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The Grapes of Wrath
- Narrated by: Dylan Baker
- Length: 21 hrs and 1 min
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Publisher's summary
John Steinbeck's powerful evocation of the suffering and hardship caused by the Great Depression, and a panoramic vision of the struggle for the American Dream, The Grapes of Wrath includes a critical introduction by Robert DeMott in Penguin Modern Classics. "I've done my damndest to rip a reader's nerves to rags, I don't want him satisfied".
Shocking and controversial when it was first published in 1939, Steinbeck's Pulitzer prize-winning epic The Grapes of Wrath remains his undisputed masterpiece. Set against the background of Dust Bowl Oklahoma and Californian migrant life, it tells of Tom Joad and his family, who, like thousands of others, are forced to travel west in search of the promised land. Their story is one of false hopes, thwarted desires, and broken dreams, yet out of their suffering Steinbeck created a drama that is intensely human, yet majestic in its scale and moral vision. Adapted into a celebrated film directed by John Ford, and starring Henry Fonda, The Grapes of Wrath is an eloquent tribute to the endurance and dignity of the human spirit.
John Steinbeck (1902-68), winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the Nobel Prize for literature, is remembered as one of the greatest and best-loved American writers of the 20th century. During the Second World War Steinbeck served as a war correspondent, with his collected dispatches published as Once There Was a War (1958); in 1945 he was awarded the Norwegian Cross of Freedom for his novel The Moon is Down (1942), a portrayal of Resistance efforts in northern Europe. His best-known works include the epics The Grapes of Wrath (1939) and East of Eden (1952), and his tragic novella Of Mice and Men (1937). John Steinbeck's complete works are published in Penguin Modern Classics. If you liked The Grapes of Wrath, you might enjoy East of Eden, also available in Penguin Classics.
Critic reviews
"It is Steinbeck's best novel, i.e., his toughest and tenderest, his roughest written and most mellifluous, his most realistic and, in its ending, his most melodramatic, his angriest and most idyllic. It is great in the way that Unlce Tom's Cabin was great. One of the most impassioned and exciting books of the year." (Time)
"One comes away moved, indignant, protesting, pitying. A fiery document of protest and compassion, as a story that had to be told, as a book that must be read." (Louis Kronenberger, The Nation)
"A novelist who is also a true poet" (Sunday Times)
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The Bondurant Boys were a notorious gang of roughnecks and moonshiners who ran liquor through Franklin County during Prohibition and after. The brothers played a central role in a major conspiracy trial and its violent end. In 1935, Sherwood Anderson, working on a magazine story, finds himself driving along the dusty red roads trying to find the brothers and break the silence that shrouds Franklin County.
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Just outstanding!
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The Auctioneer
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In the isolated farming community of Harlowe, New Hampshire, John Moore and his wife, Mim, work the land that has been in his family for generations. But from the moment the charismatic Perly Dinsmore arrives in town and starts soliciting donations for his auctions, things begin slowly and insidiously to change in Harlowe. As the auctioneer carries out his terrible, inscrutable plan, the Moores and their neighbors will find themselves gradually but inexorably stripped of their freedom, their possessions, and perhaps even their lives....
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Unbelievable
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Of Mice and Minestrone
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Story
Hap Collins looks like a good ol’ boy. But even in his misspent youth, his best pal is Leonard Pine, who is Black, gay, and the ultimate outsider. Inseparable friends, Hap and Leonard climb into the boxing ring, visit their families, get in bar fights, and just go fishing - all the while confronting racists, righting wrongs, and eating a whole lot of delicious food.
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Wringing every last drop
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Story
The Beans of Egypt, Maine introduced the world to the notorious, unforgettable Bean clan of small town Egypt, Maine. Through her story of the Beans's struggle with their inner demons to survive against hardship and societal ignorance, Chute emerged as a writer of immense humanity and unparalleled insight into a world most of us knew little of - if we'd recognized it at all.
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1985-2018
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By: Carolyn Chute
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The Gospel Singer
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Story
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The gospel singer
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Close Range
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Annie Proulx's masterful language and fierce love of Wyoming are evident in this collection of stories about loneliness, quick violence, and wrong kinds of love. In "The Mud Below", a rodeo rider's obsession marks the deepening fissures between his family life and self-imposed isolation. In "The Half-Skinned Steer", an elderly fool drives west to the ranch he grew up on for his brother's funeral, and dies a mile from home.
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A Wonderfully Ironic and Surprising Read
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Their Eyes Were Watching God
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Their Eyes Were Watching God, an American classic, is the luminous and haunting novel about Janie Crawford, a Southern Black woman in the 1930s, whose journey from a free-spirited girl to a woman of independence and substance has inspired writers and readers for close to 70 years.
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perfection
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Alabama Moon
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Ten-year-old Moon has lived in an Alabama forest with his Pap ever since he can remember. Pap, a Vietnam vet, taught Moon how to survive ? and how to keep away from the government.
