![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() By going backwards, we dig below the surface for the gold, rather than being satisfied in panning for the golden flakes. What starts as a serious educative process of informing the public on important social justice issues, in the end, becomes a mocking and light reflection on life-changing questions. Despite, or perhaps because of, this furore The Grapes of Wrath became the best-selling book of 1939, selling almost half a million copies (at 2.75 a copy) in the first year of publication alone. ![]() Retrospectively, we can also see how popular entertainment works to thin-out the social justice message. Different histories are linked by a common theme, and in this case, we are considering the folkish expression on social justice. The story told here will move backwards in time, and the historical settings are different that is the particular point I am making. There was in my own family history points of connection to the longer story, which I would only find out many years later. First published in 1939, Steinbeck’s Pulitzer Prizewinning 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. The story of rural folk migrating in times of poverty and social injustice seeped well into my childhood history, through three popular cultural forms of entertainment:- several television series in the 1960s, a series of comedy films from the late 1940s and 1950s, and a novel published in 1939 with a classic Hollywood movie the following year. ![]()
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