John Steinbeck's "The Grapes of Wrath" is a significant piece of American literature that explores the struggles of migrant families during the Great Depression. The novel is structured with alternating short lyrical chapters and longer narrative chapters detailing the Joad family'
The Grapes of Wrath has a structure to the content in its chapters.
Chapters one through twenty-nine including the even chapter twelve areh "short lyrical chapters of exposition and back ground pertinent to the migrants of the group." (unknown XI). The other even chapters two through thirty including chapter thirteen are "long narrative chapters of the Joad family's dramatic exodus to California" (unknown XI)
"The Grapes of Wrath is aruguably the most signinificant indictment ever made of the myth of California as a Promised Land." (XLIII)
His wife helped his write the book
"Carol left her stamp on the Grapes of Wrath is in many ways She typed the manuscript, editing as a rigorous critical commentator (after typing three hundred pages, she confeseed to Elizabeth Otis that she had lost 'all sense of proportion' and unfit to 'judge it at all')" (Steinbeck XVIII)
He wrote to book in a short amount of time but there are a lot of preperations taken place to write it.
" 'I wrote The Grapes of Wrath in on hundred days, but many years of preperation preceded it. I take a hell of a long time to get started. The actual writting is the last process.' " (Steinbeck XXXVII)
He doubted himself as a writter.
"He rarely thought of himself as a natural genuis and he rarely believed he had ever 'arrived' as a writer" (Steinbeck XV).
He had a mistress
His involvement with a much younger woman , a Hollywood singer named Gwyndolyn Conger
Senetor Robert M. La Follettes gave the book historical vindication and nomininated by critics and reviewers as "The Great American Novel." (XXXIX)
After high school he took college classes for what he does.
He enrolled at Standford University from 1919 to 1925. There he took a short-story wirtting class and went for a English-journalism major. He published works through the undergraduate literary magazine. In the end though he never recieved his degree
It has quialities that no other American novels could successfully create.
"The Grapes of Wrath ("No other American novel has succeeded in forging and making instumental so many prose styles," Peter Lisca Believes.")
The Grapes of Wrath took a lot out of Steinbeck
"The effects of writting 260,000 words in a single year 'finished him', he told Lawerence Clark Powell on January 24, 1939... his 'will to death' was so 'strengthened' that by the end of the decade he was sick of writting fiction" (XLII)
He wrote seventeen other novels
"The Grapes of Wrath turned out to be not only a 'fine' book, but the greatest of his seventeen novels." (unknown VII)
Steinback knew that the book needed work
"'If i could do this book properly it would be on of the really fine books and a truely American book. But i am assailed with my owm ignorance and inabilities.'" (Steinbeck VII)
