John Steinbeck's Bitter Fruit

Seventy years after The Grapes of Wrath was published, its themes – corporate greed, joblessness – are back with a vengeance. Melvyn Bragg writes of John Steinbeck's remarkable legacy in the Guardian.

From the piece...

I read The Grapes of Wrath in that fierce span of adolescence when reading was a frenzy. I was all but drowned in the pity and anger John Steinbeck evoked for these people, fleeing Oklahoma to seek work but finding nothing save cruelty, violence, the enmity of immoral banks and businesses, and the neglect by the state of its own people in the Land of the Free. The novel was published in 1939 and delivered a shock to the English reading world.

But for years I did not read him. Earlier this year, when asked to make a film about Steinbeck for the BBC, I went back with apprehension. The peaks of one's adolescent reading can prove troughs in late middle age. Life moves on; not all books do. But 50 years later, The Grapes of Wrath seems as savage as ever, and richer for my greater awareness of what Steinbeck did with the Oklahoma dialect and with his characters. It is just as alive, with its fine anger against the banks: "The bank – the monster – has to have profit all the time. It can't wait … It'll die when the monster stops growing. It can't stay in one place."