village eyes at a distance not to recognize
his stickpin as a gilded quarter, and his watch charm
as a four-bit piece.
She was glad at first that Joe had left it there.
Perhaps he was through with her punishment. They
were man and wife again. Then another thought came
clawing at her. He had come home to buy from her as
if she were any woman in the longhouse. Fifty cents
for her love. As if to say that he could pay as well as
Slemmons. She slid the coin into his Sunday pants
pocket and dressed herself and left his house.
Halfway between her house and the quarters she
met her husband’s mother, and after a short talk she
turned and went back home. Never would she admit
defeat to that woman who prayed for it nightly. If
she had not the substance of marriage she had the
outside show. Joe must leave her. She let him see she
didn’t want his old gold four-bits, too.
She saw no more of the coin for some time though
she knew that Joe could not help finding it in his
pocket. But his health kept poor, and he came home
at least every ten days to be rubbed.
n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n
“The Gilded Six-Bits”
Hurston’s own peculiar brand of politics forms an
essential part of the context of “The Gilded Six-Bits.”
The first few sentences announce definitively that the
story, although it will ultimately reveal universal values,
is a particularization of human experience in a black
skin: “It was a Negro yard around a Negro house in a
Negro settlement….” Hurston’s setting is situated in
the all-black town of Eatonville, Florida, where black
characters operate at the center of the narrative, and
whites only exist on the periphery. The inhabitants of
the town, though, are dependent for their livelihoods
upon the payroll of the G. and G. Fertilizer plant, presumably managed by white bosses. Hurston quickly
establishes a strong connection between blackness
and cleanliness, emphasizing the whitewashed house,
steps, and porch; the neatness and decoration of the
yard; and the patterns established by the decorative
bottles edging the sidewalk and the haphazard cheer
of flowers. At the very beginning, Hurston sums up the
emotional climate of the place as “happy.”
Hurston’s narrator adopts an omniscient perspective, moving between exterior description of the scene
to the interiors of the characters’ thoughts. The narrator’s standard English presents a sharp distinction to the
characters’ dialect. The narrator’s voice clearly portrays
Missie May’s behavior when she hears the ring of Joe’s
money on her floor: “Missie May promptly appeared
at the door in mock alarm,” while the next sentence
expands and enriches the view of Missie May through
her dialogue. “Who dat chunkin’ money in my do’way,”
Missie May declares as she initiates the Saturday ritual
of hide and seek and mock fighting when Joe returns
home from work for his one night off. Similar to the dialect so rich in metaphor of Steinbeck’s Okies, Hurston’s
characters faithfully reproduce the black dialect of her
native southern culture.
An important feature of Hurston’s black dialect is
the manner in which it portrays identity. Clearly, the
southern pronunciation of “I” is softened for both
blacks and whites, but Hurston always uses “Ah” as the
specific representation of black identity, so that “Ah”
and “I” demarcate racially different subjectivities. Both
Missie May and Joe constantly refer to themselves as
“Ah,” while the one white character who speaks in the
story uses “I” as self-identification. Near the end of
the story, as the relationship between Missie May and
Joe slowly resumes its normal pattern, Joe goes to
Orlando to shop. There, he’s greeted by the white clerk
who’s not seen him in a long time. Joe uses Slemmons’
gilded half dollar to pay for molasses kisses for Missie
May, and the clerk exclaims, “Well, I’ll be doggone! A
gold-plated four-bit piece.” Hurston never identifies
the clerk as white other than by the use of “I” and the
representation of the clerk’s comments to the next customer, which clearly identify his race and indicate his
profound ignorance: “Wisht I could be like these darkies. Laughin’ all the time. Nothin’ worries ‘em.”
Counterpointing the richness of Hurston’s southern
black dialect are lyrical passages that describe the
passage of time and point beyond the particularity
of Missie May’s and Joe’s lives to suggest how their
story might take on mythic and universal proportions.
However, these lyrical passages don’t appear until
shortly before Joe discovers Slemmons with his wife.
As Joe hurries home from work one morning at dawn,
“the challenging sun flung a flaming sword from east to
west across the trembling water.” The metaphor clearly
foreshadows the battle between Slemmons and Joe
that will quickly ensue, but it also evokes the language
of the Homerian epic and raises the significance of
the battle between two men for one woman to cosmic
proportions. Hurston balances sun and moon when Joe
is released from work early, and, as he passes the lake
on his way home, the narrator observes, “a lean moon
rode the lake in a silver boat.” Joe pays no attention to
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“Yessuh.” He threw the gilded half dollar on the
counter. “Will dat spend?”
“What is it, Joe? Well, I’ll be doggone! A goldplated four-bit piece. Where’d you git it, Joe?”
“Offen a stray nigger dat come through Eatonville.
He had it on his watch chain for a charm—goin’ round
making out iss gold money. Ha ha! He had a quarter
on his tiepin and it wuz all golded up too. Tryin’ to fool
people. Makin’ out he so rich and everything. Ha! Ha!
Tryin’ to tole off folkses wives from home.”
“How did you git it, Joe? Did he fool you, too?”
“Who, me? Naw suh! He ain’t fooled me none.
Know whut Ah done? He come round me wid his
smart talk. Ah hauled off and knocked ‘im down and
took his old four-bits away from ‘im. Gointer buy my
wife some good ole lasses kisses wid it. Gimme fifty
cents worth of dem candy kisses.”
“Fifty cents buys a mighty lot of candy kisses, Joe.
Why don’t you split it up and take some chocolate
bars, too? They eat good, too.”
“Yessuh, dey do, but Ah wants all dat in kisses. Ah
got a lil boy chile home now. Tain’t a week old yet,
but he kin suck a sugar tit and maybe eat one them
kisses hisself.”
Joe got his candy and left the store. The clerk
turned to the next customer. “Wisht I could be like
these darkies. Laughin’ all the time. Nothin’ worries
‘em.”
Back in Eatonville, Joe reached his own front door.
There was the ring of singing metal on wood. Fifteen
times. Missie May couldn’t run to the door, but she
crept there as quickly as she could.
“Joe Banks, Ah hear you chunkin’ money in mah
do’way. You wait till Ah got mah strength back and
Ah’m gointer fix you for dat.”
Author Zora Neale Hurston. Though
she died in obscurity, Hurston and her
work have received renewed attention
and critical acclaim in recent decades.
the gold and the silver coin. Written early in 1933 and
published in Story in August, during Franklin Delano
Roosevelt’s first six months in office as President, the
story embeds a number of issues related to its moment
in history.173 Roosevelt, faced with the enormity of the
Great Depression, knew that keeping the nation on the
gold standard had become untenable. The amount of
gold is finite, and it was becoming increasingly unrealistic to limit the amount of silver and paper money in
circulation to their value in gold.
Debate had raged through the end of Hoover’s
presidency all the way to Roosevelt’s inauguration in
early March 1933 about dropping the gold standard.
Hoover worked tirelessly to force Roosevelt to agree
to keep the gold standard as his term drew to a close;
but by April, Roosevelt had abandoned the gold standard, set the value of gold at $20.76 per ounce, and
required all Americans to turn in their gold coins and
gold certificates in denominations of more than $100 to
the government in exchange for silver or paper money.
The result was an accumulation of gold in the Federal
Reserve and the inflation of paper money, which the
government hoped would result in a rise in prices and
the stabilization of the economy.
Given Hurston’s politically libertarian views and her
outspoken dislike of big government control, it is not
unthinkable that Slemmons’ gilded gold coins represent Hurston’s ironic view of the gold standard—as
gold must have seemed to slip away as an absolute
value. But, just as important to the interior dynamics
and racial politics of the story, gold money exists only in
the domain of white society—Missie May and Joe have
never seen nor owned it, and Slemmons is reputed to
have acquired his gold money from white women. It is
silver money that is the staple of the Banks household.
Joe flings his nine silver dollars on the floor of his home
at the opening of the story and, mysteriously, the nine
silver dollars have become fifteen by the story’s end.
Hurston never explains how Joe’s salary has increased,
but the increase itself suggests an increase in personal as well as emotional wealth. Joe and Missie May’s
increased financial security may also point to a critique
of the larger, dominant society outside of Eatonville
whose greed has tipped it into the downward spiral of
a depression.
In Eatonville, in fact, it almost seems that the Great
Depression has never arrived. Missie May and Joe live
in a home, not a squatter’s camp or tent. They may
even own their home, although Hurston never makes
this point clear. Joe has a job and appears to be paid
enough for Missie May to be able to put an abundance
of food on the table for the Saturday nights that Joe
is off from work. Joe’s last name is Banks and, ironically, banks were failing in white society at an alarming
rate in 1933; but Joe and Missie May don’t place their
money in the bank and so face little risk of losing it.
While the description of the home certainly doesn’t
suggest luxury—the shelves are lined with newspaper
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the moon, but sees it “with his feelings,” increasing his
longing to rush home to his wife.
What he finds, though, causes time to stop, “The
great belt on the wheel of Time slipped and eternity stood still.” Joe is in for a shock, as the narrator
describes it, “[t]he shapeless enemies of humanity that
live in the hours of Time had waylaid Joe.” Once Joe
has beaten Slemmons and flung him from his house,
“[t]he hours went past on their rusty ankles” and “the
sun’s tide crept upon the shore of night and drowned
all its hours.” But time does not stop for Missie May and
Joe; “[t]he sun, the hero of every day, the impersonal
old man that beams as brightly on death as on birth,
came up every morning and raced across the blue
dome….” Hurston weaves these descriptions of the
passage of time to surround and cocoon the moment
of and the aftermath of infidelity and closes them in a
description of time moving forward to full reconciliation
between Missie May and Joe, “[t]he sun swept around
the horizon, trailing its robes of weeks and days.”
The sun and moon have additional significance
within the context of the Great Depression and the
issue of money that centers Hurston’s narrative, for each
symbolically and metaphorically suggests, respectively,
William Faulkner (1897–
1962) and “Barn Burning”
“I believe that man will not merely endure: he will
prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among
creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because
he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and
sacrifice and endurance.”174
—William Faulkner, Nobel Prize Speech
In August of 1933, stories by William Faulkner and
Zora Neale Hurston appeared in the same issue of Story
magazine: Faulkner’s “Artist at Home” and Hurston’s
“The Gilded Six-Bits.” This extraordinary coincidence
very likely provided Faulkner with his first opportunity
to read Hurston’s work; however, it appears as though
he never correctly attributed the story to her. For, in
1943, Faulkner sent a letter to fellow Southern writer
Eudora Welty praising her work: “You are doing fine,”
he wrote, “You are doing all right. I read THE GILDED
SIX BITS….”175 It’s impossible to know why Faulkner
paid so little attention to Hurston as the author of a
story that had so clearly made such an impression on
him that he still remembered the title ten years later.
But remember it he did, perhaps most of all for the
quality of its black dialect; for he, too, would struggle
to give faithful expression to characters of both races
and of varying classes.
Among the other writers discussed here—John
Steinbeck, Studs Terkel, Meridel Le Sueur, Zora Neale
Hurston, Carl Sandburg, and Langston Hughes—
Faulkner’s work stands as a towering achievement. He
was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1949, and
Steinbeck, in his own Nobel speech in 1962, acknowledged his debt to Faulkner:
My great predecessor, William Faulkner,
speaking here, referred to it as a tragedy of
universal physical fear, so long sustained that
there were no longer problems of the spirit, so
that only the human heart in conflict with itself
seemed worth writing about. Faulkner, more
than most men, was aware of human strength
as well as of human weakness. He knew that the
understanding and the resolution of fear are a
large part of the writer’s reason for being.176
When Steinbeck spoke in acceptance of his Nobel
Prize in December 1962, Faulkner had been dead
less than five months, so Steinbeck’s comments commemorated not only Faulkner’s lifetime literary achievement as the fifth American writer to be chosen for the
award since 1900, but they also memorialized the man
recently deceased.
William Faulkner was born in 1897 in Mississippi
to a family with a long history in the state, extending
back before the Civil War. Faulkner’s great-grandfather,
William Clark Falkner, the “Old Colonel,” served in
the Civil War at the head of the Magnolia Rifles and
the Partisan Rangers. The Falkners, in the wake of the
mounting legend of the “Old Colonel,” accumulated
wealth and became a part of a southern “aristocracy.”
William, born “Falkner,” was an indifferent student
but gradually became attached to student life at the
University of Mississippi, “Ole Miss,” where his first
published work, a drawing, appeared in its yearbook.
Near the end of World War I, Faulkner tried to enlist as
a pilot but was rejected. He refused to give up, though,
and did manage to enlist in the Canadian Royal Air
Force just one month before the end of the war. It was
at this time as well that he changed the spelling of his
last name to Faulkner, creating for himself a false British
identity that would make him eligible for the Canadian
R. A. F.
With the war’s end, Faulkner returned to the family
home in Oxford, Mississippi, where he would enroll in
the University of Mississippi and continue to publish in
student publications; however, he would never finish a
degree. In the early 1920s, Faulkner moved back and
forth between New York and Oxford, finally settling for
a while in New Orleans, where he found an amenable
group of artists and writers—among them an important
mentor, writer Sherwood Anderson—and wrote his
first novel, Soldier’s Pay. There, he also wrote for the
Double Dealer and the New Orleans Times-Picayune.
After a six-month tour of Europe, Faulkner returned
to the South to split his time between Oxford, New
Orleans, and Pascagoula, Mississippi. By 1927, he had
published his second novel, Mosquitoes, set in the
environment of New Orleans, and was at work on a
longer novel, eventually Flags in the Dust, which came
out in a shortened version entitled Sartoris in January
of 1929.
Back in Oxford in 1928, Faulkner had begun to write
The Sound and the Fury and had rekindled his love for
Estelle Oldham Franklin, whom he would marry after
her divorce was final in 1929. Like Steinbeck, Faulkner
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and Missie May dries herself with a mealsack—there is
order, cleanliness, and comfort in this space.
In fact, the overarching theme of the story appears
in connection to money and its symbolism that lies at
the story’s heart. For the message is certainly one about
the counterfeit and the real. Missie May and Joe must
learn that their tiny, relatively secure island in the midst
of crashing white society should be enough to satisfy
them. As Slemmons’ apparent gold five- and ten-dollar
coins are revealed to be a gilded quarter and fifty-cent
piece (together they are the gilded six-bits), Missie May
and Joe both learn what is real and valuable—their love
for each other and their child—and what is not. And
even though, ultimately, Hurston leaves the true paternity of Missie May’s child unclear, the reconciliation
of Joe and Missie May requires Joe’s unquestioning
acceptance of the child as his and Missie May’s recognition of how close she came to losing what mattered
most in her life.
Photograph of William Faulkner.
Photo by Carl van Vechten.
Library of Congress Prints and
Photographs Division.
can stand or fall if I never touch ink again.”178 The novel’s characters, the Bundrens, are poor, coming closer in
economic class to that of Steinbeck’s Joad family than
the once prominent and upper-class Compsons in The
Sound and the Fury.
As I Lay Dying appeared to small sales but wide
notice, and Faulkner’s confidence was boosted by the
renewal in enthusiasm writing this novel had given him.
Through 1930 and 1931, Faulkner sent out more stories
than ever before and began placing them. Twenty stories were accepted during this two-year period, beginning with the breakthrough story “A Rose for Emily,”
previously rejected but now placed in Forum, a major
periodical, in April 1930. In fact, his stories were beginning to pay well; Faulkner earned $750 for “Thrift,”
published in The Saturday Evening Post—more than he
had yet earned for any of his novels.179
The beginnings of financial success gave Faulkner
the courage to purchase a deteriorated southern mansion, known as the Shegog Place in 1930; Faulkner and
his wife would rename their home “Rowan Oak.” The
year 1931 brought increasing success mingled with
great pain. Faulkner’s first daughter, Alabama, was
born in January but lived only a few days. At the end
of 1930, Faulkner had worked to revise Sanctuary, and
in February 1931, it appeared to wide attention and
brought more sales than all of his earlier books combined. Faulkner’s financial success quickly evaporated,
however, due to the mounting costs of restoring his
mansion. Still needing money, Faulkner published a collection of his stories entitled These 13 and began work
on the manuscript that would eventually become Light
in August. Traveling to New York and Virginia, Faulkner
was beginning to attract the attention of established
writers like Lillian Hellman, Dashiell Hammett, Dorothy
Parker, and Nathanael West, among others.
