From an op-ed piece by Rachel Dry in the Washington Post:
Seventy years after John Steinbeck published his best-selling tale of the Joad family’s journey from Oklahoma to California along Route 66, “The Grapes of Wrath,” required reading that never really went out of style, is suddenly in high demand.
At the National Endowment for the Arts, the number of grant applications for “Big Read” community reading events around “The Grapes of Wrath” was twice what it was last year. In Jackson County, Mich., librarians estimate that more than 2,000 people will read the book this month as part of a “Big Read.” Kimberly Rapert is teaching the novel to her 11th-graders at Western High School there, and she says that having a book this relevant to the current economic crisis “is like a godsend.”
Out of curiosity, I surfed to Amazon.com and checked the book’s ranking in sales. There are three versions there: a centennial edition by Penguin, a Penguin Classics Edition, and a Penguin Modern Classics edition. Two of the editions are in the top 5,000 overall in sales. The centennial edition is No. 1 in the Classics division by U.S. authors.
In terms of DVD sales, John Ford’s 1940 movie from the novel is in the top 20 of Classic Dramas.
So, obviously, “The Grapes of Wrath” is being discovered and re-discovered.
More from Dry:
Steinbeck would think that we’re getting just what we deserve. And he’d like it.
Not because the Nobel laureate and best-selling author would wish misfortune upon his fellow citizens. But because, first of all, he romanticized the essential moral goodness that springs from adversity, and second, because he hated the material bloat of postwar America. He just didn’t like stuff. And now that we are brought low by stuff, acquiring it without really paying for it, devising complex financial instruments to get more of it, he’d think that maybe we’re ready to learn a lesson or two.
Rereading Steinbeck today — not the compassionate chronicler of human struggle Steinbeck of the 1930s but the cantankerous social critic Steinbeck of the 1950s and ’60s — is a little eerie. If only we’d listened to him, we might not have spent our way in to the current crisis. Of course, in the aftermath of disaster, anyone who punctured enthusiasms with vague harbingers of doom can seem retroactively brilliant. But listen to Steinbeck on the American obsession with things: “If I wanted to destroy a nation, I would give it too much and I would have it on its knees, miserable, greedy and sick.”
That sounds about right.
The irony of this is, I’ve encountered a number of Route 66 business owners who expect an excellent summer. That’s partly because the weak dollar is enticing a lot of foreign tourists. Also, the weak economy is making American tourists stay closer to home and, thus, the Mother Road.
It’s also worth noting that many Route 66 businesses are keenly aware of their road’s role during the Great Depression. As a result, they’re not greedy. They’re empathetic. They already know how to knuckle down if hard times arrive on their doorstep. And they know they can survive it and emerge stronger.
Great entry about one of my favorite books. The book is also on the list of the Modern Library’s 100 Best Novels, coming in at #10 (I think that’s low). A coworker started a book club using that list, and I’ve noticed that whenever I’ve bought any of the books on Amazon, the list of other books bought by those who bought that book (if that makes sense) includes some on the ML list. So I think other book clubs are using that list, and that may have something to do with its renewed popularity.
I’m glad that more people are teaching and discovering this book (and movie). I think we’re all realizing that we’re just a heartbeat, a dust storm, a serious illness, or a lost job away from being in the same dire straits as the Joads. As I recently wrote on Facebook, this book taught me much about compassion and the kindness that should be extended towards those who are down on their luck.