STEINBECK, John. The Grapes of Wrath.

In the Iconic Dust-Jacket

STEINBECK, John. The Grapes of Wrath. New York: Viking. 1939.

8vo. Original buff pictorial cloth decorated in brown, spine lettered in brown, top-edge yellow, in the unclipped dust-jacket by Elmer Hader, front flap priced $2.75, illustrated endpapers with reproduction of the ‘Battle Hymn of the Republic’; pp. [6], 619, [1 (blank)]; minimal wear to corners of jacket, light vertical crease to front panel, a few small nicks to spine ends of jacket, cloth with a few small spots and small dampstain to foot of spine; a little toning to edges, a couple of spots (mostly to outer margin of pp. 465–71), not affecting text; otherwise near fine.

First edition, first printing, in the iconic dust-jacket designed by Elmer Hader, scarce in such fine condition.

Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath is among the great American novels of the twentieth century, its portrayal of the Joad family’s struggle for survival amid the upheavals of the Great Depression giving enduring literary form to one of the defining crises of modern American history. The dedication to Steinbeck’s first wife, Carol Henning, closes with the words ‘who willed it’, recognising a debt that extended well beyond personal encouragement. Carol’s interest in the families uprooted by drought in the Great Plains helped bring their plight to Steinbeck’s attention; she also typed and edited the manuscript, and devised its title, taken from Julia Ward Howe’s ‘Battle Hymn of the Republic’, reprinted on the endpapers. Steinbeck brought the novel to completion in October 1938, after months of intense work, confessing to his former roommate Carl Wilhelmson that that ‘this book was a terrible amount of work. [I] Never worked so hard in my life nor so long before’ (Wagner-Martin, p. 60).

The response to the book was immediate. By its publication on 14 April 1939, advance orders had already accounted for nearly 20,000 copies, and demand prompted further printings even before the novel reached the public. Within weeks, sales had risen to 10,000 copies a week; 430,000 copies were printed in its first year. The novel went on to receive both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, and its place in Steinbeck’s wider achievement was affirmed by the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1962. John Ford’s celebrated screen adaptation, starring Henry Fonda, appeared in January 1940, as the novel reached its eleventh printing. It has never subsequently fallen out of print.

The book’s lasting power lies as much in the clarity of Steinbeck’s prose as in its social vision. From the opening image of rain falling upon the damaged Oklahoma earth, the landscape itself becomes a measure of hardship, endurance and change: ‘To the red country and part of the gray country of Oklahoma, the last rains came gently, and they did not cut the scarred earth’. The Joads’ journey has inspired adaptations across film, theatre, opera and popular music, but the novel’s unadorned eloquence remains distinctive, giving a single family’s ordeal the scale of a national tragedy. The novel won both the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize and was singled-out as a ‘great work…[an] epic chronicle’ in Steinbeck’s citation for the Nobel Prize in 1962.

Steinbeck specifically requested Elmer Hader for the iconic dust-jacket design, having admired his illustrations for Billy Butter (1936). Hader, whose work was chiefly devoted to children’s books, would later share the Caldecott Medal with his wife, Berta, in 1948. When opened out, the jacket reveals Tom Joad from behind, looking towards a procession of battered vehicles crossing the landscape beneath distant blue mountains. Its broad, receding vista evokes both the scale of the migrants’ journey and the uncertainty of what lies ahead.

The copyright page states ‘FIRST PUBLISHED IN APRIL 1939’, without any reference to subsequent printings (Goldstone & Payne A12a.)

Goldstone & Payne A12a; Wagner-Martin, John Steinbeck: A Literary Life (2017).

SKU: 2120571