By 1932, despite his growing acclaim, Faulkner
continued to outspend his income, and he accepted
an offer of $500 a week for six weeks writing for MGM
studios in Hollywood. Although he produced little during this period, he did attract the attention of Howard
Hawks and had his contract extended to write the
screenplay for the Joan Crawford film Today We Live.
Faulkner was now earning a substantial income in
Hollywood, and Paramount offered him a contract for a
film of Sanctuary. In 1933, Faulkner had earned enough
to buy himself an airplane, and his wife had given birth
to a second daughter, Jill.
Faulkner would travel back and forth between his
home Rowan Oak in Oxford and Hollywood throughout the Great Depression and the 1940s, earning more
than $20,000 a year in the late 1930s alone—a substantial income for the Depression era. By the middle
of the 1930s, Faulkner was working on his ninth novel,
Absalom, Absalom!, a work that predates the events
of The Sound and the Fury and does much to expand
Faulkner’s mythical Yoknapatawpha County. Considered
by many critics to be Faulkner’s masterpiece, Absalom,
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would make a living by writing through the course
of the Great Depression. Once The Sound and the
Fury was out in October 1929, it immediately began
to attract attention, but sales were dampened by the
economic crash that followed almost immediately after
the novel’s release. The Sound and the Fury was, in
his view, Faulkner’s grand failure, a work in which “the
hackneyed accidents which make up this world—love
and life and death and sex and sorrow—brought
together by chance in perfect proportions, take on a
kind of splendid and timeless beauty.”177
With his hopes dampened at the prospect of making money, with four books out but not selling well
and a steady stream of rejection notices for his short
stories, Faulkner would deliberately begin work on a
novel designed to make money, Sanctuary, perhaps
the bleakest, most brutal, and most sensationalist of his
novels. But the novel was too shocking to his editor and
was held back from publication while Faulkner worked
to revise it.
With The Sound and the Fury out in October 1929,
and the nation plunged into economic crisis, Faulkner
began another novel, As I Lay Dying, a work in which
Faulkner was determined to demonstrate his technical
virtuosity. Faulkner wrote of this novel, “Before I began
I said, I am going to write a book by which, at a pinch, I
As Faulkner struggled in his efforts to hold on to
his real property at Rowan Oak, he was witnessing the
greatest expansion of federal government in the history of the nation. Even though he might be viewed as
anti-New Deal in his fierce determination to protect his
own private property and his individualism, Faulkner
was famous for his reticence about political matters
and best described, by one of his biographers, as generally an “anti-radical Democrat.”184 In a rare comment,
Faulkner played to his apparent lack of political awareness and claimed, “I vote Democratic because I’m a
property owner. Self-protection.”185 Comments such as
these make it very difficult to position him politically,
and they also reveal his fierce determination to guard
his privacy.
As an artist, Faulkner’s response to times of enormous political upheaval and conflicting social formations was to “plan a cosmos of my own,”186 that is, to
try to bring order and unity to conflicting perspectives
through the wholeness of narrative form. Faulkner’s
tales, however, gave Great Depression-era readers an
imaginary world order where conceptions of unity and
wholeness were rendered problematic by and vulnerable to conflicting desires to pursue personal liberty.187
Faulkner was hardly unaware of suffering during the
Great Depression; As I Lay Dying, published in the
first year of the Great Depression, demonstrates his
ability to “glimpse the specter of revolution and to
comprehend the difficulty confronting dissident forces
intending to challenge the existing power structure.”188
Read against The Grapes of Wrath, for example, As I
Lay Dying demonstrates a failure in community through
the ultimate isolation of its protagonist, Darl Bundren,
while in Steinbeck’s novel, Tom Joad’s eloquent leavetaking articulates the power of a collective struggle to
overcome oppression.
SEL EC T ED W ORK :
S
W
Selected Work: “Barn
Burning,” (1938) by
William Faulkner
Barn Burning
By William Faulkner
“Barn Burning,” copyright 1950 by Random House, Inc. Copyright
renewed 1977 by Jill Faulkner Summers, from Collected Stories
of William Faulkner by William Faulkner. Used by permission of
Random House, Inc.
The store in which the justice of the Peace’s court
was sitting smelled of cheese. The boy, crouched on
his nail keg at the back of the crowded room, knew
he smelled cheese, and more: from where he sat he
could see the ranked shelves close-packed with the
solid, squat, dynamic shapes of tin cans whose labels
his stomach read, not from the lettering which meant
nothing to his mind but from the scarlet devils and
the silver curve of fish—this, the cheese which he
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Absalom! offers the “supreme expression of his longstanding concern with the relation between poet and
poem, teller and tale, experience and imaginative construct, history and art….”180
Working intermittently in Hollywood, sometimes for
long periods of time, Faulkner continued to write, publishing Absalom, Absalom! in 1936, The Unvanquished
in 1938, The Wild Palms in 1939, and The Hamlet in
1940. In 1940, Faulkner was also working on a collection of stories that would be published as Go Down,
Moses in 1942. Throughout the 1940s, Faulkner continued working in Hollywood but would produce only
one novel, Intruder in the Dust, in 1948. In that year
as well, he was elected to the American Academy of
Arts and Letters. In November of 1950, Faulkner would
learn that he had been awarded the Nobel Prize for
Literature for 1949.
As he entered the last full decade of his life, Faulkner
traveled widely between Oxford and New York, and to
Japan, Europe, and Iceland for the State Department.
In 1957, Faulkner became the writer in residence at the
University of Virginia, maintaining this position for several years and working on The Town and The Mansion,
which complete what is commonly known as the
“Snopes Trilogy.” Just after his final novel, The Reivers,
was published in June 1962, Faulkner suffered a serious
fall from a horse; then, in July, he entered a sanitarium
in Mississippi where he died of heart failure on July 6.
William Faulkner, coming into his own as a writer during the early years of the Great Depression,
was caught in the midst of a raging cultural debate
that pitted modernists like himself, T. S. Eliot, Ernest
Hemingway, and James Joyce, against leftist, proletarian writers, who, determined to weld poetics
to politics, considered modernist writers both elitist
and out of touch with working-class values, and thus
“irredeemably bourgeois.”181 The line of demarcation
between writers of social realism and those employing
modernist formal experimentation was not, however,
absolute. Writers like Richard Wright, Tillie Olsen, and
John Dos Passos, who were praised for their proletarian
sympathies, employed modernist techniques like the
assemblage and juxtaposition of images in forms like
collage or montage and the internal monologue and
lack of causal relationships in stream of consciousness
narrative.182
As we have noted, Faulkner was not a member
of the working poor; indeed, it would seem that his
career and his finances only improved as the Great
Depression gained momentum. But Faulkner, as his
letters during the period attest, constantly believed
himself to be at the brink of financial failure during
the 1930s. Ownership of property—both intellectual
and real—had become especially important to him.
The map he drew of his fictional Yoknapatawpha
County and appended to Absalom, Absalom! boldly
proclaimed his ownership of his imaginary territory:
“William Faulkner, Sole Owner & Proprietor.”183
“Do you want me to question this boy?” But he could
hear, and during those subsequent long seconds while
there was absolutely no sound in the crowded little
room save that of quiet and intent breathing it was as
if he had swung outward at the end of a grape vine,
over a ravine, and at the top of the swing had been
caught in a prolonged instant of mesmerized gravity,
weightless in time.
“No!” Harris said violently, explosively. “Damnation!
Send him out of here!” Now time, the fluid world,
rushed beneath him again, the voices coming to him
again through the smell of cheese and sealed meat,
the fear and despair and the old grief of blood:
“This case is closed. I can’t find against you,
Snopes, but I can give you advice. Leave this county
and don’t come back to it.”
His father spoke for the first time, his voice cold
and harsh, level, without emphasis: “I aim to. I don’t
figure to stay in a country among people who….” he
said something unprintable and vile, addressed to no
one.
“That’ll do,” the justice said. “Take your wagon and
get out of this county before dark. Case dismissed.”
His father turned, and he followed the stiff black
coat, the wiry figure walking a little stiffly from where
a Confederate provost’s man’s musket ball had taken
him in the heel on a stolen horse thirty years ago,
followed the two backs now, since his older brother
had appeared from somewhere in the crowd, no taller
than the father but thicker, chewing tobacco steadily,
between the two lines of grim-faced men and out of
the store and across the worn gallery and down the
sagging steps and among the dogs and half-grown
boys in the mild May dust, where as he passed a voice
hissed:
“Barn burner!”
Again he could not see, whirling; there was a face
in a red haze, moonlike, bigger than the full moon,
the owner of it half again his size, he leaping in the
red haze toward the face, feeling no blow, feeling no
shock when his head struck the earth, scrabbling up
and leaping again, feeling no blow this time either and
tasting no blood, scrabbling up to see the other boy
in full flight and himself already leaping into pursuit
as his father’s hand jerked him back, the harsh, cold
voice speaking above him: “Go get in the wagon.”
It stood in a grove of locusts and mulberries across
the road. His two hulking sisters in their Sunday
dresses and his mother and her sister in calico and
sunbonnets were already in it, sitting on and among
the sorry residue of the dozen and more movings
which even the boy could remember—the battered
stove, the broken beds and chairs, the clock inlaid
with mother-of-pearl, which would not run, stopped at
some fourteen minutes past two o’clock of a dead and
forgotten day and time, which had been his mother’s
dowry. She was crying, though when she saw him she
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knew he smelled and the hermetic meat which his
intestines believed he smelled coming in intermittent gusts momentary and brief between the other
constant one, the smell and sense just a little of fear
because mostly of despair and grief, the old fierce pull
of blood. He could not see the table where the Justice
sat and before which his father and his father’s enemy
(our enemy he thought in that despair; ourn! mine and
hisn both! He’s my father!) stood, but he could hear
them, the two of them that is, because his father had
said no word yet:
“But what proof have you, Mr. Harris?”
“I told you. The hog got into my corn. I caught
it up and sent it back to him. He had no fence that
would hold it. I told him so, warned him. The next
time I put the hog in my pen. When he came to get it
I gave him enough wire to patch tip his pen. The next
time I put the hog up and kept it. I rode down to his
house and saw the wire I gave him still rolled on to
the spool in his yard. I told him he could have the hog
when he paid me a dollar pound fee. That evening a
nigger came with the dollar and got the hog. He was
a strange nigger. He said, ‘He say to tell you wood
and hay kin burn.’ I said, ‘What?’ ‘That whut he say
to tell you,’ the nigger said. ‘Wood and hay kin burn.’
That night my barn burned. I got the stock out but I
lost the barn.”
“Where is the nigger? Have you got him?”
“He was a strange nigger, I tell you. I don’t know
what became of him.”
“But that’s not proof. Don’t you see that’s not
proof?”
“Get that boy up here. He knows.” For a moment
the boy thought too that the man meant his older
brother until Harris said, “Not him. The little one. The
boy,” and, crouching, small for his age, small and wiry
like his father, in patched and faded jeans even too
small for him, with straight, uncombed, brown hair
and eyes gray and wild as storm scud, he saw the
men between himself and the table part and become
a lane of grim faces, at the end of which he saw the
justice, a shabby, collarless, graying man in spectacles, beckoning him, he felt no floor under his bare
feet; he seemed to walk beneath the palpable weight
of the grim turning faces. His father, stiff in his black
Sunday coat donned not for the trial but for the moving, did not even look at him, He aims for me to lie,
he thought, again with that frantic grief and despair.
And I will have to do hit.
“What’s your name, boy?” the Justice said.
“Colonel Sartoris Snopes,” the boy whispered.
“Hey?” the Justice said. “Talk louder. Colonel
Sartoris? I reckon anybody named for Colonel Sartoris
in this country can’t help but tell the truth, can they?”
The boy said nothing. Enemy! Enemy! he thought; for
a moment he could not even see, could not see that
the justice’s face was kindly nor discern that his voice
was troubled when he spoke to the man named Harris:
steel or of powder spoke to other men, as the one
weapon for the preservation of integrity, else breath
were not worth the breathing, and hence to be
regarded with respect and used with discretion.
But, he did not think this now and he had seen
those same niggard blazes all his life. He merely ate
his supper beside it and was already half asleep over
his iron plate when his father called him, and once
more he followed the stiff back, the stiff and ruthless
limp, up the slope and on to the starlit road where,
turning, he could see his father against the stars but
without face or depth—a shape black, flat, and bloodless as though cut from tin in the iron folds of the
frockcoat which had not been made for him, the voice
harsh like tin and without heat like tin:
“You were fixing to tell them. You would have told
him,” He didn’t answer. His father struck him with
the flat of his hand on the side of the head, hard but
without heat, exactly as he had struck the two mules
at the store, exactly as he would strike either of them
with any stick in order to kill a horse fly, his voice still
without heat or anger: “You’re getting to be a man.
You got to learn. You got to learn to stick to your own
blood or you ain’t going to have any blood to stick to
you. Do you think either of them, any man there this
morning, would? Don’t you know all they wanted was
a chance to get at me because they knew I had them
beat? Eh?” Later, twenty years later, he was to tell
himself, “If I had said they wanted only truth, justice,
he would have hit me again.” But now he said nothing. He was not crying. He just stood there. “Answer
me,” his father said.
“Yes,” he whispered. His father turned.
“Get on to bed. We’ll be there tomorrow.”
Tomorrow they were there. In the early afternoon
the wagon stopped before a paintless two-room
house identical almost with the dozen others it had
stopped before even in the boy’s ten years, and again,
as on the other dozen occasions, his mother and aunt
got down and began to unload the wagon, although
his two sisters and his father and brother had not
moved.
“Likely hit ain’t fitten for hawgs,” one of the sisters
said.
“Nevertheless, fit it will and you’ll hog it and like
it,” his father said. “Get out of them chairs and help
your Ma unload.”
The two sisters got down, big, bovine, in a flutter
of cheap ribbons; one of them drew from the jumbled
wagon bed a battered lantern, the other a worn
broom. His father handed the reins to the older son
and began to climb stiffly over the wheel. “When they
get unloaded, take the team to the barn and feed
them.” Then he said, and at first, the boy thought he
was still speaking to his brother: “Come with me.”
“Me?” he said.
“Yes,” his father said. “You.”
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drew her sleeve across her face and began to descend
from the wagon. “Get back,” the father said.
“He’s hurt. I got to get some water and wash
his….”
“Get back in the wagon,” his father said, he got in
too, over the tail-gate. His father mounted to the seat
where the older brother already sat and struck the
gaunt mules two savage blows with the peeled willow, but without heat. It was not even sadistic; it was
exactly that same quality which in later years would
cause his descendants to over-run the engine before
putting a motor car into motion, striking and reining
back in the same movement. The wagon went on,
the store with its quiet crowd of grimly watching men
dropped behind; a curve in the road hid it. Forever
he thought. Maybe he’s done satisfied now, now that
he has...stopping himself, not to say it aloud even to
himself. His mother’s hand touched his shoulder.
“Does hit hurt?” she said.
“Naw,” he said. “Hit don’t hurt. Lemme be.”
“Can’t you wipe some of the blood off before hit
dries?”
“I’ll wash to-night,” he said. “Lemme be, I tell
you.”
The wagon went on. He did not know where they
were going. None of them ever did or ever asked,
because it was always somewhere, always a house of
sorts waiting for them a day or two days or even three
days away. Likely, his father had already arranged to
make a crop on another farm before he ... Again he
had to stop himself. He (the father) always did. There
was something about his wolflike independence and
even courage, when the advantage was at least neutral, which impressed strangers, as if they got from
his latent ravening ferocity not so much a sense of
dependability as a feeling that his ferocious conviction in the rightness of his own actions would be of
advantage to all whose interest lay with his.
That night they camped, in a grove of oaks and
beeches where a spring ran. The nights were still cool
and they had a fire against it, of a rail lifted from a
nearby fence and cut into lengths—a small fire, neat,
niggard almost, a shrewd fire; such fires were his
father’s habit and custom always, even in freezing
weather. Older, the boy might have remarked this and
wondered why not a big one; why should not a man
who had not only seen the waste and extravagance of
war, but who had in his blood an inherent voracious
prodigality with material not his own, have burned
everything in sight?
Then he might have gone a step farther and
thought that that was the reason: that niggard blaze
was the living fruit of nights passed during those four
years in the woods hiding from all men, blue or gray,
with his strings of horses (captured horses, he called
them). And older still, he might have divined the true
reason: that the element of fire spoke to some deep
mainspring of his father’s being, as the element of
sorrow, certainly never with that ravening and jealous rage which unknown to him walked in the ironlike black coat before him; Maybe he will feel it too,
Maybe it will even change him now from what maybe
be couldn’t help but be.
