Working Days: The Journal of the Grapes of Wrath draws our attention to some of the reasons for Steinbeck’s success. Tainted only by Steinbeck’s tendency to describe his characters’ virtues instead of dramatizing them, his somewhat shallow proselytizing for collective action and the ending in which Rose of Sharon offers the starving stranger her breast, which has always struck this reader as portentous and off-key, the book retains to an impressive degree its power to convey how the plight of the Dust Bowl migrants was the tragedy of an entire social class as well as that of the Joad family. The Grapes of Wrath holds up remarkably well. To celebrate the 50th anniversary of the publication of John Steinbeck’s masterpiece, The Grapes of Wrath, Viking Press has brought out a new edition of the novel with an introduction by Studs Terkel, as well as Working Days, a diary kept by Steinbeck while he wrote his Depression epic of tenant farmers making their slow and painful way from the Oklahoma Dust Bowl to the migrant labor camps of California.
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