Storylines California in the American West Especially, the Ideal of “Rugged Individu- Discussion Guide No

Humanities andadministered Partnership Exploring Our Exploring Our Partnership supported bytheNational of humanexperienceand American understanding by theAmericanLibrary Additional supportfrom Association toexpand StoryLines Americais Regional Literature Regional StoryLines Endowment forthe The Grapes of Wrath cultural heritage. A Radio Barnes &Noble America by John Steinbeck / Library Discussion questions StoryLines California In the American West especially, the ideal of “rugged individu- Discussion Guide No. 6 alism” is at the root of many laws, or lack of laws, and has also shaped attitudes toward welfare and treatment of the homeless by and needy. Is the ideal of rugged individualism still workable? Lowell Jaeger Flathead Valley Community College Can we survive as individuals today the way we might have Kalispell, Montana survived one or two hundred years ago? Consulting Scholars: What are the benefits of community to the individual? What are the sacrifices an individual must make to participate in the David Littlejohn community? What are some benefits and sacrifices in your University of California, own life? Berkeley Additional readings Marta E. Sanchez Francisco Jiminez. The Circuit: Stories from the Life of a University of California, Migrant Child, 1997. San Diego Tomás Rivera. Y No Se Lo Trago La Tierra/And the Earth Did Not Kevin Starr Devour Him, 1987. California State Library, Jerry Stanley. Children of the Dust Bowl: The True Story of the Sacramento School at Weedpatch Camp, 1992. John Steinbeck. Harvest Gypsies: On the Road to the Grapes of Wrath, 1936. StoryLines America is supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities and administered by the American Library Association to expand American understanding of human experience and cultural heritage. Additional support from Barnes & Noble StoryLines ©1999 American Library Association America A Radio/Library Partnership Exploring Our Regional Literature The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck John Steinbeck’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Grapes of The term “Okies,” a word the Joads had not heard until Consider also Ma’s strategy of not telling the others that Wrath, is a moving tale of the Joad family’s struggle to adapt they came to California, stereotyped and denigrated a whole Grandma has died until after they have crossed the desert and survive in a changing world. Like thousands of other group of people as inferior and undeserving of normal human at night and reached safer territory. Although Ma is suffering families in the Dust Bowl years of the 1930s, the Joads are courtesies. Dehumanizing attitudes such as these make life- deeply at the loss of her own mother, she puts aside her need forced to leave their home and the land they have been farming and-death conflicts between competing groups possible, if to grieve for the good of the rest of the family. Another mean- for generations. These “Okies” load their trucks and jalopies not inevitable. ingful moment is when Ma instructs Rose of Sharon, whose with the few possessions they can bring along and set out for Perhaps the most interesting characters in the novel are baby is stillborn, to give her breast to a man who has starved California, where they plan to work in the vineyards, orchards, the preacher, Casey, and Ma Joad. Both embody qualities that himself to feed his son. Casey says of Ma, just after she has and cotton fields. Sadly, their high expectations soon collide cause humans to care for one another in times of crisis and to revealed Grandma’s death, “ . there’s a woman so great with with harsh realities. protect the weak rather than prey upon them. They represent love—she scares me.” Ma also provides the family with a “How can we live without our lives? How will we know the sacrifice of individual needs in favor of the common good. unifying identity. Her answer to so many intricate and painful it’s us without our past?” Steinbeck asks these important ques- “I got to thinkin’ how we was holy when we was one thing, an’ dilemmas is always, “Remember, we’s Joads.” tions as the Joads are packing to leave and discarding much mankind was holy when it was one thing. An’ it on’y got unholy Through the example of Casey and Ma, Steinbeck asks of their already meager material wealth. Such disorientation when one mis’able little fella got the bit in his teeth an’ run us to think about the very definition of civilization. We have is symptomatic of all dispossessed people, and many of us can off his own way,” concludes Casey, after giving up the gospel banded together in family units, in larger groups, in nations, for perhaps identify times in our own lives when we have felt the and turning instead to spreading the doctrine of unionization the purpose of identity and survival. America is a nation of the same way in the face of profound change. The Joad family hits to working people and the oppressed. uprooted and the dispossessed; over the course of