“Stempel” by e_walk via Flickr (http://www.flickr.com/photos/walker_ep/ / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

Here in Washington, DC, we’ve been snowed in for what seems like forever. I’ve been thinking a lot about Dennis Lehane’s observation that books make it possible to armchair travel. After googling a multitude of travel quotes this morning, I’m also realizing that many of the same observations that apply to travel also apply, practically word-for-word, to reading. With that in mind, here is an excerpt from the opening paragraphs of  John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley.

A trip, a safari, an exploration, is an entity, different from all other journeys. It has personality, temperament, individuality, uniqueness. A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike. And all plans, safeguards, policing, and coercion are fruitless. We find after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us.

Learn more about John Steinbeck and his novel The Grapes of Wrath on The Big Read website. To find out who’s all aboard for The Big read near you check out The Big Read calendar.

Per Tom Carson, “Dr. Destruction is  a local [Kenosha] celebrity who has a television show about horror movies.   He is a regular user of the library and supports our core values.  He approached us and asked how he could be involved in the The Big Read.”

Kenosha Public Library’s Big Read of  The Grapes of Wrath doesn’t officially launch until February 27, but the library has been plenty busy getting ready to celebrate Steinbeck.  Here’s an update from Tom Carson, the library’s head of reference services.

We began giving away copies of The Grapes of Wrath on Monday, January 4, and boy, were we surprised by the public’s reaction! More than 450 copies were gone by noon.  We had distribution points spread throughout Kenosha.  Our Friends of the Library were very generous and purchased another 500 copies.  Those copies were snapped up within hours.  The library decided to use donation money to purchase another 250 copies, and those were all gone by yesterday.  Everyone is busy reading the book and getting ready for the official kick-off event on February 27.  If this initial interest carries over into participation in the discussions and programs, this will be the most successful endeavor that the library has ever undertaken to promote and support reading in the community. 

This project has opened our eyes to the power of partnerships. For example, we have partnered with the Kenosha Literacy Council which, in addition to helping ESL students read the book, is using the book with inmates in a local correctional institution to improve their reading, writing, and comprehension skills. Also, our local community cable outlet is promoting The Big Read in a big way.

Visit The Big Read website to learn more about Kenosha Public Library and its calendar of events for The Big Read.

“Toward Los Angeles, California, 1937″ by Dorothea Lange. From Farm Security Administration-Office of War Information collection at Library of Congress

Writer Jay Parini’s extensive bibliography includes John Steinbeck: A Biography. In this interview excerpt, the writer speculates on how Steinbeck’s personal history influenced his writing of The Grapes of Wrath. 

When you think about The Grapes of Wrath it’s  an American masterpiece, and a very long process goes into the making of such a book.  It’s almost impossible to think of the different elements, all of the different rivulets that would be like streams flowing into the great river that becomes this novel, with its thousands and thousands of details.

First of all there’s Steinbeck’s unusual rootedness in this part of California. Steinbeck was born in 1902 in this beautiful part of California, which was really quite like a garden of Eden. I mean everything grows there; you drop a stick in the ground, and it becomes a tree. . . . His Grandfather Hamilton, his mother’s father, was a farmer, and Steinbeck followed him around as a boy. Steinbeck loved to play in the woods, in the fields, he loved to talk to all the migrant workers. He was himself a farmhand, a ditch-digger. He really identified with the local people, with migrants who came to the region, but he knew California in the way that you could only know [it] if you had a peculiar openness to the landscape and the people. And I think it’s that rootedness in time and place, especially place, that made Steinbeck such an appropriate person to write this novel, where California becomes essentially the goal of this drive westward of the Joad family. 

But Steinbeck was also always a traveler with open eyes and ears. . . .He started off, as you know, writing for newspapers. He wrote for many different newspapers in New York City and various places. . . .In fact the whole Grapes of Wrath story came out of an assignment he had taken from the San Francisco News where he was sent down into the Central Valley to report on these migrant camps in places not too far from where he grew up.  And so Steinbeck had the open eyes and ears of a journalist, and he had this sense of place, the rootedness in California.  So all of this background went into the making of The Grapes of Wrath. 

