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Analysis of John Steinbeck
The grapes of wrath
The grapes of wrath
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Cannery Row
Cannery Row by John Steinbeck is a post World War I piece written with a mixture of humor and sadness about the lives of the residents of Cannery Row, a street in Monterey California. The story opens in a messy grocery store run by a Chinese man named Lee Chong. The one room store is described like so "while not a model of neatness, was a miracle of supply... clothes, food, both fresh and canned, liquor, tobacco, fishing equipment, machinery, boats, cordage, caps, pork chops, slippers, and a silk kimono" and last but certainly not least whiskey, could all be purchased. All of the whiskeys had names like "Old" Tennessee and were at least four months old. Our casts of characters have nicknamed the cheapest whiskey "Old Tennis Shoe". Lee Chong is a good man who has the respect of the town. He manages to be respected by the entire town, while most of the town was in his financial debt. Debt would rise for many people who shopped at Lee's, because he would trust consumers "until further trust would be ridiculous".
From this beginning comes a cast of characters long and detailed, making the book and the street come alive. Turning to the next page was not a chore but a leap into another person's woes and prospers. We meet men like Horace Abbeville who's summarized tale is one that begins with debt, which Horace pays off with a shack he owned that housed fishmeal. After Lee Chong agreed to this arrangement, Mr. Abbeville sauntered up the long trails to this shack and shot him self in the head, leaving his wife and children sad and confused. Lee had not pressured Horace for payment he had only suspended Horace's credit. Lee felt badly about Horace's suicide and always watched out for Horace's family.
Lee's new ownership of Horace's shack leads us to the introduction of Mack and the boys. Mack twists Lee's arm to allow them to stay in the fishmeal shack now called the Palace Flophouse and Grill. Mack and the boys are men who very well could go off and do something with themselves. Instead, Mack and the boys would sit around drinking Old Tennis Shoe, getting into trouble whenever possible.
When times get tough, many people turn away from everyone and everything. It must be part of human nature to adopt an independent attitude when faced with troubles. It is understandable because most people do not want to trouble their loved ones when they are going through problems, so it is easier to turn away than stick together. Maybe their family is going through a rough patch and they reason they would be better off on their own. This path of independence and solitude may not always be the best option for them or their family, though. Often times it is more beneficial for everyone to work through the problem together. It is not always the easiest or most desirable option, but most times it is the most efficient and it will get results in the long run. In The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck makes this point very clear through several characters. Many characters throughout
In today’s society everyone strives to be successful. Society portrays the idea that success is getting a job and being rich. In Cannery Row however, Steinbeck goes against the idea of how society depicts success and suggests that it may be something else. We can see it through his writing style and characters that success really is more than just money, and more geared to how you see yourself. A successful individual is one who views themself as successful by not giving in to cultural stereotypes, not caring how others perceive you, and by being content with the effort you put into something.
I. John Steinbeck used his personal experiences as a laborer to write many of his novels like Of Mice and Men and The Grapes of Wrath.
John Steinbeck was perhaps the best author of all time. He was the winner of a Nobel Prize, and among other accomplishments, Steinbeck published nineteen novels and made many movies during his lifetime. All of his experience and knowledge are shown through his novels. A reader can tell, just in reading a novel by Steinbeck, that he had been through a lot throughout his life. Also, Steinbeck worked very hard to accomplish everything that he did during his lifetime. Nothing came very easily to him, and he had to earn everything he owned. This helped him in his writing, because he was able to write about real people and real experiences. John Steinbeck got his inspiration from life experiences, people he knew, and places he had gone.
Maybe it's more important to be appreciated than to be wealthy. Cannery Row by John Steinbeck (1945) is one of the most unique of all of the Nobel Prize winning novels. Cannery Row is set in a very poor area of California known as Monterey. It is a small port town south of San Francisco. The time era is post Depression and World War II. The novel is about how lower class people with warm hearts have the ability to create their own heaven on earth. The novel starts out with a group of people known as Mack and the boys. None of these men have jobs, and they all live in a small shack at the end of town. Mack and the boys want to do something nice for their loving friend Doc. Doc is a simple man who lives for the simple pleasures in life. He would do anything to help out his friends, and they feel that they should return the favor. Doc owns a fish supply house in the middle of Cannery Row. He works hard each and every day to keep his supply house up and running. Doc gets his supplies from and becomes very good friends with Lee Ch...
The stories, novels, films and photographs surrounding the Dust Bowl crisis and the Vietnam War have been marred with various issues about historical reconstructions. Whereas historical critics have raised questions about the real cause of migration of south westerners during the Dust Bowl crisis, their representatives have given conflicting accounts on the events surrounding the Odyssey. Steinbeck, in his book, The Grapes of Wrath, explains that the migration of farmers from Oklahoma was caused by the harsh drought that followed the Dust Bowl Odyssey (Davidson & Lytle, 2009a). On the other hand, critics argue that the findings are not based on statistics. According to historians, novelists like Steinbeck normally base their historical stories on exaggeration and should rely on facts and statistics. For example, the number of farmers who migrated into California is exaggerated. When James Gregory, a current historian, went through the Census Bureau statistics, he found out that only 43% of people living in Oklahoma were farmers during the Dust Bowl crisis. According to historical critics, other causes for the migration might have been the agricultural reorganization and mechanization, as portrayed by a tractor in The Grapes of Wrath.
