the 1940s

The 1940s were the decade that transformed The Grapes of Wrath from a newly published novel into a permanent fixture of American culture. Published in April 1939, the novel's impact reverberated through the early 1940s, a period that saw its greatest initial sales, its most intense political battles, its first major film adaptation, and the beginning of its long critical reception. The decade also marked a profound personal turning point for John Steinbeck, who was irrevocably changed by the novel's success and the controversies that surrounded it.

Commercial Success and Cultural Impact

In 1940, The Grapes of Wrath won the Pulitzer Prize, and Steinbeck gave the $1,000 prize to his friend Ritch Lovejoy to encourage his writing career. The novel had already climbed to the top of the bestseller lists for most of 1939, selling 428,900 copies in hardcover at $2.75 each. By 1941, when Sun Dial Press issued a cloth reprint for a dollar, the publisher announced that more than 543,000 copies had already been sold. The novel's influence extended beyond the literary world; it was defended on several occasions by President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Eleanor Roosevelt for its power, integrity, and accuracy. After inspecting California migrant camps in 1940, Mrs. Roosevelt stated, "I have never thought The Grapes of Wrath was exaggerated." Steinbeck responded gratefully, noting that he had "been called a liar so constantly" that he wondered whether he "may not have dreamed the things I saw and heard."

The Film Adaptation and Its Legacy

Steinbeck sold the novel's film rights for $75,000 to producer Darryl F. Zanuck at 20th Century Fox. Nunnally Johnson scripted a truncated film version, which was memorably paced, photographed by ace cinematographer Greg Tolland, and acted by Henry Fonda as Tom Joad, Jane Darwell as Ma Joad, and John Carradine as Jim Casy, under the direction of John Ford in 1940. The film was nominated for seven Academy Awards and took home two Oscars—Ford as Best Director and Darwell as Best Supporting Actress. After seeing its Hollywood preview on December 15, 1939, Steinbeck reported that it was a "hard, straight picture . . . that looks and feels like a documentary film and . . . has a hard, truthful ring." Folksinger Woody Guthrie said it was the "best cussed pitcher I ever seen" and urged readers of his column in People's World to "go to see it and don't miss. You was the star in that picture." A restored DVD version with added historical features, Movietone documentary newsreel footage of Dust Bowl conditions, and extended interpretive commentary by Susan Shillinglaw and Joseph McBride was released in 2004.

Controversy and Censorship

The 1940s also saw the novel attacked by academic scholars and cultural critics for its alleged sentimentalism, stereotyped characterizations, heavy-handed symbolism, unconvincing dialogue, episodic, melodramatic plot, misplaced Oklahoma geography, and inaccurate rendering of historical facts. It was banned repeatedly by school boards and libraries for its rebellious theme and frank language, and denounced by right-wing ministers, corporate farmers, and politicians as communist propaganda, immoral, degrading, warped, and untruthful. Oklahoma congressman Lyle Boren called it "a lie, a black, infernal creation of a twisted, distorted mind." A Jesuit priest, Arthur D. Spearman, branded it "an embodiment of the Marxist Soviet propaganda," and an editorial in the Oklahoma City Times claimed "it has Tobacco Road looking as pure as Charlotte Brontë." The Associated Farmers and the newly formed California Citizens Association mounted smear campaigns to discredit the book and its author. Rebuttals designed to whitewash the Okie situation were published by Frank J. Taylor ("California's Grapes of Wrath"), by Ruth Comfort Mitchell, Steinbeck's Los Gatos neighbor (Of Human Kindness), and by M. V. Hartranft, whose slapdash volume Grapes of Gladness was billed as California's refreshing and inspiring answer to The Grapes of Wrath. None of these reactionary texts had any lasting impact.

Steinbeck's Personal Transformation

The effects of writing 260,000 words in a single year "finished" him, Steinbeck told Lawrence Clark Powell on January 24, 1939. After his long siege with the "Matter of the Migrants," his "will to death" was so "strengthened" that by the end of the decade he was sick of writing fiction. The unabated sales, the frenzied public clamor, and the vicious personal attacks over The Grapes of Wrath confirmed Steinbeck's worst fears about the fruits of success and pushed the already hostile tensions between John and his first wife, Carol, to the breaking point, a situation exacerbated by his willful romance with Gwyn Conger (they were wed from 1943 to 1948; the marriage produced two children) and his repeated absences in Hollywood and Mexico. Steinbeck did not quit writing, but by the early 1940s he was no longer content to be the person he had once been. In a letter of November 13, 1939, to former Stanford roommate Carlton Sheffield, he wrote: "I'm finishing off a complete revolution. . . . The point of all this is that I must make a new start. I've worked the novel as I know it as far as I can take it. I never did think much of it—a clumsy vehicle at best. And I don't know the form of the new but I know there is a new which will be adequate and shaped by the new thinking." His new writing lacked the aggressive political bite of his late 1930s fiction, but it had the virtue of being different, varied, and experimental. After 1940 much of his important work centered on explorations of newly discovered topics: ecological issues, scientific discourse, and inter-relatedness of nature and culture in two brilliant books, Sea of Cortez: A Leisurely Journal of Travel and Research (1941), written with Ed Ricketts, and Cannery Row (1945); the implications of individual choice, heroism, and moral action in The Pearl (1947), East of Eden (1952), Viva Zapata! (1952), and The Winter of Our Discontent (1961); personal nonfiction narratives in Travels with Charley (1962) and America and Americans (1966).

Enduring Significance

By the end of the 1940s, The Grapes of Wrath had already sold more than 543,000 copies and had been translated into nearly thirty languages. It had become a cornerstone of Steinbeck's eventual Nobel Prize in 1962 and proved itself to be among the most enduring—and controversial—works of fiction by any American author. The novel's legacy continued to grow in subsequent decades, with each generation of readers finding something new and relevant about it that speaks to its times. In the past six-plus decades, The Grapes of Wrath has sold more than fifteen million copies and currently sells annually 150,000 copies. A graph in Book (July/August 2003) indicates that of the fifty bestselling "classic" British and American novels in 2002, Grapes ranks eleventh—five spots behind Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, but seven ahead of Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea (Steinbeck and Hemingway are the only writers with three titles each on the list). In that same issue of Book, Jerome Kramer includes Grapes as one of the twenty books that changed America.