A RECESSION ONLY STEINBECK COULD LOVE

Rachel Dry in the Washington Post

“There’s nothing like a Great Recession to make people want to read about the Great Depression.

Seventy years after John Steinbeck published his best-selling tale of the Joad family’s journey from Oklahoma to California along Route 66, “The Grapes of Wrath,” required reading that never really went out of style, is suddenly in high demand….

Rereading Steinbeck today — not the compassionate chronicler of human struggle Steinbeck of the 1930s but the cantankerous social critic Steinbeck of the 1950s and ’60s — is a little eerie. If only we’d listened to him, we might not have spent our way in to the current crisis. Of course, in the aftermath of disaster, anyone who punctured enthusiasms with vague harbingers of doom can seem retroactively brilliant. But listen to Steinbeck on the American obsession with things: “If I wanted to destroy a nation, I would give it too much and I would have it on its knees, miserable, greedy and sick.”

At the end of his career, Steinbeck’s main subject was his extreme distaste for materialism in America, which he explored in a novel and two works of non-fiction: In 1961, he published a postwar morality tale called “The Winter of our Discontent,” in which fraud rocks a family ensconced on the ladder of suburban ascension. Shortly after he finished it, he set out across the country in a specially outfitted camper truck, accompanied by his French poodle, for the trip that became “Travels With Charley in Search of America.” He followed that with a 1966 book of essays called “America and Americans.”

Those are the three books we should really be reading now. “Grapes” might have the economic hardships, but these titles have it all: apathy, greed, moral decay, a dissection of an America gone soft. Read More