Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
Author
From Salinas, California , his background is Irish and German
(ancestry) he grew up in a modest family with a happy childhood.
He worked picking fruit in an early age with the rancher and
agricultural workers. He studied in Stanford but he dropped out .
Freelance worker in NY unsuccessful but then back in California. He
joined the League of American Writers (1935) socialist and left
inclinations (novel , strikes )
Tortilla Flat (1935) first successful novel , Of mice and Men (1937)
Grapes of Wrath (1939) best selling book controversial and Pulitzer.
He combined writing with journalism and also war correspondent in
WWII and Vietnam work. Nobel prize in 1962 (Faulkner, Hemingway,
first one was Sinclair Lewis. Toni Morrison, latest Bob Dylan)
http://www.biography.com/people/john-steinbeck-9493358
The Grapes of Wrath (1939)
-Best-seller, Pulitzer prize, and film version next year (middle crisis)
-Big social impact (Uncles Tom Cabin, big social impact also, first
civil war testimony about slavery, people dehumanized, strong
empathy, forbidden in south)
-Controversy (political debate of displaced people)
-Universal appeal despite social protest fiction(
-Joads have a collective role:
Okis, migrant workers, the eternal immigrant, DPs (displaced
people), jews, Israelites (biblical, Plymouth Plantation, exodus,
puritans)
-Themes:
Community, brotherhood, survival (people helping each other to
survive, brotherhood of man)
Human endurance, tenacity, recielance
Individuals struggle with natural and social forces (example of
naturalism, more intense type of realism, conflict between
individual, smallness individual in natural and social environment)
Banks represented abstract kind of force, monsters, unnamed
-Familiarity
Worked on farms and ranches as a boy
Before writing the novelJournalism Harvest Gypsies series of
articles (three) for the San Francisco News
Research in fieldtrips, friend of camp manager
-Novels structure
a) Drought and dispossession (1-11)
b) The Journey (12-18)
c) Arrival and life in California (19-30)
(quotation chapter 12, Journal in 66 66 is the path [] 66 is the
mother road, the road of light.
-Style fiction+ documentary
Hybrid texts than combines fictional chapters and expository
chapters (alternating)
Two kinds of chapters:
Fictional (18 and 30) + documentary (interchapters)