Anniversary of “The Grapes of Wrath”

Grapes Wrath 75 John Steinbeck‘s novel The Grapes of Wrath was published on April 14, 1939. The book, which recounts the struggles of the tenant farmers Joad family moving from Oklahoma to California, went on to win the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. It also helped Steinbeck win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1962. Steinbeck’s book seeped into popular culture, aided by a great John Ford movie as well as songs.

Less than a year after the novel’s publication, 20th Century Fox released John Ford’s vision of The Grapes of Wrath in January 1940. The film starred Henry Fonda, Jane Darwell, and John Carradine, and it contained some differences from the book, and in particular the ending.

While the book was written as an indictment of the greed that led to the Great Depression, the conservative Ford maintained some elements of that vision while also giving the story a somewhat more optimistic ending. The Grapes of Wrath thus became one of those instances where a novel and its movie version both attained greatness even with some significant differences.

The film would go on to inspire others. In particular, the speech by Tom Joad (Fonda) would inspire both Woody Guthrie and Bruce Springsteen to write songs. Check out our post about the story behind Guthrie’s “Tom Joad,” a song written at the request of a record company during an all-night session after Pete Seeger helped Guthrie find a typewriter.

Bruce Springsteen used his stark “The Ghost of Tom Joad” as the title track of his somber 1995 album. In 2014, though, he released a new version of the song on High Hopes that features the raging angry guitar of Tom Morello, highlighting the defiance in Tom Joad’s speech. While Springsteen’s original acoustic version captures the sadness of the novel, his rock version of the song might be more comparable to John Ford’s vision. Check out this performance featuring Springsteen, Morello, and the E Street Band from Allphones Area in Sydney, Australia from March 2013.

What is your favorite version of “The Grapes of Wrath”? Leave your two cents in the comments.

  • Tom Joad’s Inspiration
  • Mumford & Sons Join Elvis Costello on “Ghost of Tom Joad”
  • The Heroic Death of Folksinger Victor Jara
  • Watch Night, Emancipation, and “Mary Don’t You Weep”
  • Tell Me, What Were Their Names?
  • The Killing of “Two Good Men”
  • (Some related Chimesfreedom posts.)

    Interview with Richard Fulco, Author of “There Is No End to This Slope”

    Richard Fulco Richard Fulco’s new novel, There Is No End to This Slope, is out today. We are excited about the new book from Fulco, who is the founding editor of the wonderful online music magazine Riffraf. The novel, published by Wampus Multimedia, tells the story of John Lenza, a struggling writer haunted by the death of a woman who was his best friend.

    Before we get to your upcoming novel, tell our readers a little bit about yourself.

    I’m a New Yorker who has a vehement love/hate relationship with his hometown. I moved (not very far) to Montclair, New Jersey but occasionally dream of moving back home. I’ve been a singer, electrical apprentice, high school English teacher and playwright. Now, I’m a father of twins, founder/editor of Riffraf.net (a music blog) and my debut novel There Is No End to This Slope is being published by Wampus Multimedia.

    That’s a lot on your plate. What made you decide to write There Is No End to This Slope?

    I never consciously decided to write a novel. In 2005, I wrote a bunch of poems and a one-act play that were based on a full-length play I had in the New York Fringe Festival. My harrowing experience at the Fringe was enough to send me into hibernation where I embarked on the novel, which took seven years to write. After two years of teaching myself how to write a longer work, I committed to the project and slogged away. I’m still not sure that I know how to write a novel.

    I think many writers would agree with you about the writing process. Where did you come up with the idea for There Is No End to This Slope?

    Have you ever consciously made a poor decision, knowing full well that the outcome would be disastrous? I made so many of them from 2002-2007 that it had become a lifestyle.

    I think that is a part of life and growing. From the description of the book, the novel seems to address some important themes about death and loss. Have any other books influenced how you think about those issues?