They crossed the portico. Now he could hear his
father’s stiff foot as it came down on the boards with
clocklike finality, a sound out of all proportion to the
displacement of the body it bore and which was not
dwarfed either by the white door before it, as though
it had attained to a sort of vicious and ravening minimum not to be dwarfed by anything—the flat, wide,
black hat, the formal coat of broadcloth which had
once been black but which had now that frictionglazed greenish cast of the bodies of old house flies,
the lifted sleeve which was too large, the lifted hand
like a curled claw. The door opened so promptly that
the boy knew the Negro must have been watching
them all the time, an old man with neat grizzled hair,
in a linen jacket, who stood barring the door with his
body, saying, “Wipe yo foots, white man, fo you come
in here, Major ain’t home nohow.”
“Get out of my way, nigger,” his father said, without heat too, flinging the door back and the Negro
also and entering, his hat still on his head. And now
the boy saw the prints of the stiff foot on the doorjamb and saw them appear on the pale rug behind the
machinelike deliberation of the foot which seemed to
bear (or transmit) twice the weight which the body
compassed. The Negro was shouting “Miss Lula!
Miss Lula!” somewhere behind them, then the boy,
deluged as though by a warm wave by a suave turn
of carpeted stair and a pendant glitter of chandeliers
and a mute gleam of gold frames, heard the swift feet
and saw her too, a lady—perhaps he had never seen
her like before either—in a gray, smooth gown with
lace at the throat and an apron tied at the waist and
the sleeves turned back, wiping cake or biscuit dough
from her hands with a towel as she came up the
hall, looking not at his father at all but at the tracks
on the blond rug with an expression of incredulous
amazement.
“I tried,” the Negro cried. “I tole him to….”
“Will you please go away?” she said in a shaking
voice. “Major de Spain is not at home. Will you please
go away?”
His father had not spoken again. He did not speak
again. He did not even look at her. He just stood stiff
in the center of the rug, in his hat, the shaggy irongray brows twitching slightly above the pebble-colored eyes as he appeared to examine the house with
brief deliberation. Then with the same deliberation
he turned; the boy watched him pivot on the good
leg and saw the stiff foot drag round the arc of the
turning, leaving a final long and fading smear. His
father never looked at it, he never once looked down
at the rug. The Negro held the door. It closed behind
them, upon the hysteric and indistinguishable woman-
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“Abner,” his mother said. His father paused and
looked back—the harsh level stare beneath the shaggy, graying, irascible brows.
“I reckon I’ll have a word with the man that aims
to begin tomorrow owning me body and soul for the
next eight months.”
They went back up the road. A week ago—or
before last night, that is—he would have asked where
they were going, but not now. His father had struck
him before last night but never before had he paused
afterward to explain why, it was as if the blow and
the following calm, outrageous voice still rang, repercussed, divulging nothing to him save the terrible
handicap of being young, the light weight of his few
years, just heavy enough to prevent his soaring free of
the world as it seemed to be ordered but not heavy
enough to keep him footed solid in it, to resist it and
try to change the course of its events.
Presently he could see the grove of oaks and
cedars and the other flowering trees and shrubs
where the house would be, though not the house yet.
They walked beside a fence massed with honeysuckle
and Cherokee roses and came to a gate swinging
open between two brick pillars, and now, beyond a
sweep of drive, he saw the house for the first time
and at that instant he forgot his father and the terror
and despair both, and even when he remembered his
father again (who had not stopped) the terror and
despair did not return. Because, for all the twelve
movings, they had sojourned until now in a poor
country, a land of small farms and fields and houses,
and he had never seen a house like this before. Hits
big as a courthouse he thought quietly, with a surge
of peace and joy whose reason he could not have
thought into words, being too young for that: They
are safe from him. People whose lives are a part of this
peace and dignity are beyond his touch, he no more
to them than a buzzing wasp: capable of stinging for
a little moment but that’s all,— the spell of this peace
and dignity rendering even the barns and stable and
cribs which belong to it impervious to the puny flames
he might contrive…this, the peace and joy, ebbing for
an instant as he looked again at the stiff black back,
the stiff and implacable limp of the figure which was
not dwarfed by the house, for the reason that it had
never looked big anywhere and which now, against
the serene columned backdrop, had more than ever
that impervious quality of something cut ruthlessly
from tin, depthless, as though, sidewise to the sun,
it would cast no shadow. Watching him, the boy
remarked the absolutely undeviating course which his
father held and saw the stiff foot come squarely down
in a pile of fresh droppings where a horse had stood
in the drive and which his father could have avoided
by a simple change of stride. But it ebbed only for a
moment, though he could not have thought this into
words either, walking on in the spell of the house,
which he could ever want but without envy, without
the corner of his eye his father raise from the ground
a flattish fragment of field stone and examine it and
return to the pot, and this time his mother actually
spoke: “Abner. Abner. Please don’t. Please, Abner.”
Then he was done too. It was dusk; the whippoorwills had already begun. He could smell coffee from
the room where they would presently eat the cold
food remaining from the mid-afternoon meal, though
when he entered the house he realized they were having coffee again probably because there was a fire on
the hearth, before which the rug now lay spread over
the backs of the two chairs. The tracks of his father’s
foot were gone. Where they had been were now long,
water-cloudy scoriations resembling the sporadic
course of a Lilliputian mowing machine.
It still hung there while they ate the cold food and
then went to bed, scattered without order or claim
up and down the two rooms, his mother in one bed,
where his father would later lie, the older brother in
the other, himself, the aunt, and the two sisters on
pallets on the floor. But his father was not in bed yet.
The last thing the boy remembered was the depthless,
harsh silhouette of the hat and coat bending over the
rug and it seemed to him that he had not even closed
his eyes when the silhouette was standing over him,
the fire almost dead behind it, the stiff foot prodding
him awake. “Catch up the mule,” his father said.
When he returned with the mule his father was
standing in the black door, the rolled rug over his
shoulder. “Ain’t you going to ride?” he said.
“No. Give me your foot.”
He bent his knee into his father’s hand, the wiry,
surprising power flowed smoothly, rising, he rising
with it, on to the mule’s bare back (they had owned a
saddle once; the boy could remember it though not
when or where) and with the same effortlessness his
father swung the rug up in front of him. Now in the
starlight they retraced the afternoon’s path, up the
dusty road rife with honeysuckle, through the gate
and up the black tunnel of the drive to the lightless
house, where he sat on the mule and felt the rough
warp of the rug drag across his thighs and vanish.
“Don’t you want me to help?” he whispered. His
father did not answer and now he heard again that
stiff foot striking the hollow portico with that wooden
and clock like deliberation, that outrageous overstatement of the weight it carried. The rug, hunched, not
flung (the boy could tell that even in the darkness)
from his father’s shoulder struck the angle of wall and
floor with a sound unbelievably loud, thunderous,
then the foot again, unhurried and enormous; a light
came on in the house and the boy sat, tense, breathing steadily and quietly and just a little fast, though
the foot itself did not increase its beat at all, descending the steps now; now the boy could see him.
“Don’t you want to ride now?” he whispered. “We
kin both ride now,” the light within the house altering now, flaring up and sinking. He’s coming down
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wail. His father stopped at the top of the steps and
scraped his boot clean on the edge of it. At the gate
he stopped again. He stood for a moment, planted
stiffly on the stiff foot, looking back at the house.
“Pretty and white, ain’t it?” he said. “That’s sweat.
Nigger sweat. Maybe it ain’t white enough yet to suit
him. Maybe he wants to mix some white sweat with
it.”
Two hours later the boy was chopping wood
behind the house within which his mother and aunt
and the two sisters (the mother and aunt, not the two
girls, he knew that; even at this distance and muffled
by walls the flat loud voices of the two girls emanated
an incorrigible idle inertia) were setting up the stove
to prepare a meal, when he heard the hooves and
saw the linen-clad man on a fine sorrel mare, whom
he recognized even before he saw the rolled rug in
front of the Negro youth following on a fat boy carriage horse—a suffused, angry face vanishing, still at
full gallop, beyond the corner of the house where his
father and brother were sitting in the two tilted chairs;
and a moment later, almost before he could have put
the axe down, he heard the hooves again and watched
the sorrel mare go back out of the yard, already galloping again. Then his father began to shout one of
the sisters’ names, who presently emerged backward
from the kitchen door dragging the rolled rug along
the ground by one end while the other sister walked
behind it.
“If you ain’t going to tote, go on and set up the
wash pot,” the first said.
“You, Sarty!” the second shouted. “Set up the
wash pot!” His father appeared at the door, framed
against that shabbiness, as he had been against that
other bland perfection, impervious to either, the
mother’s anxious face at his shoulder.
“Go on,” the father said. “Pick it up.” The two
sisters stooped, broad, lethargic; stooping, they presented an incredible expanse of pale cloth and a flutter of tawdry ribbons.
“If I thought enough of a rug to have to git hit all
the way from France I wouldn’t keep hit where folks
coming in would have to tromp on hit,” the first said.
They raised the rug.
“Abner,” the mother said. “Let me do it.”
“You go back and git dinner,” his father said. “I’ll
tend to this.”
From the woodpile through the rest of the afternoon the boy watched them, the rug spread flat in
the dust beside the bubbling wash-pot, the two sisters stooping over it with that profound and lethargic
reluctance, while the father stood over them in turn,
implacable and grim, driving them though never raising his voice again. He could smell the harsh homemade lye they were using; he saw his mother come to
the door once and look toward them with an expression not anxious now but very like despair; he saw his
father turn, and he fell to with the axe and saw from
They were running a middle buster now, his
brother holding the plow straight while he handled
the reins, and walking beside the straining mule, the
rich black sod shearing cool and damp against his
bare ankles, he thought Maybe this is the end of it.
Maybe even that twenty bushels that seems hard to
have to pay for just a rug will be a cheap price for him
to stop forever and always from being what he used
to be; thinking, dreaming now, so that his brother
had to speak sharply to him to mind the mule: Maybe
he even won’t collect the twenty bushels. Maybe it
will all add up and balance and vanish—corn, rug,
fire,— The terror and grief the being pulled two ways
like between two teams of horses—gone, done with
for ever and ever.
Then it was Saturday; he looked up from beneath
the mule he was harnessing and saw his father in the
black coat and hat. “Not that,” his father said. “The
wagon gear.” And then, two hours later, sitting in the
wagon bed behind his father and brother on the seat,
the wagon accomplished a final curve, and he saw the
weathered paintless store with its tattered tobacco
and patent-medicine posters and the tethered wagons and saddle animals below the gallery. He mounted the gnawed steps behind his father and brother,
and there again was the lane of quiet, watching faces
for the three of them to walk through. He saw the
man in spectacles sitting at the plank table and he did
not need to be told this was a Justice of the Peace; he
sent one glare of fierce, exultant, partisan defiance at
the man in collar and cravat now, whom he had seen
but twice before in his life, and that on a galloping
horse, who now wore on his face an expression not
of rage but of amazed unbelief which the boy could
not have known was at the incredible circumstance of
being sued by one of his own tenants, and came and
stood against his father and cried at the Justice: “He
ain’t done it! He ain’t burnt….”
“Go back to the wagon,” his father said.
“Burnt?” the Justice said. “Do I understand this
rug was burned too?”
“Does anybody here claim it was?” his father said.
“Go back to the wagon.” But he did not, he merely
retreated to the rear of the room, crowded as that
other had been, but not to sit down this time, instead,
to stand pressing among the motionless bodies, listening to the voices:
“And you claim twenty bushels of corn is too high
for the damage you did to the rug?”
“He brought the rug to me and said he wanted the
tracks washed out of it. I washed the tracks out and
took the rug back to him.”
“But you didn’t carry the rug back to him in the
same condition it was in before you made the tracks
on it.”
His father did not answer, and now for perhaps
half a minute there was no sound at all save that of
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the stairs now, he thought. He had already ridden the
mule up beside the horse block; presently his father
was up behind him and he doubled the reins over
and slashed the mule across the neck, but before the
animal could begin to trot the hard, thin arm came
round him, the hard, knotted hand jerking the mule
back to a walk.
In the first red rays of the sun they were in the lot,
putting plow gear on the mules. This time the sorrel
mare was in the lot before he heard it at all, the rider
collarless and even bareheaded, trembling, speaking
in a shaking voice as the woman in the house had
done, his father merely looking up once before stooping again to the hame he was buckling, so that the
man on the mare spoke to his stooping back.
“You must realize you have ruined that rug.
Wasn’t there anybody here, any of your women….”
he ceased, shaking, the boy watching him, the older
brother leaning now in the stable door, chewing,
blinking slowly and steadily at nothing apparently. “It
cost a hundred dollars. But you never had a hundred
dollars. You never will. So I’m going to charge you
twenty bushels of corn against your crop. I’ll add it
in your contract and when you come to the commissary you can sign it. That won’t keep Mrs. de Spain
quiet but maybe it will teach you to wipe your feet off
before you enter her house again.”
Then he was gone. The boy looked at his father,
who still had not spoken or even looked up again,
who was now adjusting the logger-head in the hame.
“Pap,” he said. His father looked at him—the
inscrutable face, the shaggy brows beneath which
the gray eyes glinted coldly. Suddenly the boy went
toward him, fast, stopping also, suddenly. “You done
the best you could!” he cried. “If he wanted hit done
different why didn’t he wait and tell you how? He
won’t git no twenty bushels! He won’t git none! We’ll
gether hit and hide hit! I kin watch…“
“Did you put the cutter back in that straight stock
like I told you?”
“No, sir,” he said.
“Then go do it.”
That was Wednesday. During the rest of that week
he worked steadily, at what was within his scope and
some which was beyond it, with an industry that did
not need to be driven nor even commanded twice;
he had this from his mother, with the difference that
some at least of what he did he liked to do, such as
splitting wood with the half-size axe which his mother
and aunt had earned; or saved money somehow, to
present him with at Christmas. In company with the
two older women (and on one afternoon, even one of
the sisters), he built pens for the shoat and the cow
which were a part of his father’s contract with the
landlord, and one afternoon, his father being absent,
gone somewhere on one of the mules, he went to the
field.
convolutions of tulle and tights and painted leers of
comedians, and said, “It’s time to eat.”
But not at home. Squatting beside his brother
against the front wall, he watched his father emerge
from the store and produce from a paper sack a segment of cheese and divide it carefully and deliberately
into three with his pocket knife and produce crackers
from the same sack. They all three squatted on the
gallery and ate, slowly, without talking; then in the
store again, they drank from a tin dipper tepid water
smelling of the cedar bucket and of living beech trees.
And still they did not go home. It was as a horse lot
this time, a tall rail fence upon and along which men
stood and sat and out of which one by one horses
were led, to be walked and trotted and then cantered
back and forth along the road while the slow swapping and buying went on and the sun began to slant
westward, they—the three of them—watching and
listening, the older brother with his muddy eyes and
his steady, inevitable tobacco, the father commenting
now and then on certain of the animals, to no one in
particular.
It was after sundown when they reached home.
They ate supper by lamplight, then, sitting on the
doorstep, the boy watched the night fully accomplish,
listening to the whippoorwills and the frogs, when he
heard his mother’s voice: “Abner! No! No! Oh, God.
Oh, God. Abner!” and he rose, whirled, and saw the
altered light through the door where a candle stub
now burned in a bottle neck on the table and his
father, still in the hat and coat, at once formal and burlesque as though dressed carefully for some shabby
and ceremonial violence, emptying the reservoir of
the lamp back into the five-gallon kerosene can from
which it had been filled, while the mother tugged at
his arm until he shifted the lamp to the other hand
and flung her back, not savagely or viciously, just hard,
into the wall, her hands flung out against the wall for
balance, her mouth open and in her face the same
quality of hopeless despair as had been in her voice.
Then his father saw him standing in the door. “Go to
the barn and get that can of oil we were oiling the
wagon with,” he said. The boy did not move. Then he
could speak.
“What….” he cried. “What are you….”
“Go get that oil,” his father said. “Go.”
Then he was moving, running, outside the house,
toward the stable: this the old habit, the old blood
which he had not been permitted to choose for
himself, which had been bequeathed him willy nilly
and which had run for so long (and who knew where,
battening on what of outrage and savagery and lust)
before it came to him. I could keep on, he thought. I
could run on and on and never look back, never need
to see his face again. Only I can’t, I can’t, the rusted
can in his hand now, the liquid sploshing in it as he ran
back to the house and into it, into the sound of his
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breathing, the faint, steady suspiration of complete
and intent listening.
