‘Wrath’ Marathon: Lest We Forget

While Thanksgiving finds most people feasting on turkey and cranberry sauce, KPFK-FM is hoping to remind listeners of the struggles of the less fortunate. To that end, the radio station is broadcasting a four-day celebrity reading of “The Grapes of Wrath,” John Steinbeck’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about the plight of the dispossessed.

The Thanksgiving weekend reading of the book--which continues to sell more than 300,000 copies a year--was chosen by station producers because it coincides with the novel’s 50th anniversary and because of its message of hope for the poor and homeless at a time of year when others are enjoying the bounties of prosperity.

“(The book) has a tremendous amount of relevance today,” said John Chartrand, who co-produced the radio reading. “There are so many people who are homeless, people without direction, without hope, killing time. We wanted to bring a message of hope, of quality art work as well, and to stimulate our listeners to reach out to their fellows--to reach out and to bring some light into their lives.”

“My dream would be that people would sit down and listen to it as families,” said co-producer Cynthia Friedman. “It really is very much a family story about the struggle to hold a family together in the face of being uprooted and incredibly economically deprived.”

John Steinbeck IV, the 43-year-old journalist son of the late author, will be the first of 57 voices to be heard reading the 1939 novel, famous for its biting portrait of Depression-era migrants, severe dust storms and abandoned croplands. The 25-hour reading on KPFK-FM (90.7) begins today at 10 a.m.) and continues in three segments of 1 to 2 1/2 hours daily through Sunday night(). Future plans for re-broadcast have not been determined yet, but Chartrand hopes to air the reading again next Thanksgiving.

The readers--including Carl Reiner, Kris Kristofferson, Laraine Newman, Steve Allen, Alfre Woodward, Pat Hingle, Kenny Loggins and Amy Madigan--span a diverse spectrum, from film and television to popular music and television comedy.

Steinbeck wrote the novel after reporting for a San Francisco newspaper on what many migrating Oklahomans found once they came to California’s Central Valley: filthy camps, starving children, epidemic dysentery and tuberculosis. The issues raised in Steinbeck’s novel, which centers around the struggles of an Oklahoma family forced to flee their farm for the migrant camps of California, still resonate today, nearly 21 years after the author died.

The novelist’s son shares many of his father’s concerns.

“Because it seemed to grow so slowly, it’s easy to not really notice the state of the homeless in this country and it’s almost forgivable; but today, perhaps, this will open some awareness that this could happen to anyone, anytime,” the younger Steinbeck said after completing his reading.

Steinbeck, who called the broadcast “very, very timely,” said he was happy to kick off the reading of a book he came to appreciate while in Vietnam as a young journalist.

His first exposure to “The Grapes of Wrath” was through the movie version of his father’s work. (The book was published 7 years before he was born.) Screenwriter Nunnally Johnson, who adapted the book to the screen, and the author were “great friends,” Steinbeck said, and his father arranged a screening of the movie for the family.

“I found it very depressing,” Steinbeck said. “And then I read it when I was covering the rainy season in Laos (as a correspondent for ‘CBS News’ in 1970), where I was holed up with some other journalists during the monsoons, and it really grabbed me because . . . I was appreciating the brush-strokes as opposed to the subject of the picture.

“I began to appreciate how he wrote his books, not what they were about.”

Steinbeck admires his father’s story-telling abilities, particularly his talent for dialogue: “He’s very cunning. It’s just like people talking, like a caricature of the way people talk.”

Still, as a writer, he could not resist turning a critical eye to his father’s work.

“My father wrote emblematically--things were emblems of ordinary life,” he said. “You could hear his books in the last row. They hammer at you. They’re not subtle.”

While the readings’ volunteer producers labored on the broadcast--starting in August and finishing this week--they developed a deeper appreciation of the novel’s finer points.

“The book really rewards closer inspection,” Friedman said. “I’m so fascinated by the structure of it, the way it develops. It’s really got a lot of subtleties that I didn’t catch when I read it in high school.”

Chartrand said the book was particularly special to him because the story could have been that of his own family. Chartrand’s grandfather was one of the thousands who left Oklahoma in the 1930s, packing up his family and moving to California. “They were dirt poor, but then they did well,” Chartrand said. “That really motivated me in a large way.”

“It’s sort of talking about the underdog and what it’s like being on the bottom and the kinds of economic factors that put people down and keep people down and how people can survive by working together,” Friedman said. “It really is a book that speaks KPFK’s language.”