When he finally set about to write this novel he made this journey, with his then wife, across the country in a brand new car he had bought. Route 66 really opened up for him: he was thrilled by the local hamburger stands, the people he met along the way, the astonishing shifts of landscape with panoramas of valley floor, desert, and high mountains. I mean it’s quite an epic journey that he describes in that novel.  He somehow makes The Grapes of Wrath into an American epic, and it’s got that epic dimension. Traditionally speaking an epic is a journey home, if you think of Odysseus wandering from the Trojan wars back to the island of Ithaca. This is a journey to an emotional home for Steinbeck. [It] begins with displacement. This entire poor family is cast off the land by the economic system, which Steinbeck in a sense is condemning, because it has done wrong by these people. And they’re heading back like the great wandering of the Jews . . . they’re in the deserts of Egypt, they’re wandering, looking for the promised land of Canaan. The promised land for John Steinbeck was always his home, California.

Hear more from Parini and others on The Grapes of Wrath radio show. Visit The Big Read calendar to find out where a Steinbeck celebration is taking place near you.

Farmer and sons walking in the face of a dust storm. Cimarron County, Oklahoma, April 1936. Photo by Arthur Rothstein, from Library of Congress.

Although the books in The Big Read library are now acknowledged classics, not all of them were published to literary acclaim or widespread public acceptance. For example, Fahrenheit 451 has spent its fair share of time on Banned Book lists, while some have debated if “genre” novels such as The Maltese Falcon and A Wizard of Earthsea can be called “literature.” The Grapes of Wrath, which has not only moved generations of readers, but was also a powerful inspiration to writers such as Ray Bradbury, had a particularly stormy arrival on the literary scene. In the interview excerpt below, Dr. Susan Shillinglaw, Scholar-in-Residence at the National Steinbeck Center in Steinbeck’s hometown of Salinas, explains some of the animosity that greeted the novel’s publication.

[When John Steinbeck] published The Grapes of Wrath, he was really hated in California, hated in Oklahoma, reviled in many places around the country.  He was denounced in Congress by Lyle Boren, who was a congressman from Oklahoma.  So the publicity surrounding The Grapes of Wrath was very controversial. Some of it was praising the book for its literary qualities, and other reviews attacked it for its language and for the vision of California as this very selfish place with a lot of very rich fat cats who hated ordinary people and mistreated the migrants. . . .

Oklahoma thought that the book made everybody in Oklahoma look stupid, as if they were illiterate and spoke a kind of English that no one else would speak.  So the book was very controversial.  And in Salinas, they hated it because . . .most of the wealthy people own land, and the book makes people who own land look very bad.  And so the agricultural interests in Salinas hated the book.  And they hated the language of the book. They hated the fact that there had been a very vicious and violent lettuce strike in Salinas in 1936, just as [Steinbeck] began writing the book.  Right after he finished Of Mice and Men,  as he began  the research for The Grapes of Wrath, one of the worst strikes in the 1930s occurred in Salinas.  It was the lettuce packers’ strike, and that was on everyone’s minds.  It was an attempt to break the unions, [to keep] the workers from organizing at all. I think that was on everybody’s mind because The Grapes of Wrath is really suggesting that if people work together, that’s one way for the workers to survive. . . .It was burned because of the language and because it was supposedly a lying book.  “A filthy lying manuscript” is what they said.

Founded in 1683, Orange County, New York, is home to The Orange County Library Association, which hosted a community dance, presented a concert of music by Woody Guthrie, staged a reading of the novel, and convinced local antique auto aficionados to show off their period vehicles all to celebrate John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. In total, the library and its partners hosted more than 50 events for more than 1,500 Empire Staters.

Big Read Chairperson Madelyn Folino had this to say about their experience with The Big Read:

The choice of The Grapes of Wrath attracted readers who felt they had missed out by not reading this classic in their youth. The scope and variety of programs appealed to them and offered an easy entry into reading and talking about the book. It was also gratifying to discuss the novel with readers to whom it obviously meant so much. We were nervous about the reaction of potential readers to the heft and seriousness of the novel, but were congratulated repeatedly on choosing a book that is so relevant to current economic conditions and international concerns.

From top: A Grapes of Wrath display hosted by a local business  in its downtown Warwick showroom; a staged reading of the novel was presented at three different Orange County locations; a marquee  invite to The Big Read Woody Guthrie concert thanks to Middletown’s Paramount Theatre; Cornwall Public Library’s Tea & A Classic program featured period automobiles from the Model A Club of Newburgh. (All photos courtesy of the Orange County Library Association.)