“You decline to answer that, Mr. Snopes?” Again
his father did not answer. “I’m going to find against
you, Mr. Snopes. I’m going to find that you were
responsible for the injury to Major de Spain’s rug
and hold you liable for it. But twenty bushels of corn
seems a little high for a man in your circumstances to
have to pay. Major de Spain claims it cost a hundred
dollars. October corn will be worth about fifty cents.
I figure that if Major de Spain can stand a ninety-five
dollar loss on something he paid cash for, you can
stand a five-dollar loss you haven’t earned yet. I hold
you in damages to Major de Spain to the amount of
ten bushels of corn over and above your contract with
him, to be paid to him out of your crop at gathering
time. Court adjourned.”
It had taken no time hardly, the morning was but
half begun. He thought they would return home and
perhaps back to the field, since they were late, far
behind all other farmers. But instead his father passed
on behind the wagon, merely indicating with his hand
for the older brother to follow with it, and crossed the
road toward the blacksmith shop opposite, pressing
on after his father, overtaking him, speaking, whispering up at the harsh, calm face beneath the weathered
hat: “He won’t git no ten bushels neither. He won’t git
one. We’ll….” until his father glanced for an instant
down at him, the face absolutely calm, the grizzled
eyebrows tangled above the cold eyes, the voice
almost pleasant, almost gentle:
“You think so? Well, we’ll wait till October
anyway.”
The matter of the wagon—the setting of a spoke
or two and the tightening of the tires—did not take
long either, the business of the tires accomplished by
driving the wagon into the spring branch behind the
shop and letting it stand there, the mules nuzzling into
the water from time to time, and the boy on the seat
with the idle reins, looking up the slope and through
the sooty tunnel of the shed where the slow hammer
rang and where his father sat on an upended cypress
bolt, easily, either talking or listening, still sitting there
when the boy brought the dripping wagon up out of
the branch and halted it before the door.
“Take them on to the shade and hitch,” his father
said. He did so and returned. His father and the smith
and a third man squatting on his heels inside the
door were talking, about crops and animals; the boy,
squatting too in the ammoniac dust and hoof parings
and scales of rust, heard his father tell a long and
unhurried story out of the time before the birth of the
older brother even when he had been a professional
horsetrader. And then his father came up beside him
where he stood before a tattered last year’s circus
poster on the other side of the store, gazing rapt and
quiet at the scarlet horses, the incredible poisings and
of young female features untroubled by any surprise
even, wearing only an expression of bovine interest.
Then he was out of the room, out of the house, in the
mild dust of the starlit road and the heavy rifeness of
honeysuckle, the pale ribbon unspooling with terrific
slowness under his running feet, reaching the gate at
last and turning in, running, his heart and lungs drumming, on up the drive toward the lighted house, the
lighted door. He did not knock, he burst in, sobbing
for breath, incapable for the moment of speech; he
saw the astonished face of the Negro in the linen jacket without knowing when the Negro had appeared.
“De Spain!” he cried, panted. Where’s then he saw
the white man too emerging from a white door down
the hall. “Barn!” he cried. “Barn!”
“What?” the white man said. “Barn?”
“Yes!” the boy cried. “Barn!”
“Catch him!” the white man shouted.
But it was too late this time too. The Negro
grasped his shirt, but the entire sleeve, rotten with
washing, carried away, and he was out that door too
and in the drive again, and had actually never ceased
to run even while he was screaming into the white
man’s face.
Behind him the white man was shouting, “My
horse! Fetch my horse!” and he thought for an instant
of cutting across the park and climbing the fence
into the road, but he did not know the park nor how
high the vine-massed fence might be and he dared
not risk it. So he ran on down the drive, blood and
breath roaring; presently he was in the road again
though he could not see it. He could not hear either:
the galloping mare was almost upon him before he
heard her, and even then he held his course, as if the
urgency of his wild grief and need must in a moment
more find him wings, waiting until the ultimate instant
to hurl himself aside and into the weed-choked roadside ditch as the horse thundered past and on, for
an instant in furious silhouette against the stars, the
tranquil early summer night sky which, even before
the shape of the horse and rider vanished, stained
abruptly and violently upward: a long, swirling roar
incredible and soundless, blotting the stars, and he
springing up and into the road again, running again,
knowing it was too late yet still running even after he
heard the shot and, an instant later, two shots, pausing now without knowing he had ceased to run, crying
“Pap! Pap!,” running again before he knew he had
begun to run, stumbling, tripping over something and
scrabbling up again without ceasing to run, looking
backward over his shoulder at the glare as he got up,
running on among the invisible trees, panting, sobbing, “Father! Father!”
At midnight he was sitting on the crest of a hill.
He did not know it was midnight and he did not know
how far he had come. But there was no glare behind
him now and he sat now, his back toward what he had
called home for four days anyhow, his face toward
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mother’s weeping in the next room, and handed the
can to his father.
“Ain’t you going to even send a nigger?” he cried.
“At least you sent a nigger before!”
This time his father didn’t strike him. The hand
came even faster than the blow had, the same hand
which had set the can on the table with almost excruciating care flashing from the can toward him too
quick for him to follow it, gripping him by the back of
his shirt and on to tiptoe before he had seen it quit
the can, the face stooping at him in breathless and
frozen ferocity, the cold, dead voice speaking over
him to the older brother who leaned against the table,
chewing with that steady, curious, sidewise motion of
cows:
“Empty the can into the big one and go on. I’ll
catch up with you.”
“Better tie him up to the bedpost,” the brother
said.
“Do like I told you,” the father said. Then the
boy was moving, his bunched shirt and the hard,
bony hand between his shoulder-blades, his toes just
touching the floor, across the room and into the other
one, past the sisters sitting with spread heavy thighs
in the two chairs over the cold hearth, and to where
his mother and aunt sat side by side on the bed, the
aunt’s arms about his mother’s shoulders.
“Hold him,” the father said. The aunt made a startled movement. “Not you.” the father said. “Lennie.
Take hold of him. I want to see you do it.” His mother
took him by the wrist. “You’ll hold him better than
that. If he gets loose don’t you know what he is going
to do? He will go up yonder.” He jerked his head
toward the road. “Maybe I’d better tie him.”
“I’ll hold him,” his mother whispered.
“See you do then.” Then his father was gone, the
stiff foot heavy and measured upon the boards, ceasing at last.
Then he began to struggle. His mother caught him
in both arms, he jerking and wrenching at them. He
would be stronger in the end, he knew that. But he
had no time to wait for it. “Lemme go!” he cried. “I
don’t want to have to hit you!”
“Let him go!” the aunt said. “If he don’t go, before
God, I am going up there myself!”
“Don’t you see I can’t?” his mother cried. “Sarty!
Sarty! No! No! Help me, Lizzie!”
Then he was free. His aunt grasped at him but
it was too late. He whirled, running, his mother
stumbled forward on to her knees behind him, crying to the nearer sister: “Catch him, Net! Catch him!”
But that was too late too, the sister (the sisters were
twins, born at the same time, yet either of them now
gave the impression of being, encompassing as much
living meat and volume and weight as any other two
of the family) not yet having begun to rise from the
chair, her head, face, alone merely turned, presenting
to him in the flying instant an astonishing expanse
n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n
“Barn Burning”
“Barn Burning” may be read as the most class-conscious story in Faulkner’s short fiction canon. Written
in 1938, and published in Harper’s Monthly in June
1939, the story portrays a crisis in the clash between
the classes that mirrors the struggle in the nation at
large. The story, however, does not take place in 1938,
but during the Reconstruction era in the South, in
approximately 1895, with flashbacks to 1860–65, the
era of the Civil War, and flash-forwards twenty years to
approximately 1915, when the child protagonist of the
story is an adult. Faulkner clearly positions the story in
historical time thirty years after the Civil War by linking
it to Abner Snopes’s horse thievery: “His father turned,
and he followed the stiff black coat, the wiry figure
walking a little stiffly from where a Confederate provost’s man’s musket ball had taken him in the heel on a
stolen horse thirty years ago….” Faulkner’s choice of a
date for his setting of more than forty years before the
Great Depression may well suggest that in the South,
the Depression began long before the stock market
crash of 1929.
The historical context of the time of Faulkner’s
writing, though, does highlight a central concern of
the story—the plight of the sharecropper and tenant
farmer. In the South, particularly, the conditions of
sharecropping suggest its position as “slavery’s systemic descendant.”189 Throughout the second half of the
1930s, conditions of the sharecropper and tenant farmer were being well documented not only in fiction, but
also in film documentaries and photographs. Following
the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933, two unions
formed in the South that favored large landowners;
these were the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union (STFU)
and the Share Cropper’s Union. One activist associated
with the STFU, Ward Rodgers, was, in fact, tried for
subversive activities by a jury of planters convened in
an Arkansas general store.190 Faulkner would have been
aware of this and many other similar incidents as the
clashes between the unions and the dominant planter
class “raised the specter of class warfare.”191
Faulkner’s story certainly suggests a far-reaching
examination of these conditions and the means by
which such conditions may lead to destructive revolt.
Barn burning serves as an important symbol of revolt
against inequities imposed by the dominant class upon
subordinate classes. Faulkner embodies the struggle
of the classes in his child protagonist, Colonel Sartoris
Snopes. “Sarty” bears the name of Colonel Sartoris, a
nod to the fiction of his father’s honorable service in
the Civil War under the Colonel, who represents the
dominant, aristocratic Southern ascendancy. But Sarty
is also a Snopes, which brands him as the son of a
sharecropper—constantly moving, illiterate, unkempt,
and hungry.
While Faulkner chooses an omniscient narrative
viewpoint, the story is anchored in the character of
Sarty through the use of interior monologue, which
binds the narrator in close sympathy to this one main
character. The reader can know and understand more
than Sarty as a child can, but it is his interior struggle
to make sense of his father’s actions and the social
context within which he is trapped that produces the
thematic drive of the story. Sarty appears first in the
story as he sits perched on a keg of nails in a general
store, smelling cheese and hungering for the contents
of tinned containers of deviled meat and canned
fish. The boy’s struggle with hunger is echoed by his
struggle with “the smell and sense just a little of fear
because mostly of despair and grief, the old fierce pull
of blood.” Sarty is about to witness a trial in which his
father stands accused of barn burning.
This trial, though it ends with Abner Snopes’s
acquittal, results in the need for the family to move yet
again. In fact, Abner is dressed in his “black Sunday
coat donned not for the trial but for the moving.” Two
trials frame the events in the story, that with which the
story opens, and the second, in which Abner brings suit
against his new landlord, Major de Spain, for imposing
an excessive fine. Both trials occur in country hamlet
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the dark woods which he would enter when breath
was strong again, small, shaking steadily in the chill
darkness, hugging himself into the remainder of his
thin, rotten shirt, the grief and despair now no longer
terror and fear but just grief and despair. Father, My
father, he thought. “He was brave!” he cried suddenly,
aloud but not loud, no more than a whisper: “He was!
He was in the war! He was in Colonel Sartoris’ cav’ry!”
not knowing that his father had gone to that war a
private in the fine old European sense, wearing no
uniform, admitting the authority of and giving fidelity
to no man or army or flag, going to war as Malbrouck
himself did; for booty—it meant nothing and less than
nothing to him if it were enemy booty or his own.
The slow constellations wheeled on. It would be
dawn and then sun-up after a while and he would be
hungry. But that would be tomorrow and now he was
only cold, and walking would cure that. His breathing
was easier now, and he decided to get up and go on,
and then he found that he had been asleep because
he knew it was almost dawn, the night almost over.
He could tell that from the whippoorwills. They were
everywhere now among the dark trees below him,
constant and inflectioned and ceaseless, so that,
as the instant for giving over to the day birds drew
nearer and nearer, there was no interval at all between
them. He got up. He was a little stiff, but walking
would cure that too as it would the cold, and soon
there would be the sun. He went on down the hill,
toward the dark woods within which the liquid silver
voices of the birds, called unceasing—the rapid and
urgent beating of the urgent and quiring heart of the
late spring night. He did not look back.
William Faulkner at work on a
manuscript in the mid-1950s.
The nature of Abner’s character, bloodless and cold,
creates the conflict that consumes his son. Sarty, pulled
by blood, feels alignment with his father’s fight against
the enemy “ourn! mine and hisn both! He’s my father!”
Yet the pull created by his growing awareness that he’s
expected to lie and his understanding at some profound level that his father’s actions are wrong is equally
strong. “He aims for me to lie,” Sarty thinks as his father
stands accused in the first trial, “And I will have to do
hit.” Sarty is further compromised in his loyalty to his
father when he sees the de Spain house for the first
time: “he had never seen a house like this before. Hit’s
big as a courthouse he thought quietly, with a surge of
peace and joy whose reason he could not have thought
into words….” The narrator’s choice of a courthouse as
the only structure that Sarty can dream of as big as this
house is especially ironic in light of the fact that neither
of his father’s trials take place in one. The courthouse,
however, stands as the central image for the place of
judgment and, presumably, justice; and it is in the de
Spain house that Sarty will be forced to judge his own
father and warn its inhabitants of what his father is
about to do.
The grand house also provides a sharp contrast
to the two-room shack so identical with the “dozen
others” in which the family has lived in the “boy’s ten
years.” The Snopes family’s constant moving, meager
possessions, and poverty suggest the dispossession
and rootlessness exhibited in the odyssey of the Joads.
In Abner’s case, however, the narrator makes clear that
it is his determination to antagonize the upper class
that forces the family into constant flight.
The story ends, as Faulkner’s fiction so often does, in
ambiguity and ambivalence. It is clear that, in this story
of the coming of age of its protagonist, Sarty resists the
old pull of blood and kinship and warns the major and
his family that his father is on his way to set fire to their
barn. It is also clear that Sarty leaves his family, sobbing
over what he has done, “Father! Father!” and believing
that, when he hears two shots, he may have caused his
father’s death. Sarty is unable to relinquish his belief
in his father’s bravery in Colonel Sartoris’ cavalry but
doesn’t know, as the narrator knows, the truth that his
father went to war only for illegal profit.
It is not clear where Sarty will go or how he will
mature or how he will live according to the choices he
has made. The narrator only tells the reader at the end
that Sarty “did not look back.” Yet Sarty does look back
as Faulkner manipulates the fluid motion of time in the
story, when “[o]lder, the boy might have remarked” on
the smallness of his father’s campfires, or “older still,”
he might have understood his father’s need to control
something, “to be regarded with respect and used with
discretion.” Where the narrator only suggests here that
the boy “might” have thought these things, he later
asserts that Sarty continues to struggle to reach an
understanding of the events “twenty years later.” “If
I had said they wanted only truth, justice,” Sarty tells
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stores, and both are linked either explicitly or by implication to the destruction of private property, specifically burned barns. The fires also frame the events in the
story—the fire that destroys Mr. Harris’ barn before the
story begins and the fire that burns Major de Spain’s
barn as the story ends.
The fires express the ferocious independence and
defiance of Abner Snopes, who refuses to bend to the
will of landowning men whom he hates because they
think they own him “body and soul.” Fire, from the
small, niggard campfires he sets using stolen fence
rails to the engulfing flames of a fire that can destroy a
barn, is the one thing that Abner feels he can control,
“the one weapon for the preservation of dignity.” If not
a complete villain, Abner Snopes is among Faulkner’s
most utterly unsympathetic characters. He is stiff and
implacable, “a shape black, flat, and bloodless as
though cut from tin in the iron folds of the frockcoat
which had not been made for him, the voice harsh like
tin and without heat like tin….” Abner has created a
false persona of bravery by falsifying his activities during the Civil War, but the narrator makes clear that his
stiff walk is the result of “a Confederate provost’s man’s
musket ball” which “had taken him in the heel on a
stolen horse….” Thus, Faulkner deepens the irony, for,
though vulnerable in the heel as Achilles was, Abner is
no hero, but a coward and a thief shot from behind as
he deserts.
