Includes index.

The Grapes of Wrath, published in 1930 and considered by many to be John Steinbeck's crowning literary achievement, is a powerful and evocative examination of the lives of the working class during the Great Depression. It is the story of the Joads, a family of Oklahoma tenant farmers on a quest for a better life, as they head west to California where they become migratory workers. Steinbeck's compassionate and stark storytelling earned The Grapes of Wrath a Pulitzer Prize and helped to solidify Steinbeck's literary reputation. For more than sixty years, The Grapes of Wrath has achieved popular and critical support, and continues to be widely read
More than any other American novel, it successfully embodies a contemporary social problem of national scope in an artistically viable expression. It is unquestionably John Steinbeck's finest achievement, a work of literary genius.

In this novel, with the Bible very much in mind, Steinbeck sets out to expose the fatal dangers of the American myth of a new Eden, and to illuminate a path toward a new consciousness of commitment instead of displacement. VIVA MODERN CRITICAL INTERPRETATIONS presents the best current criticism on the most widely read and studied poems, novels and dramas of the Western world, from Oedipus Rex and the Iliad to such modern and contemporary works as William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury and Don Delillo's White Noise.