'grapes Of Wrath' Resonates As Heroic Tale Of Human Struggle

[...] the bank took their 80-acre farm. Steinbeck's story, published April 14, 1939, is immortalized as one of the greatest American novels, with timeless themes of family struggles, poverty, injustice and the pursuit of an illusory Promised Land. Filmmaker Ken Burns, whose documentary The Dust Bowl tells the story of the calamitous Oklahoma dust storms that caused the diaspora of refugees, said, Everything about this story - Steinbeck's story, the story of the Dust Bowl - is with us today. The book had roots in a seven-part series of articles, "The Harvest Gypsies," which Steinbeck wrote in 1936 for the pro-labor newspaper, San Francisco News. Steinbeck traveled to the makeshift labor camps - the "ragtowns" or "Hoovervilles," as he called them - to report on the squalid conditions and human woes. In a "Voice of America" radio interview after the book was published, Steinbeck said, "When I wrote 'The Grapes of Wrath,' I was filled with certain angers at people who were doing injustices to other people." Congressional hearings were held on the conditions of migrant workers, and labor laws were changed. People thought the book was communist, said Shillinglaw, a scholar at the National Steinbeck Center in Salinas and Steinbeck biographer whose most recent book is On Reading The Grapes of Wrath. Thom Steinbeck, an author who lives outside Santa Barbara, said "The Grapes of Wrath" brought his father "as many friends as he had enemies." Speaking from his home, Steinbeck, who is 59 and working on a memoir about his time with his dad, went on, My father came from the privileged class. Gentleman' SteinbeckDescribing his father as a gentle man, who would step over bugs to not kill them, Steinbeck added, My father told me that even the sheriff of Salinas - the family knew him well - came up to him and said, 'John, do you own a pistol?' My father said, 'No, I don't,' and the sheriff said, 'Get one. Sitting in his comfortable home with his wife, Marge Wood, he added, My brother is a famous chip designer who worked at Bell Labs.