Carl Sandburg (1878–1967)
and The People, Yes
“It could be, in the grace of God, I shall live to be
eighty-nine, as did Hokusai, and speaking my farewell to earthly scenes, I might paraphrase: “If God
had let me live five years longer I should have been
a writer.”192
—Carl Sandburg
When, at the age of seventy-two, Sandburg wrote
the words cited above in the Preface to a revised edition of his Complete Poems, he may have been thinking of how the body of his work had been and would
be critically evaluated. Although this volume had won
the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, Sandburg’s “poetry of
social protest”193 had quite early in his career placed his
work in sharp opposition to the aesthetics of modernist
writers, earning it the unfavorable critical judgment of
the founders of the school of New Criticism, Cleanth
Brooks and Robert Penn Warren.
Early in the 1920s, for example, Faulkner had begun
to publish essays in the Mississippian and the New
Orleans literary journal, Double Dealer. Still somewhat
trapped in the aestheticism of the late nineteenth
century but also beginning to emerge as a modernist,
Faulkner attacked Carl Sandburg as a representative of
those poets who waste their energies “sobbing over the
middle west” instead of looking to transcend the everyday and seek an “otherworldly poetic realm aspired to
in his own work.”194 Faulkner argued that Sandburg’s
excessive realism dragged poetry from its transcendent
realm and mired it in “the stock yards, to be acted, of
a Saturday afternoon, by the Beef Butchers’ Union.”195
“Is not there among us,” Faulkner asked, “someone
who can write something beautiful and passionate and
sad instead of saddening?”196 Faulkner was responding
to Sandburg’s Chicago Poems (1916), whose opening
poem, “Chicago,” begins with the lines:
divide in the development of his modernist aesthetics
pitted against the social realism and muscular, activist
poetry of Sandburg. And, even though Faulkner’s social
sensibilities had matured by the 1930s, his attitude
toward Sandburg’s work of the 1930s, while perhaps
not openly hostile, would have been at the very least
ambivalent.
Sandburg and Faulkner share another connection,
one very important to the development of each as
a writer—their friendship with Sherwood Anderson.
Anderson, author of Winesburg, Ohio (1919), mentored a number of the next generation of writers,
including Faulkner, Steinbeck , Ernest Hemingway, and
Tennessee Williams, among others. Of Anderson, who
had embraced Faulkner as part of the New Orleans
literary scene in the 1920s and had helped him get
published, Faulkner wrote: “He was the father of
my generation of writers.”198 Steinbeck considered
Winesburg, Ohio one of his favorite composite novels,
and not only had the opportunity to hear Anderson
speak while he was still at Stanford, but also met him
in 1939. Years after this meeting, Steinbeck wrote to
Hog Butcher for the World,
Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,
Player with Railroads and the Nation’s Freight
Handler;
Stormy, husky, brawling,
City of the Big Shoulders:197
But Faulkner had not yet written anything other than
a few poems published in magazines. Faulkner would
publish only one volume of poetry, The Marble Faun
(1924), in his career, and he would not become famous
for his poetry. His criticism of Sandburg, however, so
early in his own career as a writer, points to a sharp
Photograph of the poet Carl Sandburg.
Photo by Al Ravenna, World Telegram staff
photographer. Library of Congress. New
York World-Telegram & Sun Collection.
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himself, “he would have hit me again.” What is most
ambiguous, ultimately, is the position taken by the
narrator, and, by extension, Faulkner himself, on the
central conflict of class, for the story utterly resists an
easy resolution of this important matter either for Sarty
or for Faulkner’s readers.
The fog comes
on little cat feet.
It sits looking
over harbor and city
on silent haunches
and then moves on.203
But the volume is not most notable for its examples
of “imagism,” in the style of Amy Lowell, Ezra Pound,
or William Carlos Williams, for this is the period during
which Sandburg was most engaged in socialist politics
as well as in the literary culture of Chicago. Sandburg,
just after the turn of the century, had been inspired by
the politics of Robert La Follette, who inspired Studs
Terkel in the 1930s and closed the thirties by underscoring Steinbeck’s fictional account of the plight of
the Okies with the undeniable facts of his 1940 report,
Violations of Free Speech and Rights of Labor. Thus,
economic injustice, the “inequities of social privilege,
legal rights, and political power, became the dominant
theme of Chicago Poems.”204 One of the most powerful
poems of the collection, “I Am the People, the Mob,”
foreshadows the later The People, Yes in its solidarity
with the working class and Sandburg’s self-deployment
as both observer and participant in the motion of the
people:
When I, the People, learn to remember, when I, the People, use the
lessons of yesterday and no longer forget who robbed me last year,
who played me for a fool—then there will be no speaker in all the
world say the name: “The People,” with any fleck of a sneer in his
voice or any far-off smile of derision.
The mob—the crowd—the mass—will arrive then.205
Publication of this volume began to establish
Sandburg’s reputation, but critics and poets like
Amy Lowell lamented the “propagandist side of Mr.
Sandburg’s book.….”206 Sandburg followed with the
publication of Cornhuskers (1918) and Smoke and
Steel (1920). Taken together, these three early volumes
represent Sandburg’s achievement in free verse and
his celebration of American industrialism, American
landscape and geography, and the common people.
Demonstrating that his passionate belief in human
dignity and justice extended to the working- and lowerclasses of all races, Sandburg covered the race riots
in Chicago in 1919, work for which he would receive
honors from the NAACP in 1965.
During the 1920s, Sandburg was consumed with his
work on the first part of his magisterial biography of
Abraham Lincoln, Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years
(1926); and in the 1930s, Sandburg completed his
biography with Abraham Lincoln: The War Years (1939)
and published his book-length poem The People, Yes
(1936). In this decade, Sandburg was a more moderate
populist, known for his folksy performances and poetry
readings, and, by 1941, could really no longer be considered a radical socialist. During the 1930s, Sandburg
was in his fifties and chose to target more mainstream
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his publisher: “Sherwood Anderson made the modern
novel and it has not gone much beyond him.”199
A native of Ohio, Anderson left his family to pursue
a literary career in Chicago, where he quickly became
part of the growing circle of artists and writers associated with the Chicago Renaissance, including Edgar
Lee Masters and Theodore Dreiser; it was in this context that Anderson met Sandburg, who had begun to
publish in Harriet Monroe’s increasingly prestigious
magazine, Poetry. Whereas Anderson would play an
important role in the work of the generation of writers
who followed him, Sandburg, just two years younger than Anderson, mentored, inspired, and encouraged Anderson during his years in Chicago. In 1928,
Anderson wrote of Sandburg: “Of all the poets we
have produced he is the one who has best expressed
for me what is magnificent or beautiful in our American
life.”200
Carl Sandburg was born in 1878 in Galesburg,
Illinois, to Swedish immigrants August and Clara
Sandburg. Sandburg, like Faulkner and Steinbeck, was
a rather indifferent student, attending public school
until he was thirteen and then leaving school to work
odd jobs and travel. Sandburg did enlist in the infantry
when the Spanish-American War broke out in 1898,
but, like Faulkner in World War I, Sandburg saw no
action. Sandburg returned to Galesburg and attended
Lombard College, but he left in 1902 without finishing
his degree. By 1904, Sandburg had published his first
book of poems, In Reckless Ecstasy, privately printed.
In 1908, he married fellow socialist and sister of noted
photographer Edward Steichen, Lilian Steichen, and
campaigned for the socialist presidential candidate,
Eugene V. Debs.
By 1913, Sandburg had moved to a suburb of
Chicago where he wrote for newspapers like the
International Socialist Review. In 1914, he published
his poems in Harriet Monroe’s Poetry: A Magazine of
Verse, which awarded him its Levinson prize for best
poems of the year. Sandburg’s first major collection
of poetry, Chicago Poems, appeared in 1916; several
of the poems in the collection had appeared first in
Poetry, and Harriet Monroe, its editor, commented:
“It was verse of massive gait whether you call it poetry
or not.”201 What Sandburg displays in this volume
is the “first important use of modern urban experience and vernacular speech in our national letters,
and also the renewal, in a new century, of the muse
of Walt Whitman.”202 The volume introduces many of
Sandburg’s lifelong themes and contains several of his
most widely anthologized poems, including “Chicago,”
“Fog,” and “I Am the People, the Mob.” “Fog,” for
example, is a brief, extended metaphor, frequently
cited as an example of imagist poetry:
SEL EC T ED W ORK :
from
S Excerpt
The People, Yes, (1936)
W by Carl Sandburg
Excerpt from The People, Yes
By Carl Sandburg
Excerpt from “Section #107” from The People, Yes by Carl
Sandburg, copyright 1936 by Harcourt, Inc. and renewed 1964
by Carl Sandburg, reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin
Harcourt Publishing Company.
The people yes
The people will live on.
The learning and blundering people will live on.
They will be tricked and sold and again sold
And go back to the nourishing earth for rootholds,
The people so peculiar in renewal and comeback,
You can’t laugh off their capacity to take it.
The mammoth rests between his cyclonic dramas.
The people so often sleepy, weary, enigmatic,
is a vast huddle with many units saying:
“I earn my living.
I make enough to get by
and it takes all my time.
If I had more time
I could do more for myself
and maybe for others.
I could read and study
and talk things over
and find out about things.
It takes time.
I wish I had the time.”
The people is a tragic and comic two-face: hero and
hoodlum:
phantom and gorilla twisting to moan with a
gargoyle mouth:
“They buy me and sell me...it’s a game...sometime I’ll
break loose...”
Once having marched
Over the margins of animal necessity,
Over the grim line of sheer subsistence
Then man came
To the deeper rituals of his bones,
To the lights lighter than any bones,
To the time for thinking things over,
To the dance, the song, the story,
Or the hours given over to dreaming,
Once having so marched.
Between the finite limitations of the five senses
and the endless yearnings of man for the beyond
the people hold to the humdrum bidding of work
and food while reaching out when it comes their way
for lights beyond the prison of the five senses, for
keepsakes lasting beyond any hunger or death.
This reaching is alive.
The panderers and liars have violated and smutted it.
Yet this reaching is alive yet
for lights and keepsakes.
The people know the salt of the sea
and the strength of the winds
lashing the corners of the earth.
The people take the earth
as a tomb of rest and a cradle of hope.
Who else speaks for the Family of Man?
They are in tune and step
with constellations of universal law.
The people is a polychrome,
a spectrum and a prism
held in a moving monolith,
a console organ of changing themes,
a clavilux of color poems
wherein the sea offers fog
and the fog moves off in rain
and the labrador sunset shortens
to a nocturne of clear stars
serene over the shot spray
of northern lights.
The steel mill sky is alive.
The fire breaks white and zigzag
shot on a gun-metal gloaming.
Man is a long time coming.
Man will yet win.
Brother may yet line up with brother:
This old anvil laughs at many broken hammers.
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audiences to sustain his income. While working on the
Lincoln biography, Sandburg simultaneously crafted
The People, Yes, his long “paean to democracy,”
his “‘profound affirmation of the American people,
a testament to their gifts for survival.’”207 The poem,
however, according to critic Sally Greene, is ultimately
“too sprawling to be reduced to a political statement,”
however, there are embedded “fragments…of the old
radical Sandburg.”208
Sandburg collected two Pulitzer Prizes during his
career: the first in 1940 for history, awarded for the completed six-volume biography of Lincoln, and the second
for poetry, based on the publication of his Complete
Poems (1950), in 1951. In the same year as his first
Pulitzer, Sandburg was also elected to the American
Academy of Arts and Letters and received numerous
honorary degrees from colleges and universities.
Like Faulkner, Sandburg traveled as a cultural envoy
for the State Department in the 1950s and worked as a
Hollywood film consultant in the 1960s, while along with
fellow recipient John Steinbeck, Sandburg was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in September
1964. Although Sandburg did not win the Nobel Prize
for Literature, Hemingway, at least, thought in 1954
that he should have; and at his death in July 1967, a
eulogy in The New York Times declared Sandburg “the
American bard. The sense of being American informed
everything he wrote.”209
There are men who can’t be bought.
The fireborn are at home in fire.
The stars make no noise,
You can’t hinder the wind from blowing.
Time is a great teacher.
Who can live without hope?
In the darkness with a great bundle of grief
the people march.
In the night, and overhead a shovel of stars for
keeps, the people
march:
“Where to? what next?”
n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n
The People, Yes
The People, Yes is a book-length epic poem,
recording in a vast sweep the language and the lives
of Americans, and foreshadowing the epic movement of Steinbeck’s Okies in The Grapes of Wrath.
The poem establishes Sandburg as the public poet of
the 1930s, producing an oral history of America in the
Great Depression, “uniting montage form in poetry
with the ensemble portraiture of documentary.”210
The poem opens with lines that evoke the movement
of the dispossessed all over the country during the
Great Depression and offers an important precursor to
Steinbeck’s novel:
From the four corners of the earth,
from corners lashed in wind
and bitten with rain and fire,
from places where the winds begin
and fogs are born with mist children,
tall men from tall rocky slopes came
and sleepy men from sleepy valleys,
their women tall, their women sleepy,
with bundles and belongings,
with little ones babbling, “Where to now?
what next?”211
In a letter to Malcolm Cowley that Sandburg wrote
during the process of revising the poem, Sandburg
described his work, “I have been rewriting the longest
piece of verse I have ever done, a ballad pamphlet
harangue sonata and fugue titled, The People, Yes.”212
Sandburg’s characterization of his work suggests its
multiple dimensions: song, documentary, rant, and
orchestration. Furthermore, despite the dismissal of
his work on the part of several modernist poets like
Amy Lowell, William Carlos Williams, and Robert Frost,
Sandburg’s language of the street recalls T. S. Eliot’s
use of Cockney dialect and street language in The
Waste Land, demonstrating that even Eliot, as a quintessential modernist poet, could incorporate snippets
of social realism in his work.
The People, Yes consists of 107 parts of varying
lengths, but all demonstrate the sustained use of free
verse with little or no rhyme, meter, or patterns of
organized sound. Sandburg’s predominant influence
is Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass in both form and
purpose to provide a wide-ranging vision of contemporary American life. The overriding theme of the poem
insists upon the commonality of the people speaking
in a collective voice, setting themselves aside as individuals, and reaffirming the power of mass movement,
marching for change. For its poetic form, the work
depends, as did Whitman’s, upon parallel structures:
lists, catalogues, and repeated phrases which give it a
cumulative power and coherence.
The speaker in the poem, however, takes a different
position from Whitman’s flamboyant ego-persona, acting instead as a mouthpiece for an apocalyptic vision
gathered together from the language of the people,
folk wisdom, statistics, and documentary passages.213
The poetic excerpt included for study here is taken
from the closing section of the poem, numbered 107.
The section opens with an affirmation: “The people
will live on.” The people, though, “blunder,” for they
will be “tricked and sold and again sold.” But the first
stanza ends with a quixotic pronouncement: “The
mammoth rests between his cyclonic dramas.” An
example of asyndeton, or rhetorical juxtaposition of
one clause or phrase to another without connection by
conjunctions, the sense of the line doesn’t seem to follow that of the preceding line, “You can’t laugh off their
capacity to take it.” However, closer inspection reveals
that the people, ancient and prehistoric and viewed
collectively, are like the mammoth in size and almost
amorphous shape, moving cyclically between periods
of rest and periods of upheaval and action bearing the
force of a cyclone.
Poet Carl Sandburg shown
sharing a song with traditional
ballad singer Jean Ritchie.
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The line metaphorically reflects a human condition in
which the people are continually broken on the anvil of
life, but, the speaker insists, as the stanza progresses,
“There are men who can’t be bought.” While “You
can’t hinder the wind from blowing,” the people must
continue, for “Who can live without hope?”
The closing lines of the final stanza repeat the central themes of the section and of the poem at large.
Despite their grief, “the people march,” both of the
earth and of the cosmos, “overhead a shovel of stars
for keeps,” the people must continue to march, but
where they march to is the overarching question of the
poem. As the ending reflects the opening of the poem
and creates a framing device, the speaker asks the
monumental question asked by the people collectively,
“Where to? what next?”
In the midst of these unanswered questions, though,
the people are sustained as an indomitable force,
poised to take their rightful place on the world stage.
Examined with close attention to detail which it has
rarely enjoyed, this poem, as much of Sandburg’s
work, rises above the cold, anti-populist judgment of
modernists and New Critics who for so long barred
Sandburg’s poetry from the mainstream of canonical poetry. Read both aesthetically and politically, the
poem emerges as a revolutionary celebration of the
unquenchable spirit of the American people, and, as
such, calls out for renewed critical attention. Fellow
poet Archibald MacLeish’s review of The People, Yes
for The New Masses applauds Sandburg as the new
public poet of the 1930s. “Out of the book comes for
the first time in our literature the people of America.
