The Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
Nov 10th, 2006 by Bauman
“We ain’t gonna die out. People is going’ on - changin’ a little, maybe, but goin’ right on.”
In November 1933, a vast dust cloud rose over an area stretching from Texas to the Great Plains, the beginnings of an ecological disaster that would blacken the sky all the way to Chicago. Over the next five years, the Dust Bowl forced thousands of Americans to hit the road in search of work. John Steinbeck reported first-hand on the bleak conditions in the California migrant camps and resolved to write a “big book” chronicling the ordeal of the displaced and disenfranchised.
That book was The Grapes of Wrath, his most celebrated and controversial novel, a national bestseller and winner of the Pulitzer Prize. “It is a long novel, the longest that Steinbeck has written, and yet reads as if it had been composed in a flash… Steinbeck has written a novel from the depths of his heart” (Books of the Century, 118).
The recipient of this copy, playwright Paul Osborn, would go on to write the screenplay for the film adaptation of Steinbeck’s East of Eden, directed by Elia Kazan and starring James Dean.
We offer a beautiful presentation copy of the April 1939 first issue of The Grapes of Wrath, in the original dust jacket, boldly inscribed to Paul Osborn with an original drawing of a bird by Steinbeck.