In a Dark Time … The Eye Begins to See

Although Tom Joad starts out merely trying to help his family survive after they are dispossessed, through Casy’s influence he begins to realize that it is not enough to merely help his own family survive. Indeed, his family will not survive unless they join forces with the other families victimized by the economic system. While [...]

Here’s hoping that Oprah Winfrey’s recent promotion of John Steinbeck’s East of Eden will spread to include his acknowledged masterpiece, The Grapes of Wrath. Although the novel’s vaguely socialistic tendencies caused J. Edgar Hoover to begin collecting a dossier on Steinbeck and prevented Steinbeck from receiving an officer’s commission in World War II, in retrospect [...]

If The Grapes of a Wrath has a weakness, it is that at times the novel seems too analytical and relies too heavily on exposition, as if Steinbeck doesn’t quite trust his reader to see the causes of the tragedy at work in the novel. When current history is taken into consideration, though, perhaps Steinbeck [...]