Whitman’s men were Man. Sandburg’s are men of this
earth.”216
Langston Hughes (1902–67) and
“Let America Be America Again”
Good morning Revolution:
You are the best friend
I ever had.
We gonna pal around together from now on.
Say, listen, Revolution:
You know the boss where I used to work,
The guy gimme the air to cut expenses
He wrote a long letter to the papers about you:
Said you was a trouble maker, a alien-enemy…217
—From “Good Morning Revolution,”
by Langston Hughes (1932)
Langston Hughes acknowledged the influence of
the vernacular poetry of Carl Sandburg, among others,
on his own work.218 But as much as Sandburg—and
Whitman, the poetic ancestor of both—may have
influenced Hughes’s use of language and the forms
of free verse, he was quite capable of demonstrating
resistance to that influence. As the opening lines above
from “Good Morning Revolution” indicate, Hughes
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The second stanza introduces the element of time,
repetitively alluded to by the collective voice of the
people, “a vast huddle with many units,” lamenting the
lack of time, “I wish I had the time.” From the shorter,
more poetically arranged lines of this stanza, the
speaker moves in the third stanza to a prose arrangement consisting of a single sentence laced with ellipses
whose theme reflects the theme of being sold in the
first stanza: “‘They buy me and sell me….’” The stanza
also introduces the theme of duality and opposition:
“The people is a tragic and comic two-face: hero and
hoodlum.” Additionally, “two-face” and “hoodlum”
reflect the language of the street, while the parallel
structure of the next thought-phrase adds to the evolving image the specter of fear and horror as the people,
attempting to ward off the specter, “moan with a gargoyle mouth.”
The fourth stanza introduces the motion of marching, “Once having marched,” and presents the organizational pattern of anaphora214: “To the deeper rituals
of his bones,/To the lights lighter than any bones,/To
the time for thinking things over,/To the dance, the
song, the story….” The stanza both parallels and
reverses the second stanza, in which the people lament
the lack of time, for here, the people have marched
“Over the margins of animal necessity” to the “deeper
rituals,” “the time for thinking things over,” and “the
hours given over to dreaming.”
The fifth stanza positions the people both in the
body and of the universe, between “the finite limitations of the five senses” and “the endless yearnings of
man for the beyond.” Despite the efforts of “panderers and liars,” “this reaching is alive yet/for lights and
keepsakes.” Stanza six positions the people on earth:
they “know the salt of the sea/and the strength of the
winds/lashing the corners of the earth.” The earth is
both “a tomb of rest and a cradle of hope.” Being in
step with “constellations of universal law” crystallizes
the people into an amalgamation of light, color, and
sound, “The people is a polychrome,/a spectrum and
a prism.” Thus the people both collect, “polychrome,”
and refract waves of light, “spectrum” and “prism;”
are both static and moving, “moving monolith;” and
comprise both sound and sight, “console organ” and
“clavilux of color poems.”215 The speaker continues a
structure that combines multiple sensory impressions
in the vision of the sea fog as it “moves off in rain/and
the labrador sunset shortens/to a nocturne of clear
stars….”
Stanza six breaks away from the melodious meditation on an illuminated symphony that forms the collective body of the people to introduce “[t]he steel mill
sky” under which “Man is a long time coming.” The
lines suggest becoming rather than being—Man, the
speaker seems to say, still has a long way to go: “Brother
may yet line up with brother:….” And the next stanza
continues the image of steel and fire with its opening
line, “This old anvil laughs at many broken hammers.”
Photograph of poet Langston Hughes.
Photo by Jack Delano for OWI.
Library of Congress Prints and
Photographs Division.
American journal Crisis in 1921, bringing a young man,
barely out of high school to the light of critical attention. With the support of his father, Hughes attended
Columbia University, but stayed only one year, dropping
out to take odd jobs and travel to Africa and Europe.
While in New York, however, he had already begun to
meet writers who, with him, would shape the Harlem
Renaissance, notably, Countee Cullen and Alain Locke.
He remained in touch with both while abroad, and,
upon his return to New York, Hughes met the writers
Arna Bontemps and Carl Van Vechten, both important
to the development of his career.
In 1925, Hughes moved to Washington, D.C., to
live with his mother and stepfather. It was there, while
working as a busboy, that Hughes left several of his
poems next to the poet Vachel Lindsay’s dinner plate.
Lindsay was so impressed that he included several in
his poetry reading and helped provide the impetus
to launch Hughes’s career. By 1926, Hughes was back
in school, attending Lincoln University, and had published his first book of verse, The Weary Blues. Carl Van
Vechten, whom Hughes had met in New York two years
before, was responsible for bringing the volume to
the attention of the publisher Alfred Knopf, and when
Hughes published his second volume, Fine Clothes to
the Jew (1927), he dedicated it to Van Vechten. At the
end of the twenties, Hughes had not only obtained the
patronage of the same “godmother” who supported
Zora Neale Hurston for a while, Charlotte Osgood
Mason, but he had also completed his first novel Not
Without Laughter (1930) and finished his degree at
Lincoln.
Even though he spent little time in Harlem during the twenties, Hughes was a leading voice of the
Harlem Renaissance; but that incredible time of creativity for black writers would come to a halt with the
stock market crash in 1929.220 In Hughes’s own view, by
the time “the thirties came, the voltage of the Negro
Renaissance had nearly run its course…. The chain of
influences that had begun in Renaissance ended in
the thirties when the Great Depression drastically cut
down on migrations, literary or otherwise.”221 Hughes,
though, had begun to grow weary of black modernist aesthetics, and, rather than publishing much of his
work in the black journal Crisis, he began, in the early
1930s, to publish more in the Communist Party journal,
New Masses.
In 1930, Hughes collaborated with Hurston on the
play Mule Bone, but their collaboration ended a year
later when they quarreled over creative ownership
and Hurston filed for sole copyright. In the same year,
Hughes wrote another play, Mulatto, which, over time,
would provide him with a steady income. In 1930,
Hughes had visited Cuba and met a number of writers
and artists, and, upon his return to the States, he ended
his relationship with Mason, his benefactor and sponsor, and distanced himself from Hurston.
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could not only successfully satirize Sandburg’s “Good
Morning America,” but could also offer a far more
radicalized poetic vision than that of the older poet.
Hughes, critic Eric Sundquist argues, was uniquely
capable of “refining ideology into the language of
popular art.”219
Langston Hughes was born in Joplin, Missouri,
on February 1, 1902. His would not be a particularly
happy childhood, for, shortly after his birth, his father
left for Mexico, where he would remain the rest of his
life, and his mother would leave him in the care of his
grandmother in Kansas until he was a teenager. After
his mother’s divorce from his father and her remarriage,
Hughes would move with his mother and stepfather
to Cleveland, Ohio, where he attended the progressive Central High School and encountered Sandburg’s
poetry.
Following his graduation, Hughes left for Mexico
to live for a year with his father; it was during this
travel, while on a train, that Hughes wrote his first major
poem, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers.” Now widely
anthologized, the poem first appeared in the African
Three hundred years in the deepest South:
But God put a song and a prayer in my mouth.
God put a dream like steel in my soul.
Now, through my children, I’m reaching the
goal.225
The poem also reproduces the images of rising
and of climbing the stair found in Hughes’s earlier and
widely anthologized “Mother to Son”:
Well, son, I’ll tell you:
Life for me ain’t been no crystal stair.
It’s had tacks in it,
And splinters,
And boards torn up.
And places with no carpet on the floor—
Bare.226
Both The Negro Mother and Other Dramatic
Recitations (1931), the booklet Hughes read from and
distributed at his poetry readings, and Scottsboro
Limited (1932), founded upon his experiences with the
Scottsboro nine and racial injustice, were published by
Hughes’s own Golden Stair Press. Hughes established
the press with the help of Carl Van Vechten, and in
partnership with his artist friend, Prentiss Taylor, who
produced compelling illustrations for both volumes.
In 1932, Hughes traveled to the Soviet Union to
work on a film that was never made and stayed on for
almost a year, until 1933, writing socialist verse that
would be published in American magazines as well as
returning to his work in short fiction. “Goodbye Christ,”
written during this period, would act as the centerpiece
of the FBI investigation of him in the 1950s, and “Good
Morning Revolution,” whose opening lines appear at
the beginning of this section, called prophetically for
international Communism. After leaving the Soviet
Union in 1933, Hughes toured the Far East, returning
to the States in August to settle in Carmel, California,
where he planned to work on a volume of short stories
inspired by the work of D. H. Lawrence.
While in Carmel, living in the cottage of benefactor Noel Sullivan, Hughes became close to Ella Winter
and her husband, Lincoln Steffens, both of whom were
also connected to Steinbeck. In his autobiography,
Hughes writes of this circle, mentioning his awareness of Steinbeck’s proximity in Pacific Grove and his
compassion for the Depression victims in the migratory camps, which he personally visited.227 The result
of this experience led to collaboration with Ella Winter
on a play Harvest (also known as Blood on the Fields),
meant to act as a documentary of the famous San
Joaquin cotton strike. The play was neither published
nor produced, however, and as a result of his notoriety
among California vigilante ranchers and his fear of their
threats, Hughes fled to San Francisco in 1934.
Like Steffens, Hughes never joined the Communist
Party, but did display strong affiliations for socialist politics, joining the leftist John Reed Club headed by Ella
Winter. It may have been, though, that the position of
the Communist Party on jazz as “decadent bourgeois
music” offered the most compelling reason for not
joining a Party that had disavowed music that Hughes
felt was part of his African-American heritage.228
Hughes published the collection of stories he had
worked on in Carmel, The Ways of White Folks, in
1934. The collection, partially evolved from Hughes’s
experiences in the South, reflects upon the excesses of
the jazz age, the exploitation of black talent by white
clientele, the divide of the color line, and the obsession with interracial sexuality. The collection is widely
regarded as one of the key proletarian collections of
short stories produced in the proletarian renaissance
of 1934.229 In late 1934, Hughes’s father died, and he
returned to Mexico to settle his affairs. Throughout
1935 and 1936, Hughes continued to travel, working on
a novel in Chicago, and he continued his involvement
with the theater, overseeing the production of several of his plays. While many of his associates, Richard
Wright and Ralph Ellison among them, had begun to
work for the Federal Writers’ Project, and although he
later maintained a loose association with the Federal
Theater Project, Hughes did not register with the WPA;
in his own words, he didn’t write for the government or
get paid, he “just wrote.”230
In July 1937, Hughes addressed the Second
International Writers Congress in Paris; coincidentally Ernest Hemingway also attended, and Meridel
Le Sueur was elected one of the vice presidents. From
Paris, Hughes traveled on to Spain to cover the Spanish
Civil War for the Baltimore African American. While in
Europe, in addition to Ernest Hemingway, Hughes met
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In 1931, Hughes spent six weeks in Haiti, an experience that helped solidify and strengthen his radical
leftist politics; this radicalization would be further
deepened when Hughes went on a reading tour of the
South and met the Scottsboro boys in prison. The nine
Scottsboro boys had been convicted of raping two
white women and sentenced to death. Hughes visited
the nine and found that little he said seemed to make
an impression on them; however, at the last minute, as
he prepared to leave and wish them well, one of the
boys, Clarence Norris, got up and shook hands with
him. Seven years later Hughes dedicated the poem
“August 19th. . . A Poem for Clarence Norris” to him.222
The date in the title is significant as it marked the date
that Norris was to be executed.
This trip to the South had an enormous impact on
Hughes; he discovered firsthand “the great social and
cultural gulf between the races”223 which grew as he
traveled deeper into Dixie. He wrote of this 1931 tour,
“I introduced my poetry to every major city, town and
campus in the South that year.”224 Despite the numerous protests that attended his appearances on college
campuses, Hughes read “The Negro Mother” to a
packed house at the University of North Carolina and
received a standing ovation.
SEL EC T ED W ORK :
S
W
“Let America Be America
Again,” (Written in 1936,
published in 1938) by
Langston Hughes
Let America Be America Again
By Langston Hughes
“Let America Be America Again” from THE COLLECTED POEMS
OF LANGSTON HUGHES by Langston Hughes, edited by Arnold
Rampersad with David Roessel, Associate Editor, copyright © 1994
by the Estate of Langston Hughes. Used by permission of Alfred A.
Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.
Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.
(America never was America to me.)
Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed—
Let it be that great strong land of love
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
That any man be crushed by one above.
(It never was America to me.)
O, let my land be a land where Liberty
Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,
But opportunity is real, and life is free,
Equality is in the air we breathe.
(There’s never been equality for me,
Nor freedom in this “homeland of the free.”)
Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark?
And who are you that draws your veil across the stars?
I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart,
I am the Negro bearing slavery’s scars.
I am the red man driven from the land,
I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek—
And finding only the same old stupid plan
Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.
I am the young man, full of strength and hope,
Tangled in that ancient endless chain
Of profit, power, gain, of grab the land!
Of grab the gold! Of grab the ways of satisfying need!
Of work the men! Of take the pay!
Of owning everything for one’s own greed!
I am the farmer, bondsman to the soil.
I am the worker sold to the machine.
I am the Negro, servant to you all.
I am the people, humble, hungry, mean—
Hungry yet today despite the dream.
Beaten yet today—O, Pioneers!
I am the man who never got ahead,
The poorest worker bartered through the years.
Yet I’m the one who dreamt our basic dream
In the Old World while still a serf of kings,
Who dreamt a dream so strong, so brave, so true,
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Nicolas Guillen, W. H. Auden, Bertolt Brecht, and Pablo
Neruda. By the end of 1937, Hughes had returned to
Harlem and established his own theater, the Harlem
Suitcase Theater. In 1938, he would premiere his play
Don’t You Want to Be Free? at his Suitcase Theater and
would also publish his socialist collection of verse, A
New Song, which included “Let America Be America
Again.” In June 1938, Hughes would lose his mother
to cancer. As the thirties came to an end, Hughes traveled, lecturing with Arna Bontemps, worked on film
scripts, gave up his position with the Harlem Suitcase
Theater, and once more returned to Carmel.
During the forties, Hughes would begin a political
turn toward the right, supporting America in its war
effort, writing patriotic short stories and fiction but
continuing to produce essays that were mainstream
leftist and anti-fascist. Hughes was also notable in the
forties for his creation of the character Jesse B. Semple,
or “Simple,” in his columns in the black weekly Chicago
Defender. The character’s name puns on the phrase
“just be simple,” and the very popular sketches, collected later in several volumes, present Simple as a folk
philosopher and storyteller being interviewed by the
narrator, who plays the straight man to Simple’s comic
persona. In a preface to one of the collections of the
sketches, Simple Stakes a Claim (1957), Hughes wrote,
“The race problem in America is serious business, but
humor is a weapon, too, of no mean value against one’s
foes.”231
In the 1950s, in addition to producing several important works—his poetic collection Montage of a Dream
Deferred (1951), The Pictorial History of the Negro in
America (1956), and a second autobiographical work,
I Wonder as I Wander (1956), Hughes was called to
testify on his suspected allegiance to the Communist
Party before Senator Joseph McCarthy’s committee
on subversive activities. Hughes denied ever having
belonged to the Communist Party and even admitted
that some of his more radical verse had been a mistake.
Soon, though, McCarthy himself, and his committee,
would be discredited by a public grown tired of witch
hunts for suspected communists.
Hughes remained active through the 1960s, publishing his book-length poem Ask Your Mama, a history
of the NAACP, plays, and children’s literature. Never
forsaking his belief in social justice, Hughes would write
of the tense relationship between poetry and politics:
“Politics can be the graveyard of the poet. And only
poetry can be his resurrection.”232 Langston Hughes
died of complications following surgery on May 22,
1967.
The free?
Who said the free? Not me?
Surely not me? The millions on relief today?
The millions shot down when we strike?
The millions who have nothing for our pay?
For all the dreams we’ve dreamed
And all the songs we’ve sung
And all the hopes we’ve held
And all the flags we’ve hung,
The millions who have nothing for our pay—
Except the dream that’s almost dead today.
O, let America be America again—
The land that never has been yet—
And yet must be—the land where every man is free.
The land that’s mine—the poor man’s, Indian’s, Negro’s, ME—
Who made America,
Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,
Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain,
Must bring back our mighty dream again.
Sure, call me any ugly name you choose—
The steel of freedom does not stain.
From those who live like leeches on the people’s lives,
We must take back our land again,
America!
O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath—
America will be!
Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,
The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,
We, the people, must redeem
The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.
The mountains and the endless plain—
All, all the stretch of these great green states—
And make America again!
n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n
“Let America Be America Again”
“Let America Be America Again” is the second
important poem that Hughes wrote while riding a
train, this time from New York to Oberlin, to escape
negative reviews of his play Mulatto. The poem first
appeared in Esquire in 1936 in a truncated version,
but the full version was later included by Hughes in his
volume of radical verse titled A New Song, published
by the International Workers Order in 1938. The poem,
despite Hughes’s later ambivalent perspective on his
poetry of the thirties, provides an excellent example
of “socialist realism.”233 It also follows on the heels of
life-changing experiences for Hughes, not the least of
which were his deep concern about the racism involved
in the case of the Scottsboro boys, his travels to the
Soviet Union, and his witnessing firsthand the horrendous conditions and poverty in the migrant workers’
camps in California.
Like so many modernists of the twenties, Hughes
believed that art could transform social reality. “We
build our temples for tomorrow,” Hughes wrote, “and
we stand on top of the mountain, free within ourselves.”234 The Great Depression of the 1930s, however,
forced Hughes, along with many other writers, to reconsider the value and place of culture in a nation where
masses of people were dispossessed. Hughes recognized in his own relative privilege at the beginning of
the Depression a disconnect with the reality of the outside world. Leaving his wealthy white patron, Charlotte
Mason, for example, drove Hughes to face the glaring
contradictions between the lives of the wealthy on Park
Avenue and those of the hungry on breadlines. Hughes
wrote in his autobiography of 1930:
New York began to be not so pleasant that
winter. People were sleeping in subways or on
newspapers in office doors, because they had no
homes. I got so I didn’t like to go to dinner on
luxurious Park Avenue…and come out and see
people hungry on the streets, huddled in subway
entrances all night and filling Manhattan Transfer
like a flop house. I knew I could very easily and
quickly be there, too.…235
So Hughes’s emphasis on a specifically “black”
poetics incorporating jazz and blues moved outward
from a more fixed sense of racial identity to embrace
the wider notion of common experience of nationality
as opposed to common racial ancestry.236 “Let America
Be America Again” is Hughes’s lament for the failure
of the American dream, not only for the oppressed
in the black race, but for the oppressed of all races,
all classes. For critic Anthony Dawahare, the poem
“(re)creates a cultural fiction of a nation,”237 reinforcing
Hughes’s own earlier notions of the value of aesthetics
in restoring and healing communal life.
The poetic persona, who appears within parentheses
in the fifth line of the poem distinguishes himself early
on from a nation whose dream is lost. The anonymous
speaker of the first stanza longs for an America which
can be itself again, a place where the dream can be
reborn and the pioneer on the plain can once again be
free. However, even in this relatively innocuous stanza,
the mention of the pioneer is countered by the image
of the “red man driven from the land” who appears in
line 21. Formally, the first stanza suggests the bardic,
prophetic stance of a Whitman or a Sandburg but is
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That even yet its mighty daring sings
In every brick and stone, in every furrow turned
That’s made America the land it has become.
O, I’m the man who sailed those early seas
In search of what I meant to be my home—
For I’m the one who left dark Ireland’s shore,
And Poland’s plain, and England’s grassy lea,
And torn from Black Africa’s strand I came
To build a “homeland of the free.”
Photograph of Langston Hughes
taken in 1943 by Gordon Parks.
Library of Congress Prints and
Photographs Division.
consisting of two stanzas loosely rhymed, acts as the
concluding pronouncement and restores the poetic
“I” previously marginalized to full voice. Many stanzas
also contain rhymes that carry over across the breaks
between stanzas and even between sections.
The first section offers three four-line stanzas which
plead for a restoration of the lost dream of America—
“Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme” and
“opportunity is real and life is free.” But, the parenthetical speaker scoffs, “(There’s never been equality
for me,/Nor freedom in this ‘homeland of the free.’)”
Each of the three parenthetical refrains which follow
the three stanzas performs the same function, scoffing
at the empty idealist wish expressed in the stanza. The
section ends with a couplet in which a speaker, perhaps
the same speaker as the nebulous, anonymous speaker
in the stanzas, asks, “who are you that mumbles in the
dark?”
The answer to the question comes in the second
section, and the responses are legion. Those who
mumble in the dark and draw their “veil[s] across the
stars” are, among others, the poor white, “fooled and
pushed apart,” the Negro, “bearing slavery’s scars,”
the immigrant, “clutching the hope I seek,” the farmer,
the worker, the people—“the man who never got
ahead.” All of these voices of the dispossessed are
raised against a society of “dog eat dog,” “mighty
crush the weak,” and “owning everything for one’s own
greed!” Yet all the voices have dreamed the dream
and, collectively, have made “America the land it has
become.”
The section is populated with anaphora, lines which
begin the same—eight lines begin “I am….” and four
lines begin with “Of….” Whereas the rhymes in the first
section were predominantly “me” and “free,” in this
section, the predominating rhymes are words whose
middle consists of the long “e” sound: need, greed,
mean, dream, years; but rhymes with “free,” echoing
the predominant rhyme of the first section, pick up
once more near the end of the second section. Overall,
the section sustains a very loose rhyming pattern of
imperfect or slant rhymes—“land” and “plan” in lines
21 and 23, for example—and stanzas which may have
only two rhyming lines and those in which there is a
rhyme for every line, even if it is slant or imperfect.
The third section opens with a single line that mocks
the conclusion of the preceding section, “The free?” In
this section, the parenthetical speaker of the first section steps out of the parentheses to answer the ironically posed question with another: “Not me?/Surely not
me?” And the “me” blends with the “we” who strike,
are on relief, and “have nothing for our pay—/Except
the dream that’s almost dead today.” The section continues to deploy anaphora as a semblance of its use in
free verse, but also maintains a rhyming structure with
alternating rhyming lines and closing couplets in two
stanzas. The final stanza of this section defies those
who would continue the oppression of the “other”—
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decidedly not free verse. The stanza’s alternating lines
rhyme, and the refrain, which follows in parentheses,
picks up the rhyme of lines 2 and 4. That refrain is
particularly interesting, for it is the first appearance
of the poetic persona, who announces that “(America
never was America to me.)” This speaker is disaffected,
speaking his piece, as it were, as an aside or offstage,
as the use of the parentheses certainly suggests. The
parentheses also evoke marginalization, supplementarity, non-essentiality; and the speaker surely portrays
himself as an outsider.
Structurally, the poem divides into four sections,
which, both within and across the sections, suggest
the reproduction of the “call and response” of African
communal life. The first consists of three four-line
stanzas, each followed by a refrain in parentheses that
mocks the preceding lines, and ends in a couplet.
The second section consists of four stanzas of varying
lengths, which approach free verse in their appearance
but still maintain a system of rhyming and which offer
the many voices of the broad community. The third
section responds ironically to the hopes and dreams
of the speakers in the second section and consists of a
single-line stanza and three longer stanzas, all continuing to maintain a system of rhyme. The final section,
swear this oath—/America will be!” In “all the stretch of
these great green states,” the speaker closes, the people
whose voices populate this poem as “we” and the “I”
who speaks for all will “make America again!”
MONTVILLE HS - OAKDALE, CT
“Sure, call me any ugly name you choose—/The steel
of freedom does not stain.”
The closing section proclaims the end of oppression—“America never was America to me/ And yet I
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1. Thomas Wolfe, “You Can’t Go Home Again,” The American Writer and the Great Depression, ed. Harvey
Swados (Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc., 1966) 513.
2. Ibid., pp. 514–515.
3. Closing lines from “Ulysses,” Alfred Lord Tennyson, Victorian Prose and Poetry, eds. Lionel Trilling and
Harold Bloom (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973) 416–18.
4. Quoted in Jackson J. Benson, John Steinbeck, Writer: A Biography (New York: Penguin Books, 1990) 26
5. Ibid., 59.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid., 48.
8. Jeffrey Schultz and Luchen Li, Critical Companion to John Steinbeck: A Literary Reference to His Life and
Work (New York: Checkmark Books, 2005) 54
9. Benson, 156.
10. Schultz and Li, 54.
11. Richard Astro, qtd. in James Nagel, “Introduction,” The Pastures of Heaven, by John Steinbeck, ed.
James Nagel (New York: Penguin Classics, 1995) xvii.
12. Benson, 223.
13. Benson, 244.
14. Ibid., 291.
15. Kevin Starr, Endangered Dreams: The Great Depression in California (New York: Oxford University Press)
74.
16. Ibid.
17. Benson, 298.
18. For more information on this point, see Marcia Salazar, “John Steinbeck’s Phalanx Theory,” Ilha Do
Desterro 23 (1990): 100.
19. Benson, 327.
20. Schultz and Li, 145.
21. Benson, 371.
22. Ibid., 411.
23. Ibid., 454.
24. The film, directed by Herbert Kline and narrated by actor Burgess Meredith, may be viewed online at:
http://www.archive.org/details/forgotten _ village.
25. Schultz and Li, 131.
26. Ibid., 141.
27. Benson, 547.
28. Benson, 549.
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Notes
29. Brian E. Railsback and Michael J. Meyer, A Steinbeck Encyclopedia (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2006)
284.
30. Thomas French, Steinbeck and Covici (The Woodlands, TX: New Century Books, 2002) 140.
31. “East of Eden,” About John Steinbeck, 5 June 1990, The National Steinbeck Center, 6 Dec. 2009
<http://www.steinbeck.org/EastEden.html>.
32. Schultz and Li, 73.
33. Benson, 770.
MONTVILLE HS - OAKDALE, CT
34. Qtd. in Benson, 773.
35. Schultz and Li, 251.
36. Ibid., 254.
37. John Steinbeck, “Banquet Speech,” John Steinbeck: The Nobel Prize in Literature 1962 (1969) 6 Dec. 2009
<http://nobelprize.org/nobel _ prizes/literature/laureates/1962/steinbeck-speech.html>.
38. Benson, 975–977.
39. Ibid., 966.
40. Ibid., 1000.
41. Ibid., 1017.
42. Ibid., 1038.
43. Starr, 28.
44. Ibid., 148.
45. Whitney v. California 274 U.S. 357 (1927), a First Amendment Supreme Court Case, defines criminal
syndicalism and describes the nature of the felony. For more information, see
http://www.anarchytv.com/speech/whitney.htm.
46. Starr, 74.
47. Ibid., 77.
48. Ibid., 80.
49. Ibid., 162.
50. Ibid., 161. Symes refers, of course, to the rise of Mussolini and the fascists in Italy in 1922 and the growing
power of Hitler’s Nazi Party in Germany in 1932.
51. Ibid., 187–88.
52. Ibid., 224.
53. John Steinbeck, The Harvest Gypsies: On the Road to The Grapes of Wrath, introduction by Charles
Wollenberg (Berkeley: Heyday Books, 1988) 19.
54. Ibid., 30.
55. Ibid., 37.
56. Starr, 263–4.
57. Ibid., 269.
58. Qtd. in Robert DeMott, Steinbeck’s Reading: A Catalogue of Books Owned and Borrowed, (New York:
Garland Publishing, 1984), The Martha Heasley Cox Center for Steinbeck Studies, 38.
59. Ibid., 60.
60. Ibid., 34.
61. Donna M. Campbell, “Naturalism in American Literature,” Literary Movements, 14 July 2008, 6 Dec. 2009
<http://www.wsu.edu/~campbelld/amlit/natural.htm>.
62. Qtd in DeMott, Steinbeck’s Reading, 34.
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63. Barbara Foley, “Writing Up the Working Class: The Proletarian Novel in the U.S.,” 11 April 2005, 6 Dec. 2009
<http://www.angelfire.com/nj4/proletarian/>.
64. Qtd. in Starr, 257.
65. Ibid., 259.
66. Harold Bloom, ed., John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishers, 2005) 17.
68. Ibid., 18.
69. Warren Motley, “From Patriarchy to Matriarchy: Ma Joad’s Role in The Grapes of Wrath,” American Literature
54.3 (October, 1982): 399.
70. Ibid., 398.
71. William Blake, “A Song of Liberty,” The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, in The Poetry and Prose of William
Blake, ed. David Erdman (New York: Doubleday, 1970) 44.
72. Louis Owens, “Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath,” A New Study Guide to Steinbeck’s Major Works, with
Critical Explications, ed. Tetsumaro Hayashi (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 1993) 105.
73. Qtd. in Stephen Bullivant, “‘That’s him. That shiny bastard.’: Jim Casy and Christology, Steinbeck Studies
16.1&2 (Spring 2005): 17.
74. Ibid., 23.
75. Ibid., 22.
76. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Essay IX, The Over-soul,” Essays: First Series (1841), Ralph Waldo Emerson Home
Page, 1998 6. Dec. 2009 <http://www.rwe.org/works/Essays-1st _ Series _ 09_ The _ Over-Soul.htm>.
77. Jackson Benson, “‘To Tom, Who Lived It’: John Steinbeck and the Man from Weedpatch,” Journal of Modern
Literature 5.2 (April 1976): 175.
78. Ibid., 179.
79. “Special Resource Study, Route 66: Illinois, Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona,
California,” National Park Service, U. S. Department of the Interior, 4 July 1995, 6 Dec. 2009
<http://www.nps.gov/history/rt66/SpecialResourceStudy.pdf>, 6.
80. Ibid., 7.
81. Woody Guthrie, “66 Highway Blues,” lyrics by Woody Guthrie, music by Pete Seeger, Encyclopedia of Road
Culture, 6 Dec. 2009 <http://www.digihitch.com/road-culture/music-lyrics/1022>.
82. Starr, 261.
83. Ibid.
84. Steinbeck, The Harvest Gypsies, 39.
85. Charles Cunningham, “Rethinking the Politics of The Grapes of Wrath,” Cultural Logic: An Electronic Journal
of Marxist Theory & Practice 5 (2002): 29. <http://clogic.eserver.org/2002/cunningham.html>.
86. Qtd. in “Novel Reflections on the American Dream,” The American Novel, PBS American Masters, (2007) 6
Dec. 2009 <http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americannovel/video/ANhypertext _ steinbeck.html>.
87. Ibid.
88. Peter Lisca, “The Grapes of Wrath as Fiction,” PMLA 72.1 (March 1957), 301.
89. Percy Lubbock, The Craft of Fiction (New York: Peter Smith, 1945).
90. See Lisca, 297, 300, for an application of Lubbock’s terms to the structure and style of The Grapes of Wrath.
91. John Steinbeck, Working Days: The Journals of The Grapes of Wrath, ed. Robert DeMott, (Penguin Books,
1990) 22.
92. Lisca, 304, comments upon these stylistic elements in several passages.
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67. DeMott, Steinbeck’s Reading, p. 18, lists that Steinbeck owned two titles by Briffault, The Making of
Humanity (1919) and The Mothers.
93. Ibid.
94. Steinbeck, Working Days, 29.
95. Benson, “To Tom,” 168.
96. Ibid., 171.
97. Ibid., 187.
99. The song was originally published in The Atlantic Monthly (February 1862), and can be accessed online at a
number of sites including: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The _ Battle _ Hymn _ of _ the _ Republic.
100. Owens, 103.
101. Qtd. in Owens, 103.
102. See as an example, Fredric Carpenter, “The Philosophical Joads,” College English 2.4 (January 1941):
315–325.
103. Fredric Carpenter, “The Philosophical Joads,” rpt in “Fredric I. Carpenter on the Novel and
Transcendentalism,” John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, (Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishers, 2005)
57.
104. Qtd. in Matthew Langione, “John Steinbeck and the Perfectibility of Man,” Steinbeck Review, 3.2 (Fall,
2006): 89.
105. Arthur Spearman, S. J., “Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath Branded as Red Propaganda by Father A. D.
Spearman,” qtd in John Steinbeck: The Contemporary Reviews, eds. Joseph McElrath, Jr., Jesse Crisler,
and Susan Shillinglaw (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1996) 171.
106. Burton Rascoe, “But…Not…Ferdinand,” John Steinbeck: The Contemporary Reviews, 164.
107. Philia Rahv, “A Variety of Fiction,” John Steinbeck: The Contemporary Reviews, 166.
108. Charles Poore, “Books of the Times,” John Steinbeck: The Contemporary Reviews, 153.
109. Clifton Fadiman, “Books,” John Steinbeck: The Contemporary Reviews, 154.
110. Peter Monro Jack, “John Steinbeck’s New Novel Brims with Anger and Pity,” John Steinbeck: The
Contemporary Reviews, 159.
