Books

1939. New York: Viking. 1939. 8vo. Original tan pictorial cloth with dust wrapper displaying '$2.75' and 'First edition', endpapers with reproduction of the Battle Hymn of the Republic; pp. 619; dustwrapper with minimal wear to the corners, a little toning to edges, a couple of spots of browning, generally very good indeed. First edition. Steinbeck's masterpiece and literature's lasting testament to the Great Depression, it won the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize and was singled-out as a "great work…[an] epic chronicle" in his citation for the Nobel Prize in 1962. This book is one of the great American novels, the travails of Tom Joad and his family struggling through the Depression in the Dust Bowl having become legendary. The book has inspired films, plays, operas and popular music but nothing compares to the stripped back beauty of Steinbeck's prose; "To the red country and part of the gray country of Oklahoma, the last rains came gently, and they did not cut the…

The Grapes of Wrath, written by John Steinbeck, is a powerful novel depicting the struggles of the Joad family during the Great Depression as they journey from Oklahoma to California in search of a better life.