    A partial list of works that influenced the writing of There is No End to This Slope includes: Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, Michael Thomas’ Man Gone Down, Frederick Exley’s A Fan’s Notes, Charles Bukowski’s Post Office, J.M. Coetzee’s Waiting For the Barbarians, Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer, Samuel Bekett’s Waiting for Godot and Endgame, Harold Pinter’s Birthday Party, Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis and The Castle, Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road, Joshua Ferris’ Until We Came to the End, William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, the poetry of Robert Desnos, the songs of Lennon and McCartney, George Harrison, Jeff Tweedy, Bob Dylan, Paul Westerberg, Jagger and Richards, Otis Redding, Stevie Wonder and Lou Reed.

    That’s a great list. And we have seen some of those artists discussed on your music blog at RiffRaf. Did your work on the blog influence There Is No End to This Slope in any way?

    I can’t escape music. It’s what sustains me. Well, a good book excites me too, but nothing gets my juices flowing like a great guitar riff or drum fill or lyric.

    The novel’s protagonist, John Lenza, played guitar for a short-lived band in high school. As an adult, his guitar sits in its case inside a closet, buried underneath boxes of his wife’s journals just gathering dust. Depressing, isn’t it?

    Yeah. Unfortunately, that happens a lot to musicians as they grow older and get overwhelmed with life’s other demands. I’m interested to see how it comes out in the novel. Where will we find the book when it comes out?

    Amazon and other fine stores.

    I look forward to reading it. Finally, I’m always interested in the writing process. While writing your novel, how did you balance other commitments? Did you follow a set schedule or work on the book as you found time?

    While I was teaching, I wrote mostly at night and on the weekends. When my twins were born, I had to be more flexible. I wrote in the morning, during their afternoon nap and when they went to bed.

    Thank you for your time Richard, and good luck with the novel. We look forward to reading it.

    A Christmas Carol: Dickens, Edison, Sim, and the Fonz

    Charles DickensOn December 17, 1843, London publishing house Chapman & Hall published a novella called A Christmas Carol. In Prose. Being a Ghost Story of Christmas.  The novella, by Charles Dickens, would become a classic.

    Charles Dickens had already found success from writing projects, including The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club (1836), Oliver Twist (1838) and Nicholas Nickleby (1839). His new book, which he only started writing three months earlier in September 1843, was an immediate success, and many today credit it with reviving Christmas traditions in Victorian England.

    We now know the book simply as A Christmas Carol. While it may seem odd that a book about ghosts would become a Christmas classic (instead of a Halloween story), Dickens was not the only one telling yuletide ghost stories. In Victorian England, it was a tradition to tell ghost stories around the fire on Christmas Eve. I guess many places still have that tradition, but it is now called, “watching A Christmas Carol on television.”

    Adaptations of “A Christmas Carol”

    Soon after the novella was published, people began adapting the story for theater productions. Dickens himself often gave readings of the book throughout his lifetime.

    As technology changed, there were adaptations for radio and screens. Thomas Edison created an early silent version of the story in 1910.

    One of the most famous movie versions of the book — and the most highly regarded in many quarters — is 1951’s Scrooge, starring Alastair Sim. Sim, who was born in Edinburgh in 1900 and starred in a number of projects on stage and screen before his death in 1976, had the perfect voice and face for Mr. Scrooge.

    And now with modern technology, we can add the tradition of watching Scrooge on the Internet.

    Other famous versions of the movie feature George C. Scott, Jim Carrey, and Albert Finney as Scrooge. The Alistair Sim one remains my favorite.

    An American Christmas Carol

    But I must admit I have a soft spot for a 1979 made-for-television movie called An American Christmas Carol, starring Fonzie himself, Henry Winkler as the Scrooge character named Benedict Slade.

    Maybe I was at an impressionable age when I first saw An American Christmas Carol. Or maybe I liked the way it put a new twist on an old story by setting it during the Depression in New England.

    You also may watch An American Christmas Carol below.

    No matter who is your favorite Scrooge, may the future find that it always be said of him (or her), “that he knew how to keep Christmas well, if any man alive possessed the knowledge. May that be truly said of us, and all of us! And so, as Tiny Tim observed, God bless Us, Every One!”

    What is your favorite version of A Christmas Carol? Leave your two cents in the comments.

  • Mork and Happier Days
  • Happy Days on Love, American Style
  • What Holiday Film Featured a Kidnapping?: Christmas Movie Quiz
  • ‘Fairytale of New York’ at Shane MacGowan’s funeral
  • With Glowing Hearts: “O Holy Night” By John Denver
  • There Will Be Another Christmas
  • (Some related Chimesfreedom posts.)

