: Thomas Fensch
: Steinbeck's Bitter Fruit From the Grapes of Wrath to Occupy Wall Street
: New Century Books
: 9780990718147
: 1
: CHF 7.80
:
: Sonstiges
: English
: 150
: DRM
: PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet
: ePUB
John Steinbeck observed the plight of the dispossessed --the Okies--during the Great Depression and then wrote the epic Novel, 'The Grapes of Wrath.' The first half of 'Steinbeck's bitter fruit' details his observations of the Depression years of the 1930s--the second half shows how close we may still be to the dark decade of the 1930s .The 'bitter fruit' in the title are the grapes in 'The Grapes of Wrath'.

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In Dubious Battle

JOHN STEINBECK WAS BORN in Salinas, California, February 27, 1902. He attended Stanford University, sporadically from 1919–1925, taking courses in Marine Biology and literature but failed to graduate. He held various jobs including working in a sugar factory in Salinas, as a caretaker of an estate in Lake Tahoe and eventually traveled to New York City to work, building the original Madison Square Garden. He also got a job as a reporter on the oldNew York American.

He was hopelessly out of his element.“They gave me stories to cover in Queens…” he later said,“… and Brooklyn and I would get lost and spend hours trying to find my way back.” He became emotionally attached to the individuals he was supposed to be writing about; the editors transferred him to the federal courts beat, but that was even worse—Steinbeck had little knowledge of the courts system. He was fired. He attempted free-lancing in New York with little success and returned to California by freighter in early 1926.

He began publishing novels in 1929, just as the Great Depression hit. His first three, which were commercial failures, were all published by firms which ultimately went bankrupt. Steinbeck’s first novel,Cup of Gold, a fictionalized biography of the pirate Henry Morgan, was published by the firm of Robert M. McBride& Co. Lewis Gannett, the critic, wrote that his first book sold only 1,533 total copies, because few critics bothered to review it when it was published, two months after the beginning of the Great Depression.

His second book,The Pastures of Heaven, did little better. Published in 1932 by the firm Brewer, Warren and Putnam, it earned Steinbeck $400. Neither his first nor third book earned more than the publisher’s advance of $250.

Although Steinbeck probably did not realize it at the time, 1933 marked the beginning of his sustained success as a professional, salable writer. He published two short stories, which would later become parts ofThe Red Pony, and his third book,To a God Unknown, found a publisher, this time the firm of Robert O. Ballou, in New York, but only 598 copies were bound and shipped to bookstores.

Then his luck began to change. Pascal Covici, a Chicago bookseller and publisher chanced to read his first three books and decided to publish Steinbeck. One of the first books Steinbeck remembered reading as a child was a vers