The Grapes of Wrath

⚖The case for it

Casy steps between the deputies and the camp, and readers carry that scene for years afterward. Ma Joad is the book's actual center of gravity, holding a disintegrating family together while the men break around her. Steinbeck alternates the Joads with interchapters that pull back to the highway, the used-car lot, the land itself, a "technique of focusing on things supposedly tangential" that widens the frame rather than padding it. The closing forty pages get named among the best endings in American fiction. And the book refuses to stay historical: it "scares the poop out of me because we are repeating history," one reader writes. Another puts the appeal plainly, that here "a book is ABOUT SOMETHING."

— the honest librarian

✕The case against

Chapter three is a turtle crossing a road. "I could barely get past a whole chapter about a turtle," one reader admits, and the interchapters keep arriving, standalone essays on land use and economics that stop the Joads cold each time. Steinbeck explains dispossession and supply and demand so often that the book stops trusting anyone to have understood it once, which is why a critic files it as "a well-written piece of propaganda." Several chapters drop quotation marks and readers lose track of who is speaking. "The first half of the book drags terribly," runs the common report, and Al, Ruthie, Connie, and Rose of Sharon stay flat beside Ma and Tom.

— the honest librarian

11h

honest hours

16

sittings