Yet having nothing, the Joads still share. In the final scene of The Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck taps into the legend of “Roman Charity” where a daughter breastfeeds her starving father. In this case, however, Rose of Sharon feeds a starving stranger. A new human family is rising out of the ashes of the old.
My novelist friend Rachel Kranz recently sent me an article by novelist William Kennedy about John Steinbeck’s self-doubts as a writer. She herself has been wrestling with self-doubts, even though she has a completed manuscript of what I think is a remarkable work, and the article lets her know that she is not alone. It […]
“I’m shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!” Captain Renault famously exclaims in Casablanca, only then to be secretly presented with a bribe from the winnings. Why did this scene come to mind when I heard about the shenanigans of Goldman Sachs this past week? It did so, I suspect, because […]
Ma, Tom, and Pa Joad in John Ford’s Grapes of Wrath I don’t know a lot about the details of the Massey coal mining accident that killed 29 miners in West Virginia last week, but, from what I’ve been able to make out, it was a non-union mine owned by a heavily fined company that […]
Sports Saturday Once again March Madness is gripping America. Once again we see Cinderella teams upsetting the giants (Northern Iowa upsetting top-seeded Kansas, Butler upsetting mighty Syracuse) and games won or lost on remarkable shots made in the waning seconds (Murray State, Michigan State). Maryland, the team I was rooting for, made a miraculous last […]
