Steinbeck, Marx, O'Shaughnessy, Faulkner

Grapes of Wrath Marches On March 14, 2011 On this day in 1939, John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath was published. Although Steinbeck believed that he had succeeded in his "very grave attempt to do a first-rate piece of work," he was convinced that his "revolutionary" book would be unpopular for political reasons, and he tried to dissuade his publisher from having a large first printing. [full story] Please use these links when purchasing books (or anything else): Amazon Books The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes. Karl Marx died on this day in 1883. Above, the opening to The Communist Manifesto; below, the sort of passage from The Grapes of Wrath that made Steinbeck and his novel a capitalist-socialist battleground; and right, "The Departure of the Joads," by the "Regionalist" American painter, Thomas Hart Benton. The painting was commissioned by Twentieth Century Fox for the 1940 film, and now is at the Art Institute of Chicago. One man, one family driven from the land; this rusty car creaking along the highway to the west. I lost my land, a single tractor took my land. I am alone and I am bewildered. And in the night one family camps in a ditch and another family pulls in and the tents come out. The two men squat on their hams and the women and children listen. Here is the node, you who hate change and fear revolution. Keep these two squatting men apart; make them hate, fear, suspect each other…. We are the music makers, And we are the dreamers of dreams, Wandering by lone sea-breakers, And sitting by desolate streams;— World-losers and world-forsakers, On whom the pale moon gleams: Yet we are the movers and shakers Of the world forever, it seems…. Above, the opening lines of "Ode," by British poet Arthur O'Shaughnessy, who was born on this day in 1844. The poem gave "movers and shakers" to the language, and inspired a host of musicians and writers, from Elgar's Opus 69 to Roald Dahl's Willy Wonka and beyond; go here for a brief video introduction to O'Shaughnessy, one which makes many of the music & movie connections to his most famous poem. William Faulkner fractured his collarbone in a fall from his horse on this day in 1959. This was the first of a series of similar falls over his last few years, more than one of them alcohol-related, say the biographers. Faulkner had a lifelong passion for horses, and in 1955 he attended the Kentucky Derby on behalf of Sports Illustrated. His resulting article, "Kentucky: May: Saturday," is collected in the magazine's Fifty Years of Great Writingissue; below, the opening sentence: This saw Boone: the bluegrass, the virgin land rolling westward wave by dense wave from the Allegheny gaps, unmarked then, teeming with deer and buffalo about the salt licks and the limestone springs whose water in time would make the fine bourbon whiskey; and the wild men too--the red men and the white ones too who had to be a little wild also to endure and survive and so mark the wilderness with the proofs of their tough survival--Boonesborough, Owenstown, Harrod's and Harbuck's Stations; Kentucky: the dark and bloody ground.   Thanks to