The Grapes of Wrath

Winner of the Pulitzer and the National Book Award, The Grapes of Wrath , the book that marked the peak of the career of Nobel Prize winner John Steinbeck, becoming a perennial manifesto of the struggle of the excluded, has been published in a revised edition with a new graphic design.

Published in 1939, The Grapes of Wrath marked the pinnacle of Nobel Prize-winning author John Steinbeck's career and remains a social document and a literary landmark. Like the book, the film, which won an Oscar for director John Ford and starred Henry Fonda, has become a classic.

Ten years after the onset of the Great Depression in 1929, Steinbeck created a lasting manifesto focusing on the struggle of the excluded. The Grapes of Wrath represents the confrontation between individual and society, through the epic story of the Joad family, driven by drought from the cotton fields of Oklahoma to try to survive as seasonal workers on the fruit plantations of California's Salinas Valley.

Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962, Steinbeck portrayed the plight of modern man facing hardship, poverty, and deprivation in a fierce world dominated by victims of competition and social outcasts. By witnessing human weaknesses in the face of a ruthless economic system, we encounter situations replete with drama. The text's realism, with strong naturalistic overtones, exposes the writer as an experimenter with innovative narrative techniques, rich in symbolism and mythic elaboration.

As American as he is universal, Steinbeck displays in life and art irreducible paradoxes, provoked by the tension between instinct and mind, nature and history, civilization and its discontents. The Grapes of Wrath is proof that men in ordinary places and situations can be exchanged for epic intention and led to immortality.

From the blurb by Pedro Pacífico, Bookster:

“ The Grapes of Wrath is [...] a read to be taken slowly, appreciating the complexity of the characters and Steinbeck's construction of diverse narrative layers.”