111. “Okies,” John Steinbeck: The Contemporary Reviews, 163.
112. Eleanor Roosevelt, My Day: The Best of Eleanor Roosevelt’s Acclaimed Newspaper Columns, 1936–1962,
ed. David Emblidge (Da Capo Press, 2001) 39–40.
113. Benson, John Steinbeck, 409.
114. Ibid., 408–9.
115. Vivian Sobchack, “The Grapes of Wrath (1940): Thematic Emphasis Through Visual Style,” American
Quarterly 31.5 (Winter 1979): 597.
116. Ibid., 600.
117. Ibid.
118. Ibid., 602.
119. Ibid., 606.
120. Qtd. in Sobchack, 615.
121. Ibid.
122. Qtd. in Constance Coiner, Better Red: The Writing and Resistance of Tillie Olsen and Meridel Le Sueur
(Oxford University Press, 1995) 81.
123. Qtd. in North Callahan, Carl Sandburg: His Life and Works (Penn State Press, 1987) 116.
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98. Steinbeck, Working Days, 65.
124. Qtd. in Joshua Good, “The Successful Censorship of Langston Hughes’s Poem ‘Goodbye Christ,’”
Banned Magazine, 17 Feb. 2007, 6 Dec. 2009 <http://www.bannedmagazine.com/LangstonHughes.
GoodbyeChrist.0001.htm>.
125. Qtd. in Arnold Rampersad, “The Life & Times of Langston Hughes,” Crisis (January–February 2002): 28.
126. Qtd. from Hurston’s “How It Feels To Be Colored Me,” in Delia Caparoso Konzett, Ethnic Modernisms:
Anzia Yezierska, Zora Neale Hurston, Jean Rhys, and the Aesthetics of Dislocation (Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2002) 82–83.
128. President Clinton’s quote on awarding the National Humanities Medal to Studs Terkel in 1997. Qtd. in John
de Graaf and Alan Harris Stein, “The Guerrilla Journalist as Oral Historian: An Interview with Louis ‘Studs’
Terkel,” Oral History Review 29.1 (Winter/Spring 2002): 88.
129. Ibid., 95.
130. Ibid., 96–7.
131. Ibid., 91.
132. Ibid., 88.
133. Ibid., 105.
134. “Studs Terkel, ‘Hard Times’ and Other Histories,” National Public Radio, 7 Nov. 2008, 6 Dec. 2009
<http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=96724840>.
135. Studs Terkel, “Community in Action,” National Public Radio, 24 Oct. 2005, 6 Dec. 2009
<http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4963443>.
136. Steinbeck writes in Chapter 14, the interchapter which deals with the rising tension of the Western states
awaiting the flood of migrants, “If you could separate causes from results, if you could know that Paine,
Marx, Jefferson, Lenin, were results, not causes, you might survive. But that you cannot know. For the
quality of owning freezes you forever into ‘I,’ and cuts you off forever from the ‘we’.” 166.
137. Studs Terkel, “Community in Action,” National Public Radio, 24 Oct. 2005, 6 Dec. 2009
<http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4963443>.
138. Ibid.
139. Studs Terkel, “Foreword,” Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression (New York: The New Press,
2000) xii. All quotations from Hard Times in this section are from this edition.
140. Terkel, Ibid., xvii.
141. Terkel, Hard Times, 22.
142. Terkel, Ibid., 3.
143. Studs Terkel, “Recordings from Hard Times,” Chicago History Museum (2002) 7 Dec. 2009
<http://www.studsterkel.org/htimes.php>. See the website to listen to the link to this interview.
144. Studs Terkel, Hard Times, 53. Chávez was born on March 31, 1927. Accounts differ on when the Chávez
family left Arizona and migrated to California, so it’s important to note that the dates and ages given above
come from Chávez’ own memory of his past.
145. Qtd. in Coiner, 72–3.
146. Ibid., 80.
147. Elaine Hedges, “Introduction,” Ripening: Selected Work, Meridel Le Sueur (Feminist Press, 1990) 8.
148. Blanche Gelfant, “Rereading a Radical,” The New York Times, 4 April 1982, 7 Dec. 2009
<http://www.nytimes.com/1982/04/04/books/rereading-a-radical.html?sec=&spon=&pagewanted=print>.
149. James M. Boehnlein, “Meridel Le Sueur, Reportage, and the Cultural Situatedness of Her Rhetoric,”
Delights, Desires, and Dilemmas: Essays on Women and the Media, ed. Ann C. Hall (Greenwood Publishing
Group, 1998) 89.
150. Ibid.
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127. Ibid., 84.
151. The term “essay” will be used here in reference to this piece, which is a cross-breed between nonfiction
and fiction.
152. Qtd. in Constance Coiner, Better Red, 96.
153. Ibid.
154. Hedges, 11.
156. Laura Hapke, Daughters of the Great Depression: Women, Work, and Fiction in the American 1930s,
(Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995) 24.
157. Meridel Le Sueur, “Women on the Breadlines,” Ripening, 141. Future quotations are from this edition.
158. Qtd. in Susan Sipple, “‘Witness [to] the Suffering of Women’: Poverty and Sexual Transgression in Meridel
Le Sueur’s Women on the Breadlines,” Feminism, Bakhtin, and the Dialogic, eds. Dale M. Bauer and Susan
Jaret McKinstry (State University of New York Press, 1991) 137.
159. Qtd. in Elaine Hedges, “Introduction,” Ripening, 11.
160. Qtd. in Coiner, Better Red, 97.
161. Zora Neale Hurston, qtd in “Zora Neale Hurston,” Black History Month, Gale Cengage Learning, 7 Dec.
2009 <http://www.gale.cengage.com/free _ resources/bhm/bio/hurston _ z.htm>.
162. Ibid.
163. For this information, see Robert E. Hemenway, Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography (University of
Illinois Press, 1980) 161–2.
164. See “The Zora Neale Hurston Digital Archive” for a comprehensive chronology of her life and works.
“Chronology of Hurston’s Life,” The Zora Neale Hurston Digital Archive, 7 Dec. 2009
<http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~zoraneal/chronology.php>.
165. Qtd. in “Zora Neale Hurston.”
166. Qtd. from Hurton’s “How It Feels To Be Colored Me,” in Delia Konzett, Ethnic Modernisms, 82–3.
167. Qtd. in “Zora Neale Hurston.”
168. David T. Beito and Linda Royster Beito, “Isabel Paterson, Rose Wilder Land, and Zora Neale Hurston on
War, Race, the State, and Liberty,” The Independent Review, XII.4 (Spring 2008): 553.
169. Beito and Beito, 560.
170. Ibid.
171. Ibid., 561.
172. Ibid.
173. Hildegard Hoeller’s “Racial Currency: Zora Neale Hurston’s ‘The Gilded Six-Bits’ and the Gold-Standard
Debate,” American Literature 77.4 (December 2005): 762–785 provides a fuller development of the history
of the gold standard during the Depression and the place Hurston’s story occupies within the politics of this
discourse.
174. William Faulkner, “Nobel Prize Speech,” 7 Dec. 2009 <http://www.rjgeib.com/thoughts/faulkner/faulkner.
html>.
175. Qtd. in Taylor Hagood, “Ah Ain’t Got Nobody: Southern Identity and Signifying on Dialect in Hurston and
Faulkner,” Publications of the Mississippi Philological Association (2004): 47.
176. John Steinbeck, “Banquet Speech,” Nobelprize.org, (1962) 7 Dec. 2009 <http://nobelprize.org/nobel _
prizes/literature/laureates/1962/steinbeck-speech.html>.
177. Qtd. in David Minter, William Faulkner: His Life and Work (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press,
1980) 102.
178. Ibid., 117.
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155. Robert Shulman, The Power of Political Art: The 1930s Literary Left Reconsidered, (University of North
Carolina Press, 2000) 51.
179. Ibid., 121.
180. Ibid., 158.
181. Ted Atkinson, Faulkner and the Great Depression: Aesthetics, Ideology, and Cultural Politics (Athens:
University of Georgia Press, 2006), 43.
182. Ibid. See this guide, “Literary History and the Novel,” for further discussion of modernist techniques.
183. Qtd in Atkinson, 48.
185. Ibid., 52.
186. Ibid., 53.
187. Ibid., 54.
188. Ibid., 194.
189. Ibid., 195.
190. Ibid., 200.
191. Ibid., 201.
192. Carl Sandburg, “Notes for a Preface,” The Complete Poems of Carl Sandburg: Revised and Expanded
Edition (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2002) xxxi.
193. Qtd. in Brian M. Reed, “Carl Sandburg’s The People, Yes, Thirties Modernism, and the Problem of Bad
Political Poetry,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 46.2 (Summer 2004): 182.
194. Daniel J. Singal, William Faulkner: The Making of a Modernist (University of North Carolina Press, 1999) 54.
195. Ibid., 55.
196. Ibid.
197. Carl Sandburg, “Chicago,” Chicago Poems (1998) 7 Dec. 2009 <http://carl-sandburg.com/chicago.htm>.
198. Qtd. in Richard J. Gray, A History of American Literature (Wiley-Blackwell, 2004) 371.
199. Qtd. in Railsback and Meyer, A Steinbeck Encyclopedia, 14–15.
200. Qtd. in “‘Carl Sandburg at 50’, by Harry Hansen in the New York World of January 6, 1928,” 7 Dec. 2009
<http://sdrc.lib.uiowa.edu/traveling-culture/chau1/pdf/sandburg/1/brochure.pdf>.
201. Qtd. in North Callahan, Carl Sandburg: His Life and Works (Penn State Press, 1987) 81.
202. Ibid., 82.
203. Carl Sandburg, “Fog,” Chicago Poems (New York: Henry Holt, 1916) 71.
204. Mark Van Wienen, “Taming the Socialist: Carl Sandburg’s Chicago Poems and Its Critics,” American
Literature 63.1 (March, 1991): 91.
205. Carl Sandburg, “I Am the People, the Mob,” Carl Sandburg—Chicago Poems (1998) 7 Dec. 2009
<http://carl-sandburg.com/i _ am _ the _ people _ the _ mob.htm>.
206. Van Wienen, 94.
207. Sally Greene, “‘Things Money Cannot Buy’: Carl Sandburg’s Tribute to Virginia Woolf,” Journal of Modern
Literature 24.2 (2000/2001): 295.
208. Ibid., 295.
209. Qtd. in Gay Wilson Allen, Carl Sandburg (University of Minnesota Press, 1972) 6.
210. Laurence Goldstein, The American Poet at the Movies: A Critical History (University of Michigan Press, 1995)
71.
211. Carl Sandburg, The People, Yes, (Mariner Books, 1990), p. 3. Even the authors of the John Steinbeck
Encyclopedia, Brian Railsback and Michael Meyer, p. xlvi, acknowledge the similarities between this poem
and Steinbeck’s novel.
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184. Ibid., 52.
212. Qtd. in North Callahan, 94.
213. Brian M. Reed, in “Carl Sandburg’s The People, Yes, Thirties Modernism, and the Problem of Bad Political
Poetry,” p. 192, makes several of these points in his essay, one of the very few contemporary critical
examinations of Sandburg’s poem.
214. A rhetorical device in which the beginning words of sequential phrases or clauses are repeated.
216. Qtd. in Goldstein, 71.
217. Langston Hughes, “Good Morning Revolution” (1932), The Workers Dreadnought, 13 Dec. 2008, 7 Dec. 2009
<http://theworkersdreadnought.wordpress.com/2008/12/13/good-morning-revolution-langston-hughes1932/>.
218. George Hutchinson, The Cambridge Companion to the Harlem Renaissance (Cambridge University Press,
2007) 114.
219. Eric J. Sundquist, “Who Was Langston Hughes?” Commentary 102 (December 1996): 55.
220. Ibid., 56.
221. Qtd. in Faith Berry, Langston Hughes: Before and Beyond Harlem (Citadel Press, 1992) 133.
222. Ibid., 143.
223. Ibid., 137.
224. Ibid., 138.
225. Langston Hughes, “The Negro Mother,” Old Poetry 7 Dec. 2009
<http://oldpoetry.com/opoem/12618-Langston-Hughes-The-Negro-Mother>.
226. Langston Hughes, “Mother to Son,” Old Poetry 7 Dec. 2009
<http://oldpoetry.com/opoem/10388-Langston-Hughes-Mother-To-Son>.
227. Langston Hughes, “Autobiography: I Wonder as I Wander,” The Collected Works of Langston Hughes,
Volume 14 (University of Missouri Press, 2003) 280.
228. Ibid., 18.
229. Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (Verso,
1998) 217.
230. Langston Hughes, The Collected Works of Langston Hughes: Essays on Art, Race, Politics, and World
Affairs, Volume 9 (University of Missouri Press, 2002) 466.
231. Qtd. in Sundquist, 58.
232. Ibid., 58.
233. Ibid., 57.
234. Qtd. in Anthony Dawahare, “Langston Hughes’s Radical Poetry and the ‘End of Race,’” Melus 23.3 (Fall
1998): 26.
235. Ibid., 28.
236. Ibid., 29.
237. Ibid., 34.
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215. In 1922, Thomas Wilfred made his first public appearance in New York with his invention, the Clavilux,
an organ for producing color music which he called “lumia.” Sandburg’s use of the term suggests his
awareness of Wilfred and his experiments in combining the dimensions of sight and sound.
Allen, Gay Wilson. Carl Sandburg. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1972.
Atkinson, Ted. Faulkner and the Great Depression: Aesthetics, Ideology, and Cultural Politics. Athens: University
of Georgia Press, 2006.
Beito, David T. and Linda Royster Beito. “Isabel Paterson, Rose Wilder Land, and Zora Neale Hurston on War,
Race, the State, and Liberty.” The Independent Review XII.4 (Spring 2008): 553–573.
Benson, Jackson J. John Steinbeck, Writer: A Biography. New York: Penguin Books, 1990.
—. “‘To Tom, Who Lived It’: John Steinbeck and the Man from Weedpatch.” Journal of Modern Literature 5.2
(April 1976): 151–210.
Berry, Faith. Langston Hughes: Before and Beyond Harlem. New York: Citadel Press, 1992.
Blake, William. “A Song of Liberty,” The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. In The Poetry and Prose of William Blake.
Ed. David Erdman. New York: Doubleday, 1970. 43.
Bloom, Harold, ed. John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishers, 2005.
Boehnlein, James M. “Meridel Le Sueur, Reportage, and the Cultural Situatedness of Her Rhetoric.” Delights,
Desires, and Dilemmas: Essays on Women and the Media. Ed. Ann C. Hall. Westport, CT: Greenwood
Publishing Group, 1998. 89–98.
Bullivant, Stephen. “‘That’s him. That shiny bastard.’: Jim Casy and Christology.” Steinbeck Studies 16.1&2
(Spring 2005): 15–31.
Callahan, North. Carl Sandburg: His Life and Works. University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 1987.
Campbell, Donna. “Naturalism in American Literature.” Literary Movements. 14 July 2008. 8 Dec. 2009.
<http://www.wsu.edu/~campbelld/amlit/natural.htm>.
Carpenter, Fredric. “The Philosophical Joads.” College English 2.4 (January 1941): 315–325.
—. “The Philosophical Joads,” Rpt. in “Fredric I. Carpenter on the Novel and Transcendentalism.” John
Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. Ed. Harold Bloom. Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishers, 2005. 55–66.
“Chronology of Hurston’s Life.” The Zora Neale Hurston Digital Archive. 8 Dec. 2009
<http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~zoraneal/chronology.php>.
Chávez, César. “César Chávez.” Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression. Ed. Studs Terkel. New
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Coiner, Constance. Better Red: The Writing and Resistance of Tillie Olsen and Meridel Le Sueur. Oxford: Oxford
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Cunningham, Charles. “Rethinking the Politics of The Grapes of Wrath.” Cultural Logic: An Electronic Journal of
Marxist Theory & Practice. (2002) 8 Dec. 2009 <http://clogic.eserver.org/2002/cunningham.html>.
Dawahare, Anthony. “Langston Hughes’s Radical Poetry and the ‘End of Race.’” Melus 23.3 (Fall 1998): 21–41.
DeMott, Robert. Steinbeck’s Reading: A Catalogue of Books Owned and Borrowed. New York: Garland
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Denning, Michael. The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century. London:
Verso, 1998.
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