Maggie and Jimmie, siblings whom Cranes uses as protagonists, live in deplorable and violent conditions. The setting is America West, during the industrialization era. The change from agricultural to industrial economy led to many casualties, including Maggie and Jimmie’s parents. They found themselves in periphery of economic edifice where poverty was rampant. Now alcoholics, they are incapable of offering parental care and support to their children. This leaves the children at the mercies of a violent, vain, and despondent society that shapes them to what they became in the end. Cranes’ ability to create and sustain characters that readers can empathize with is epic though critics like Eichhorst have lambasted his episodic style (23). This paper will demonstrate that in spite of its inadequacy, Cranes Novella caricatures American naturalism in a way hitherto unseen by illustrating the profound effect of social circumstances on his characters.
The admiration of Hybrid cars in the United States market to this day is increasing at a rapid rate. Hybrid cars have been in high demand by buyers all over the United States. As time progresses, more and more consumers grasp that the upcoming hysteria of hybrid vehicles are not only better for the environment, but are all around much economical to our prodigious populace. The growing popularity of hybrid cars is due to an increase in the diverse archetypal choices available, the time-tested expertise and the economical valuing. A vehicle is deliberated as a hybrid if it utilizes more than one form of energy to attain momentum. With a customary internal-combustion engine and fuel tank, as well as one or more electric motors and a battery pack, this makes this type of vehicle is considerably dissimilar than other Hybrid’s out there.
George Saunders, a writer with a particular inclination in modern America, carefully depicts the newly-emerged working class of America and its poor living condition in his literary works. By blending fact with fiction, Saunders intentionally chooses to expose the working class’s hardship, which greatly caused by poverty and illiteracy, through a satirical approach to criticize realistic contemporary situations. In his short story “Sea Oak,” the narrator Thomas who works at a strip club and his elder aunt Bernie who works at Drugtown for minimum are the only two contributors to their impoverished family. Thus, this family of six, including two babies, is only capable to afford a ragged house at Sea Oak,
The early twentieth century was a time of change for America with western expansion, discrimination, and innovation. The western United States became one of the places to live because of its sense of wild lands and industrial progress. This time of change paved way for legendary literature including great authors such as Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and even the great J. R. R. Tolkien. However, one of the best authors during this time was John Steinbeck. Born and raised in California, he wrote many novels that were influenced by his childhood backyard and experiences in the Central Valley and Monterey areas. Steinbeck’s short story collection The Long Valley shows Steinbeck’s influence from his childhood home in the settings around the Salinas and Monterey regions in many of the short stories, as well as prominent and common themes such as communion, unfulfilling marriages, and the road to manhood.
The article discusses the need for these early Chicago saloons as a neighborhood commune for those men who labor long hours only to come home to poverty and despair of a desolate household. Melendy focuses on the mental, physiological, and moral nature of these workingmen. He points out that this saloon culture allows it’s patrons to develop these traits by interacting with their peers—others facing the same despair. These establishments are described as the “workingman’s school. He is both scholar and teacher” (Melendy pg. 78). Patrons gather at the bar, around tables and in the next room amongst games of pool, cards, and darts to discuss political and social problems, sporting news, and other neighborhood gossip. Here men, native and immigrant, exchange opinions and views of patriotism, brotherhood, and lessons in civil government. Melendy describes this atmosphere as cosmopolitan, and articulates that these businesses advertise this issue in their names. For example one of the downtown saloons was entitled “Everybody’s Exchange.” The saloon’s customers experienced a buffet of nationalities upon which was not so for those of poverty in previous decades. Saloons also served as disguises of corruption as Melendy illustrates by declaring “...
Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath is a realistic novel that mimics life and offers social commentary too. It offers many windows on real life in midwest America in the 1930s. But it also offers a powerful social commentary, directly in the intercalary chapters and indirectly in the places and people it portrays. Typical of very many, the Joads are driven off the land by far away banks and set out on a journey to California to find a better life. However the journey breaks up the family, their dreams are not realized and their fortunes disappear. What promised to be the land of milk and honey turns to sour grapes. The hopes and dreams of a generation turned to wrath. Steinbeck opens up this catastrophe for public scrutiny.
Cannery Row is a novel John Steinbeck wrote after World War I. At first, the novel almost seems like a humorous book, written in a style commonly used by Steinbeck. The book has its main plot, but also has side chapters that periodically interrupt the main idea, which adds to the story. One would think that these side chapters are there to universalize the book, but in fact that is not true. The side chapters tell their own story, and they have a message that Steinbeck was clearly trying to show through his book. The novel has a main point about respect. In Cannery Row , Steinbeck is trying to say that respectability is the destructive force that preys on the world. Steinbeck uses his characters to tell this story about respect and its effect on society. The central figure of the whole book, Doc, better explains this point by saying, "It has always seemed strange to me . . . The things we admire in men, kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding and feeling are the concomitants of failure in our system. And those traits we detest, sharpness, greed, acquisitive, meanness, egotism and self-interest are the traits of success. And while men admire the quality of the first they love the produce of the second" (131).
John Steinbeck lead a life filled with words, from his award winning novels to the hundreds letters he wrote to friends during his career. He was born in Salinas, California on February 27, 1902, and lived there for the first sixteen years of his life until he graduated from Salinas High School in 1918. He took classes at Stanford, but spent more of his college years working to pay tuition than then he spent in the classroom. 1924 brought his first publication, two short stories in the Standford Spectator, but in 1925 he left his schooling and went to New York for a time. By 1926, he was back in California and his first book, Cup of Gold, was published the year the of great stock market crash, but had little success. In 1930, he married Carol Henning, and the two lived in Pacific Grove, CA for the next several years. These years were lean; Steinbeck was having trouble selling his work, even with the help of his literary agents, McIntosh and Otis. Often, selling a short story for 50$ or so was the difference between eating or not.
Regarding our efforts here at Apple, we may have a few areas we need to redirect some of our energy into, to make sure we can continue such a strong brand following. If our reputation is tarnished, we could risk loosing current and future customers, leading to a decrease in overall market shares and sales.