The Grapes of Wrath

"In The Grapes of Wrath , every other chapter is a description, a metaphor, prose poetry, it’s not plot…I subconsciously borrowed that structure from Steinbeck when I wrote The Martian Chronicles ."

"One day, I just picked it up and started reading it. Guys at school didn’t believe I was really reading it but I was. I found it hard to put down."

"A powerful introduction to the Depression years."

"This was another book I read when I was in London doing the musical Oklahoma! with Trevor Nunn, who loves to think of everything in naturalistic terms. Oklahoma! is set about 20 years before The Grapes of Wrath . It shows American farm life before the Dust Bowl, and The Grapes of Wrath , obviously, is what came next. I was mesmerized by Tom Joad. He’s living a very egocentric life at the beginning of the novel, but along his family’s arduous trip to California, he is transformed into someone..."

"Novels that set out to describe grand historical events sometimes struggle with scale: too big, and they lose the particular, the personal; too small, and they lose the immensity, the connectedness of all things. Steinbeck describes the experience of migrating ‘Okies’ during the Depression, and makes you weep on both scales."

"Recommended by Mike McCready ."