JOHN STEINBECK: THE GRAPES OF WRATH [1959].

Description

We present the second Polish edition of the masterpiece of American literature – ” The Grapes of Wrath” (original title: The Grapes of Wrath) by John Steinbeck (1902-1968), winner of the Pulitzer Prize (1940) and the Nobel Prize for Literature (1962) . It was published in 1959 in Warsaw by the State Publishing Institute (PIW) in the prestigious series “Novels of the 20th Century” .

The novel, first published in 1939 , is a realistic, harrowing portrayal of the fate of an American farm family during the Great Depression and the “Dust Bowl” – a catastrophic drought that hit the Great Plains in the 1930s . The Joad family, deprived of their land in Oklahoma by banks and changes in the agricultural industry, sets off in a run-down truck along Route 66 to California, the promised land where, according to yellow flyers, jobs and a decent life await . The journey, fraught with death and disappointment, becomes a universal tale of the struggle for dignity, the solidarity of the poor, the strength of family ties and how “clusters of anger grow in the hearts of the exploited and hopeless” .

To gather material for the novel, Steinbeck employed himself as a farm laborer in California, sharing the hardships of life with poor farmers, and published his reports in the San Francisco News under the title “The Harvest Gypsies.” In a letter to a friend, he wrote: “There are five thousand families there facing death by starvation […] I have been associated with this cause from the very beginning, and I must go to the place to see if I can do something here to smash the heads of these murderers”.

This is the second edition translated by Alfred Liebfeld (the first was published in 1956) , belonging to the sought-after by collectors PIW series “Novels of the 20th Century” with a cover designed by Ewa Frysztak . The presented copy is clean and preserved in very good condition, which is a rarity for a widely read book. This is a must-have for a collector of world literature, a lover of Steinbeck’s prose and a bibliophile looking for a representative edition of one of the most important works of American social realism.

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