Grapes Scholarship

Question 1

Melvyn Bragg the book

Answer 1

‘it was as if he had transplanted himself into another class, and into areas of passion and politics he had only observed before.’

Question 2

Steinbeck about his book

Answer 2

‘I want to put a tag of shame on the greedy bastards who are responsible for this.’

Question 3

Arthur Miller about the book

Answer 3

‘I can’t think of another American writer…who so deeply penetrated the political life of the country.’

Question 4

Steinbeck as a communist

Answer 4

‘a Jew acting for Zionist-Communist interests’

Question 5

Peter Monro Jack the whole novel

Answer 5

1939: ‘as pitiful and angry a novel ever to be written about America’

Question 6

Peter Monro Jack California

Answer 6

‘this part of the story reads like news from Nazi Germany’ ‘they live in what might as well be called concentration camps’

Question 7

Malcolm Cowley

Answer 7

1939: ‘What one remembers most of all is Steinbeck’s sympathy for the migrants’

Question 8

Matt Lewis

Answer 8

‘warm-hearted celebration of the persistence of the human spirit.’

Question 9

Crockett

Answer 9

‘not a promised land, but a blighted Eden’

Question 10

Motley

Answer 10

‘Joad family shifts from a patriarchal structure to a predominantly matriarchal one.’

Question 11

Spangler

Answer 11

‘Steinbeck has smashed the notions of the American Dream’