A careful observer of personnel on The Big Read audio guides will notice that The Big Read authors often show up on each other’s guides talking about the ways they’ve inspired and encouraged each other, either in person or through the example of their work. Ray Bradbury, for example, modeled the structure of The Martian Chronicles after John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. I think it’s fair to say that The Big Read is not just a community of readers, but also a community of writers.

Here’s Amy Tan (from an interview with the NEA) on Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine:

Love Medicine is a collection of stories around a community of people, and they happen to be Native Americans who often refer to themselves as Indians.  It’s about, I think, five generations of family and their relationships are not necessarily through the traditional lines. They may be [related] through secret affairs or liaisons that not everyone in the family knows about. They are united by these secrets and tragedies as well as a kind of love that is different I think from what we normally think of as love. It’s love that goes through misunderstanding and through history and through, sometimes, violence, anger, grudges, but it’s an enduring kind of love.

Read more from The Big Read authors on The Big Read Web site.

Just a quick shout-out in honor of the recent launch of the Big Read Web site for the Biblioteca Alexandrina, one of our Egyptian partners for The Big Read Egypt/U.S.  The site features discussion boards, the Reader’s Guides for the three Big Read classics they’re reading in Egypt as well as for The Thief and the Dogs, and snapshots from various Big Read events hosted by the library. Make sure to check out my favorite set of pix–The Big Read booth at an Alexandria mall!

Another sneak peek this morning at Thornton Wilder, who is debuting on The Big Read list this fall. As I read through an advance copy of the Reader’s Guide to The Bridge of San Luis Rey and Our Town, I was struck by the opening quote, taken  from a 1929 letter by Wilder: “It seems to me that my books are about: what is the worst thing that the world can do to you, and what are the last resources one has to oppose it. In other words: when a human being is made to bear more than human beings can bear—what then?”
Wilder’s description of his work aptly describes the central conflict in several Big Read titles, The Grapes of Wrath, The Things They Carried, and A Lesson Before Dying, to name a few. It also resonates with one of my favorite passages from another Big Read author, Ernest Hemingway. This quote from A Farewell to Arms seems perhaps a kind of answer or corollary to Wilder’s.
 

If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places.”
Your thoughts?
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The highlights of English class the spring semester of my senior year of high school: I wrote the best English paper I’ve ever written (a conversation between Huck Finn, Holden Caulfield, and the unnamed narrator from Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man); I saw The Graduate for the first time (“Plastics Benjamin!”); and I read The Grapes of Wrath followed by an incredible couple of days watching John Ford’s atmospheric translation of Steinbeck’s epic. I remember that the black-and-white film didn’t seem old-fashioned, but rather it was fitting that the Joads’ story had seemingly leached all of the color out of the film stock the way the Dust Bowl had leached all of the color out of Texas, Arkansas, Missouri, and — of course — Oklahoma.

As many of you may have noticed reading the blog, Big Read cheer-person David Kipen knows a thing or two about film and contributed the essay “The Novel at the Movies” to The Grapes of Wrath Reader’s Guide. Kipen writes, “Of [The Grapes of Wrath], John Steinbeck himself claimed that, ‘[Producer Darryl] Zanuck has a hard, straight picture in which the actors are submerged so completely that it looks and feels like a documentary film and certainly has a hard, truthful ring . . . it is a harsher thing than the book, by far. It seems unbelievable but it is true.’” Kipen goes onto call the film “a starkly beautiful movie, suffused in every scene with the intensity of craftsmen working on what even they must have suspected was the most important picture they might ever make.”

But don’t take Kipen’s (or my) word for it. If you’re in the DC area, check out the 1934 Film Series, hosted by the Smithsonian American Art Museum, “in the spirit of the museum’s current exhibition, 1934: A New Deal for Artists.” The museum will screen The Grapes of Wrath — clocking in at a little more than two hours — Thursday, May 21 at 6:00 pm. Check SAAM’s Web site for more info.

As his son Thom tells it, even John Steinbeck had to trick his kids into loving literature!

Looking for tips on getting your kids to enjoy reading? Here’s some advice from avid Big Reader Marie Pyko.

Want more Steinbeck? Join Jackson District Library’s Big Read of The Grapes of Wrath.