Epic Celebration : Steinbeck’s Timeless ‘Grapes of Wrath’ Is 50 Years Old

“I am sure of one thing -- it isn’t the great book I had hoped it would be. It’s just a run-of-the-mill book. And the awful thing is that it is absolutely the best I can do.” --John Steinbeck

For John Steinbeck, a writer more famous for his rhetoric than his subtlety, those words jotted in a diary more than five decades ago were probably his greatest understatement.

On Sunday, more than 100 writers, scholars and Steinbeck enthusiasts gathered in Santa Monica to celebrate Steinbeck on the 50th anniversary of that “run-of-the-mill book,” the Pulitzer-Prize winning novel “The Grapes of Wrath,” first printed on April 14, 1939.

“If you look at those books like ‘The Great Gatsby,’ ‘The Grapes of Wrath’ is the one that is absolutely as timeless as it was 50 years ago,” said Carolyn See, a novelist who helped coordinate the daylong program. “(This) is to honor him for the vision he had. If you were Hemingway, you were writing about bullfights, but Steinbeck stayed home in his own back yard and wrote about what he saw, which wasn’t a pretty sight.”

The celebration, sponsored by the professional writers’ organization Pen Center USA West, was undertaken in the spirit of Steinbeck’s writing. Instead of a reception in a fancy hotel room, the tribute was held at a private school music hall housed in a warehouse in Santa Monica. Instead of fancy appetizers served on silver trays, there was big steel pots of black bean chili and corn bread. And there was no orchestra or dinner music. At this literary celebration, they played the blues.

Among those participating in the event were Jane Fonda, whose father, Henry, starred as Tom Joad in the film version of “The Grapes of Wrath,” and John Steinbeck IV, the author’s youngest son, who shared memories of his father in between discussions, readings from the novel and a screening of the 1939 film.

Fitting Tribute

It was a fitting tribute to a man who, as a popular writer from the West, often found himself up against the Eastern literary establishment and languishing in the literary shadows of his contemporaries, such as William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway.

Said Jackson Benson, a Steinbeck biographer and a speaker at Sunday’s celebration: “If you take Hemingway and Faulkner, it’s hard to think of a novel they wrote that had the kind of impact of ‘Grapes of Wrath’ . . . (but) critics are a little leery of popular writers, and the Eastern establishment put down the worth of anything written west of New York City.”

Despite the praise, Sunday’s celebration was not meant to simply be a sugar-coated tribute. There was also analysis, and at times even a critique of Steinbeck, the issues he raised in his award-winning novel and the relevance of both in today’s society.

Author Alejandro Morales said that the epic, which centers around the struggles of an Oklahoma family forced to flee their farm for the migrant camps of California “is important not only because of the people it talks about, but because of the omissions it makes. For example, not talking about the ethnic diversity of the valley the (characters) walked into. The Mexican and Filipino workers who were basically competing with the incoming labor force.”

But Alvin Toffler, author of “Future Shock & The Third Wave,” called such criticism ill-placed. “I think we’re asking too much from any author to not only respond to his or her time but to also touch all the bases of half a century later,” Toffler said.

What was most important, according to many celebrants, was the unfortunate reality that not much has changed since the days Steinbeck wrote “The Grapes of Wrath.” The “Okies and Arkies” in the novel have now become the displaced Midwestern farmers of today, See said. The squatter camps of the 1930s migrant workers have become cardboard shanty towns on Skid Row filled with the homeless. And, she said, there are still migrant workers, dealing with an economic structure far more impenetrable than the system that confronted Steinbeck’s characters.

“You look at the (6 o’clock) news and you see it all over again. This country hasn’t learned a thing,” See said. “The Savings and Loan (crisis) going on, that’s Chapter 5 (of) John Steinbeck. The intense urge to make money at somebody else’s expense, that was going on then.”

Just as the problems Steinbeck wrote about still exist today, so does the truth of his message, according to the celebrants.

“The general humanism of the book stands up,” Toffler said. “The fact that poor people had depth. Its insistence that you don’t need a Ph.D. or a big pay check to have dignity. . . . The thing that speaks clearly is the Americanism of Steinbeck, the idea of every human being having value.”