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RADICAL RESPONSES TO THE GREAT
DEPRESSION Radical Novels |
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The Grapes of Wrath. A series of successful novels dealing with the
downtrodden in his native California (Tortilla Flat, 1935;
In Dubious Battle, 1936; Of Mice and Men, 1937; and
The Long Valley, 1938) preceded John Steinbeck's Grapes of
Wrath (1939), which made the Joad Family, displaced Oklahoma
farmers in California, a household word and was hailed even on
publication as the greatest modern American novel. Its frank language
and honest depiction of sordid conditions brought Steinbeck
censorship and much verbal abuse; but the novel won the Pulitzer
Prize for 1940 and more than anything subsequently written gained for
Steinbeck the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962. |