Obscene in the Extreme
The Burning and Banning of John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath
By Rick Wartzman
(PublicAffairs, Paperback, 9781586487676, 320pp.)
Publication Date: September 2009
Other Editions of This Title: Google eBook, Paperback, Hardcover
Categories: American - General, Censorship, General
 |     |
Few books have caused as big a stir as John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, when it was published in April 1939. By May, it was the nation’s No. 1 bestseller, flying off store shelves at a rate of 10,000 copies a week. But in Kern County, California—the Joads’ newfound home—the book was burned publicly and banned from library shelves. Obscene in the Extreme tells the remarkable story behind that fit of censorship, a moment when several lives collided as part of a larger class struggle roiling the nation. It is a superb historical narrative that serves as an engaging window into an extraordinary time of upheaval in America, when as Steinbeck put it, “A revolution is going on.”
Rick Wartzman is the Director of the Drucker Institute at Claremont Graduate University in California and a fellow of the New America Foundation. He is the co-author, with Mark Arax, of The King of California: J.G. Boswell and the Making of a Secret American Empire.
 |
1Q84 Haruki Murakami Knopf |
 |
The Marriage Plot Jeffrey Eugenides Farrar, Straus, and Giroux |
 |
The Sense of an Ending Julian Barnes Knopf |
 |
Death Comes to Pemberley PD James Knopf |
