A Student Companion To

A Student Companion To With the generous support of Jane Pauley and Garry Trudeau The Raymond Foundation Contents section 1: The Book and Its Context page 2 Who Was John Steinbeck? | Ellen MacKay page 3What Was the Dust Bowl? | Ellen MacKay page 6 Primary Sources Steinbeck Investigates the Migrant Laborer Camps Ellen MacKay: Dorothea Lange’s “Migrant Mother” and the Look of the Dust Bowl The Novel’s Reception The Wider Impact of The Grapes of Wrath page 10 What Makes The Grapes of Wrath Endure? Jonathan Elmer: Steinbeck’s Mythic Novel George Hutchinson: Hearing The Grapes of Wrath Christoph Irmscher: Teaching The Grapes of Wrath section 2: Sustainability, Bloomington, and the World of The Grapes of Wrath page 14 What Does Literature Have to Do with Sustainability? | Ellen MacKay page 15 Nature Writing Now: An Interview with Scott Russell Sanders An Excerpt from A Conservationist Manifesto | Scott Russell Sanders page 18 What Can Be Done?: Sustainablilty Then and Now Michael Hamburger Sara Pryor Matthew Auer Tom Evans page 22 Primary Access: The 1930s in Our Midst Ellen MacKay: Thomas Hart Benton, the Indiana Murals, and The Grapes of Wrath Nan Brewer: The Farm Security Administration Photographs: A Treasure of the IU Art Museum Christoph Irmscher: “The Toto Picture”: Writers on Sustainability at the Lilly Library section 3: The Theatrical Event of The Grapes of Wrath page 26 How Did The Grapes of Wrath Become a Play? | Ellen MacKay page 27 The Sound of The Grapes of Wrath: Ed Comentale: Woody Guthrie, Dust Bowl Ballads, and the Art and Science of Migratin’ Guthrie Tells Steinbeck’s Story: The Ballad of “The Joads” page 31 Another Look at the Joads’ Odyssey: Guthrie’s Illustrations. An Interview with Randy White section 4: Recommended Resources and Events A page from the manuscript of Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath courtesy of the Library of Congress. Welcome To the Show! The College of Arts and Sciences at Indiana University is Cardinal Stage is thrilled to be presenting The Grapes of Wrath pleased to welcome you to the Cardinal Stage production of in collaboration with the College of Arts and Sciences’ second The Grapes of Wrath. This fine adaptation of John Steinbeck’s Themester, on sustain • ability. We extend special thanks to gripping novel is produced in connection with the College’s Kirstine Lindemann and Stephen Watt for their unflagging 2010 Themester initiative, “sustain•ability: Thriving on a Small support. As it did last year, the Themester initiative has helped us Planet,” a semester-long program that combines academic to reach out to more students and engage the community more courses, public lectures and exhibits, film showings, and other deeply and broadly than ever before; it represents a wonderful events connected to this most vital topic. While this program extension of IU’s intellectual and social interests into the town of prominently features interconnected coursework for Indiana Bloomington and beyond. We are thrilled to be a part of it. University students, many events—like this production of The The materials in this educational packet are meant to enrich Grapes of Wrath—are open to the public. the experience of seeing The Grapes of Wrath by illuminating Forming the core of this initiative are over two hundred Steinbeck’s Dust Bowl milieu, its vibrant traces in Bloomington, inter-related courses on the Bloomington campus that range and its wider world of literary, historical and ecological context. in topic from ecology to creative writing, from economic and The contributors to this work deserve special thanks: Matthew public policy to conservation, energy, and climate change. Auer, Nan Brewer, Ed Comentale, Jonathan Elmer, Tom Evens, In addition, a number of spectacular events are planned for each Michael Hamburger, George Hutchinson, Christoph Irmscher, month of the fall semester to which all are invited. In October, Sara Pryor, and Scott Sanders. Thanks, too, to intern Emily for example, Patten and Branigan lecturers, world-renowned MacDonald, for her research and transcription, and to Ellen experts invited by IU Faculty, will address topics of crucial MacKay, Cardinal’s Director of Educational Outreach, for importance to sustainability: climate change and tropical assembling, editing and contributing this outstanding document. conservation. In November, highly acclaimed writers Thomas Cardinal Stage Company takes it as its mission to make world- Friedman, author of The World is Hot, Flat, and Crowded, and class theatre and high-quality educational programming Wendell Berry will give public lectures on campus. Straddling accessible to all local children and families. We are able to achieve October and November, SoFA gallery will host an exhibition of this mission thanks to the financial support of the Bloomington artist and activist Subhankar Banerjee, a prominent nature Community Arts Commission and the City of Bloomington, photographer, while the IU Art Museum offers sustainability- and because of a very generous grant in