The Friday 56 & First Line Friday | The Grapes of Wrath

The Friday 56 is hosted weekly by Freda's Voice.
First Line Friday is hosted weekly by Hoarding Books.

Happy Friday!

Today, I'm tackling this John Steinbeck classic for the first time (and unlike Cory Matthews, I think I'll start reading from the beginning). The VeggieTales song is stuck in my head already, so it's sure to be an interesting day.

First Line: To the red country and part of the gray country of Oklahoma, the last rains came gently, and they did not cut the scarred earth.

From Page 56: "Kids," he said. "They'll go twenty miles to bust a window. I done it myself. They know when a house is empty, they know."

ABOUT THE BOOK

The Pulitzer Prize-winning epic of the Great Depression, a book that galvanized—and sometimes outraged—millions of readers.

First published in 1939, Steinbeck’s Pulitzer Prize-winning epic of the Great Depression chronicles the Dust Bowl migration of the 1930s and tells the story of one Oklahoma farm family, the Joads, driven from their homestead and forced to travel west to the promised land of California. Out of their trials and their repeated collisions against the hard realities of an America divided into Haves and Have-Nots evolves a drama that is intensely human yet majestic in its scale and moral vision, elemental yet plainspoken, tragic but ultimately stirring in its human dignity.

A portrait of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless, of one man’s fierce reaction to injustice, and of one woman’s stoical strength, the novel captures the horrors of the Great Depression and probes into the very nature of equality and justice in America.

The Grapes of Wrath summed up its era in the way that Uncle Tom’s Cabin summed up the years of slavery before the Civil War. Sensitive to fascist and communist criticism, Steinbeck insisted that “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” be printed in its entirety in the first edition of the book—which takes its title from the first verse: “He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored.” At once a naturalistic epic, captivity narrative, road novel, and transcendental gospel, Steinbeck’s powerful landmark novel is perhaps the most American of American Classics.

Goodreads | Amazon | Barnes & Noble

Now, feel free to leave a line from a book near you in the comments below.
And be sure to stop by Hoarding Books and Freda's Voice for a peek into other books.