April 14, 1939: John Steinbeck Publishes "The Grapes of Wrath"

April 14, 1939: John Steinbeck, already the author of books such as Tortilla Flat and Of Mice and Men, publishes The Grapes of Wrath, establishing him as the finest American writer of his generation -- a generation that included F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway.

John Ernst Steinbeck Jr. was born on February 27, 1902 in Salinas, California, about 100 miles south of San Francisco. Salinas and nearby Monterey were immigrant communities, and the way he wrote about them made the characters seem very familiar to people in other immigrant communities: Even if they weren't of the same ethnicity, they could identify, and empathize, with these people.

The Grapes of Wrath tells of the Joad family of rural Oklahoma. The Great Depression hit America's farmers hard. In 1935, the Dust Bowl clobbered the Great Plains, and made things even worse. Thousands of "Okies" -- and also "Arkies" from neighboring Arkansas -- packed up whatever they could, and headed west to California, in the hopes of working in the farms, fields and fruit orchards of "the Golden State."

But when they got there, they found that life was no better. The farms were already part of what would become known as "agribusiness," and if you weren't a foreman, you had no power, and you were treated like garbage. And the United Farm Workers union wouldn't be founded until 1962. And California turns out to be one of the few places in America that is oversupplied with labor, so wages are low.

Tom and Casy, the Joad sons, get jobs, but find out that they're strikebreakers -- the hard way. Casy is beaten to death by the strikers, and Tom avenges his brother by killing the killer. He has to go on the run, and as he leaves, he tells his mother that he will work for the oppressed.

The book won Steinbeck the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, but sympathizing with labor got Steinbeck labeled a Communist by ignorant people.

The novel was filmed in 1940, with Henry Fonda as Tom. His final speech became legend:

I'll be all around in the dark. I'll be everywhere. Wherever you can look, wherever there's a fight, so hungry people can eat, I'll be there. Wherever there's a cop beatin' up a guy, I'll be there. I'll be in the way guys yell when they're mad. I'll be in the way kids laugh when they're hungry and they know supper's ready, and when the people are eatin' the stuff they raise and livin' in the houses they build. I'll be there, too.  

Steinbeck would go on to write several more books, including the novels Cannery Row, East of Eden and The Winter of Our Discontent; and the non-fiction Travels with Charley: In Search of America. He died on December 20, 1968, at the age of 66.

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April 14, 1939 was a Friday. Baseball season didn't start for another 3 days. Football was out of season. The NBA hadn't been founded yet. And it was an off-day in the Stanley Cup Finals, which the Boston Bruins would win 2 days later, beating the Toronto Maple Leafs in 5 games. So there were no games on this historic day.