    Stephen King’s 11/22/63 (Short Review)

    11/22/63 A number of television shows and movies have commemorated the anniversary of the death of President John F. Kennedy. PBS recently broadcast a new documentary in its American Experience series, JFK. The two-part examination of Kennedy’s life featured some new footage and it brought new understanding about Kennedy’s health problems. CNN’s The Assassination of President Kennedy is a fascinating portrayal of the events around the killing using a lot of archival footage I had never seen before (see video below). Meanwhile, the National Geographic Channel presented a dramatization of the period leading up to the assassination with its TV-movie version of Bill O’Reilly’s book, Killing Kennedy, which one might find superficial but still entertaining. While some have wondered if popular culture is overdoing the commemoration of the national tragedy of our president’s death, I found a quiet way to contemplate the anniversary by reading a novel related to the event: Stephen King‘s 11/22/63.

    The novel explores a famous what-if question about “what if you could go back and time and prevent a horrible event from happening?” In 11/22/63, the narrator is Jake Epping, a high school English teacher in Maine who learns from his friend Al about a time portal that will take him back to 1958. With some experimentation, Jake and Al discuss whether one may change the past and how the world might have been different had Lee Harvey Oswald not killed Kennedy. What happens if history is changed? Can it be changed? And what if Oswald was not the person who killed Kennedy?

    As King explains in his “Afterword,” he did a significant amount of research about Oswald, and the book is informative about the main players we associate with the events leading up to the assassination. But the book is more than a novel about a killing. King provides an interesting portrayal of life in America in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The protagonist of the novel is not Oswald or Kennedy but Jake Epping, and it is his life that fascinates us. Epping becomes the focal point in the context of major world events while King meditates on the fragility of both life and history. The book is long, but it is fast reading, and it is Jake’s story that makes it a page-turner that you cannot put down.

    Conclusion? 11/22/63 is a fun read that also asks some big questions. And while enjoying the book you might learn a little bit along the way. Earlier this year it was reported that the novel may be made into a TV series or miniseries, but the book is so fun you should read it. In the meantime, below you may check out part one and part two of CNN’s The Assassination of President Kennedy.


    The Assassination of President Kennedy CNN… by VidsnMore


    The Assassination of President Kennedy CNN… by VidsnMore

    What is your favorite historical novel? Leave your two cents in the comments.

  • Trailer for “11.22.63” Stephen King Miniseries
  • John F. Kennedy Inauguration and Robert Frost
  • Anybody Here Seen My Old Friend John?
  • Dylan Releases “Murder Most Foul”
  • RFK (and Aeschylus) on MLK Assassination
  • Harry Shearer’s New Series on Richard Nixon
  • What Comic Strips Influenced “Calvin and Hobbes”?

    Krazy Kat
    The documentary Dear Mr. Watterson (2013) opens this week in theaters and on video on demand. The documentary about the great comic strip Calvin and Hobbes and its creator Bill Watterson is directed by Joel Allen Schroeder. To promote the movie, which started as a Kickstarter project, the filmmakers have released this interesting clip that examines three comic strips that apparently influenced Watterson and Calvin and Hobbes. Check it out.

    As you can see from the clip, we do not have the reclusive Watterson, who remains protective of his creation and still refuses to license products related to the comic. So other commentators explain the comic strips whose influences they see in Calvin and Hobbes. The three influences discussed in the clip are Walt Kelly’s Pogo, Charles M. Schulz’s Peanuts, and George Herriman’s Krazy Kat. If you want more on Watterson, check out his recent rare interview on Mental Floss.

    What is your favorite Calvin and Hobbes strip? Leave your two cents in the comments.

  • Calvin and Hobbes: The Movie?
  • Charlie Brown Returns to the Big Screen
  • “We’ve Got Another Holiday to Worry About”
  • A Charlie Brown Christmas Reunion: Charlie, Charlie, Charlie, Charleeeee
  • When Is My Favorite Holiday Special or Film on TV?
  • (Some related Chimesfreedom posts.)