a life, one the road with little more than family memories and dreams. By Ma struggles valiantly against the family’s disintegration. person might experience again and again the turmoil of dislo- the close of the novel, the dreams have died, the memories are Her notion of family is more inclusive than blood relation; cation or hear the call to help others in times of extreme need. distant, and the Joad family has disintegrated—or so it appears. she is, in a sense, a true humanist, a champion of the family of What actions are right or wrong, just or unjust, during such When The Grapes of Wrath was first published in 1939, man. Thus she welcomes strangers and guests into the times? These are the central conflicts in the story of the Joads. it was banned in some schools and discredited by many critics, family and shares whatever she can. One of the most touching They are also central in the settlement of California and the who called it inflammatory, biased and exaggerated. The scenes in the book is the moment in camp when Ma has West, which have seen one wave of immigrants after another book asks the reader to reexamine the free enterprise system. managed with great ingenuity to cook a meager meal to feed arrive with the fierce hunger born of desperation and the The Joads, like many Midwestern farmers and ranchers her own hungry clan, but must ignore the desperate looks of instinct for survival. today, could not compete with the larger—and more politically children who have smelled the food and come to beg. Readers powerful—corporate farm. “Who can we blame for our might compare Ma’s agony to their own reactions to the About the author hardships and mistreatment?” ask Tom Joad and others. The homeless who beg on our city streets. corporate farm had no face and no personality. It was run by John Steinbeck (1902-1968) was born in Salinas, California, the finance company and the bank—monsters, in the Joads’ and educated at Stanford University. Among his other novels eyes—of overwhelming size, devoid of human compassion are Tortilla Flat, Of Mice and Men, and East of Eden. He also and understanding. wrote nonfiction works, including the autobiographical Travels with Charley. Steinbeck was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962 for “writings, combining... sympathetic humour and keen social perception.” Humanities andadministered Partnership Exploring Our Exploring Our Partnership supported bytheNational of humanexperienceand American understanding by theAmericanLibrary Additional supportfrom Association toexpand StoryLines Americais Regional Literature Regional StoryLines Endowment forthe Slouching Towards cultural heritage. A Radio Barnes &Noble America Bethlehem / Library by Joan Didion Discussion questions StoryLines California Is Didion fair to Lucille Miller in “Some Dreamers of the Golden Discussion Guide No. 10 Dream” or is she using her to fit a stereotype of the disappointed, careless, and greedy immigrant to California? by Lowell Jaeger Flathead Valley Community College Didion has sometimes been accused of extrapolating a fractured, Kalispell, Montana frightening external world out of her own personal fears and neuroses. In these essays, is there any evidence for this claim? Consulting Scholars: What image of herself does Didion create? David Littlejohn Additional readings University of California, Joan Didion. Play It As It Lays, 1970. Berkeley Joan Didion. The White Album, 1979. Tom Wolfe. The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, 1968. Marta E. Sanchez University of California, San Diego Kevin Starr California State Library, Sacramento StoryLines America is supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities and administered by the American Library Association to expand American understanding of human experience and cultural heritage. Additional support from Barnes & Noble StoryLines ©1999 American Library Association America A Radio/Library Partnership Exploring Our Regional Literature Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion Joan Didion was born in 1934 in the Sacramento Valley, where in the 1960s appeared to be ripping at the seams, especially in husband largely because he no longer provided her with the her ancestors had settled almost a century earlier during the Haight-Ashbury District of San Francisco, where anti- affluent lifestyle she had been promised in California. Didion the Gold Rush era. She attended the University of California, establishment rhetoric and the drug dependent lifestyles of interviews a professional radical in “Comrade Laski, C.P.U.S.A. Berkeley, in the 1950s, and later lived in New York and wrote the “Hippie” movement were centered. “If I was to work again (M.-L.),” exposing his political aspirations as obsessive and for various magazines. The 20 essays gathered in Slouching at all,” Didion concluded, “it would be necessary for me to delusional, “doomed commitments” with which he filled the Towards Bethlehem originally appeared in The Saturday come to terms with disorder.” void.

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