support of this Themester themed tours throughout the semester. Other events include collaboration from Jane Pauley and Garry Trudeau. screenings and discussions of films such as The 11th Hour and An Inconvenient Truth. And now, enjoy! Themester, a semester-long initiative launched by the College of Arts and Sciences and Dean Bennett Bertenthal Yours, in 2009, is intended to engage students and the entire community in a collective learning experience about a timely, Randy White even urgent, issue. The 2011 topic, “War and Peace,” will continue in this spirit. To read more about Themester and to access a Calendar of Events, please visit the Themester home page at http://themester.indiana.edu/. Stephen Watt Associate Dean for Undergraduate Education College of Arts and Sciences Indiana University section 1: The Book and Its Context Who Was John Steinbeck? by Ellen MacKay John Steinbeck was born in 1902 in Salinas, California, a region At the moment of its release, however, the book was decidedly known as The Salad Bowl of the Nation for its record output of controversial. Californian farmers objected to their depiction as vegetables and fruits. His family was prominent but modest of exploitative and unfeeling; some Oklahoma migrants denounced means; his father, at one time the treasurer of Monterey County, the squalid picture they felt Steinbeck offered of their day-to-day tried out several lines of work, including feed store owner and existence. One California County banned it for irreligious flour mill manager. Steinbeck later wrote evocatively of his happy content, bad language and socialist politics, but the effect was childhood, spent in the dazzling outdoors. Weekends on the coast only to entrench the novel’s reception as an extremely timely and weekdays in the valley helped to develop his particular regional work, perfectly attuned to the complex interplay of American flavor—Steinbeck is often recognized as a founding father of individualism and the spirit of collective uplift that pervaded the Californian fiction. pre-war Roosevelt era. In 1919 he enrolled at Surprisingly, Steinbeck’s next book did little to capitalize Stanford University but upon his success. Exhausted from his research in the Okie camps, followed no particular a strained marriage and ill health, he set off with his friend Ed course of study. He Ricketts, a longtime friend and marine biologist, to study the earned the money to pay ecology of the Sea of Cortez. He and Ricketts published a catalogue for his classes in English, and a chronicle of the species they collected in 1941 called The Classics, Composition Sea of Cortez. Critics have come to see Steinbeck’s collaboration and Natural Science by with Ricketts as deeply influential; the documentary style that working summers on characterizes Steinbeck, and in particular, his non-teleological farms and ranches; the structure (in other words, his tendency to let things play out experience cemented his without driving toward any particular end or purpose) have been John Steinbeck in a photograph from the 1930s. lifelong empathy for attributed to Ricketts’s scientific philosophy. agricultural laborers and Steinbeck then turned his attention to the war effort, and his perception that the soul of America resided in its soil. After six became a correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune in years at Stanford and without a degree, Steinbeck tried his luck 1942 (his columns were later collected in Once There Was a War, as a journalist in New York. The experiment was a failure, and he published in 1958). His post-war returned to California to turn his hand to novel-writing. The 1930s works, Cannery Row (1945) and were a period of tremendous productivity for Steinbeck. His first The Pearl (1947) were not embraced real success, Tortilla Flat (1935), was a comic tale about the alcohol- by critics, and Steinbeck’s most fueled exploits of four paisanos in pre-Prohibition Monterey. visible influence was as a writer for The book was made into a 1942 movie starring Spencer Tracy the cinema: his screenplay for Elia and provided Steinbeck enough money to buy a home and the Kazan’s Viva Zapata! (1952) and confidence to embrace his career choice. He followed it up with a the film adaptation of his East of series of novels that became known as his Dust Bowl trilogy: Eden (1955, starring James Dean) In Dubious Battle (1936), Of Mice and Men (1937), and The Grapes of brought him more popular success Wrath (1939). Each of these took up the subject of migrant farm than his fiction. After East of Eden, labor and the cultural forces that ignored, sentimentalized or he ceased working on novels exploited them. Of the three works, The Grapes of Wrath was entirely; his last successful book, considered Steinbeck’s greatest triumph. An advance edition of Travels with Charley (1962), returns nearly 20,000 copies sold out immediately, and at the height of its to the travel-log style Steinbeck popularity, the book sold 10,000 copies a week.

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