Celebrate May Day with this passage from “Grapes of Wrath,” which emphasizes how vital work is to our sense of self respect.
As I waited for the cop to write me a ticket, I glanced through Steinbeck’s “The Pearl.”
Steinbeck reminds us that it is not only people of color who have had their voting rights infringed.
Life today is a far cry from the Great Depression, but Steinbeck’s “Grapes of Wrath” is still relevant.
The Harbaughs’ Super Bowl Rivalry brings to mind the sibling rivalry in Steinbeck’s “East of Eden.”
Steinbeck and the Beowulf poet both point out that piling up wealth does not lead to happiness.
Depending on your point of view, literature reduced to tweets is either comic or horrifying.
Also posted in Austen (Jane), Flaubert (Gustave), Forster (E.M.), Kafka (Franz), Milton (John), Proust (Marcel), Salinger (J. D.) | Tagged Catcher in the Rye, E. M. Forster, Franz Kafka, Gustave Flaubert, Howards End, In Search of Lost Time, J. D. Salinger, Jane Austen, John Milton, John Steinbeck, Madame Bovary, Marcel Proust, Metamorphosis, Of Mice and Men, Paradise Lost, Pride and Prejudice, Trial |
Economics teacher Steve Ziliak uses Steinbeck’s “Grapes of Wrath” to teach the human side of microeconomics.
Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath” allows us to see some of the dynamics that the tough new anti-immigration law in Alabama has set into play.
Two images came to mind as I twice watched the Japanese soccer team rebound from deficits. One was from Alain’s Renais’s film “Hiroshima Mon Amour” where we see grass clawing its way back in the city streets on the day following the atom bomb. The other was of the tortoise crossing the road in “Grapes of Wrath.”
Yet having nothing, the Joads still share. In the final scene of The Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck taps into the legend of “Roman Charity” where a daughter breastfeeds her starving father. In this case, however, Rose of Sharon feeds a starving stranger. A new human family is rising out of the ashes of the old.
My novelist friend Rachel Kranz recently sent me an article by novelist William Kennedy about John Steinbeck’s self-doubts as a writer. She herself has been wrestling with self-doubts, even though she has a completed manuscript of what I think is a remarkable work, and the article lets her know that she is not alone. It [...]