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A Modern Huckleberry Finn
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The Orchard Keeper
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- Unabridged
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Overall
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Story
One of America’s most celebrated novelists, Cormac McCarthy announced his towering presence on the literary stage with his first novel, The Orchard Keeper. Within the pages of this classic work, John Wesley Rattner, his uncle Ather, and bootlegger Marion Sylder find their lives dangerously entwined in pre-World War II Tennessee. There, the men’s tragedies and struggles are mirrored by the looming specter of industrialization.
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Contains the embryo of McCarthy's future greatness
- By Darwin8u on 06-12-13
By: Cormac McCarthy
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Ava's Man
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- Abridged
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Performance
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Story
With the same emotional generosity and effortlessly compelling storytelling that made All Over But the Shoutin’ a beloved bestseller, Rick Bragg continues his personal history of the Deep South. This time he’s writing about his grandfather Charlie Bundrum, a man who died before Bragg was born but left an indelible imprint on the people who loved him. Drawing on their memories, Bragg reconstructs the life of an unlettered roofer who kept food on his family’s table through the worst of the Great Depression
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Deeply moving
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That Old Ace in the Hole
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Overall
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Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner Annie Proulx's That Old Ace in the Hole is told through the eyes of Bob Dollar, a young Denver man trying to make good in a bad world. Dollar is out of college but aimless, when he takes a job with Global Pork Rind - his task to locate big spreads of land in the Texas and Oklahoma panhandles that can be purchased by the corporation and converted to hog farms.
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Doesn't work as a novel
- By Sarah C on 05-30-12
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Wise Blood
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Overall
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Flannery O’Connor’s astonishing and haunting first novel is a classic of 20th-century literature. It is the story of Hazel Motes, a 22-year-old caught in an unending struggle against his innate, desperate faith. He falls under the spell of a “blind” street preacher named Asa Hawks and his degenerate fifteen-year-old daughter. In an ironic, malicious gesture of his own non-faith, and to prove himself a greater cynic than Hawks, Hazel founds The Church of God Without Christ but is still thwarted in his efforts to lose God.
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Grotesque Southern Gothic Masterpiece
- By Darwin8u on 10-18-12
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What listeners say about The Grapes of Wrath
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- P. Minor
- 07-18-14
Wish I could give it 10 stars!
I don't give many 5 star ratings. I listen to too many books to be impressed by many of them but I honestly wish I could give both this book and this narrator 10 stars. They were perfectly matched and I did not want this story to end.
Like most people of my generation (mid 60's), I read this book in high school and found it boring and didn't like it at all. It is wasted on the young who haven't faced any hardships in life yet and they can't possibly understand the impact of it's lessons.
But now when I listen to it I can feel the dust in my throat and the bugs biting my skin and the heat beating down on me. I know the pain of the parents watching their children starve and the humiliation of the men , especially, who could not take care of their families.
And, I could see how we as a country are starting to repeat those same mistakes that culminated in the massive poverty of the majority of Americans in those years.
This is a must read for all adults.
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147 people found this helpful
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- Josh Mitchell
- 01-20-15
Book's as good as I remembered.
How could the performance have been better?
Dylan Baker does a solid job differentiating the voices of the different HEY DO YOU LIKE HARMONICA MUSIC? YOU'RE GOING TO LISTEN TO SOME JOLTINGLY LOUD HARMONICA MUSIC RIGHT NOW WHETHER YOU LIKE IT OR NOT! characters. But the producer who put this audiobook together didn't OH LOOK IT'S TIME FOR MORE REALLY LOUD HARMONICA MUSIC! I HOPE YOU LIKE IT BECAUSE IF YOU DON'T IT'S REALLY GOING TO MESS WITH THE STORY! consider the way it would sound if every chapter was separated with some lousy harmonica playing at nine thousand decibels. The overall experience of listening to this OOPS NOW HERE'S ANOTHER SUPER LOUD HARMONICA INTERLUDE!! audiobook as an exercise in patience. Not recommended if, for example, you like listening to audiobooks at bedtime.
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128 people found this helpful
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- Danielle
- 09-22-18
Harmonica..
PLEASE stop the harmonica in between every chapter!!! It breaks the mood and is so loud! The narrator does a great job at the voices I think.
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68 people found this helpful
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- James Tuttle
- 05-03-19
Jarring Harmonica
The loud, harsh harmonica music between the chapters is wholly unnecessary and unpleasant. Otherwise a good book.
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65 people found this helpful
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- J. Monaco
- 10-18-13
Wonderful Tale Punctuated with Loud Harmonic Licks
Would you listen to The Grapes of Wrath again? Why?
Yes, the story is wonderful. The narrator is excellent and does a great job with all the character voices. He seems to be channeling Henry Fonda as Tom Joad, for he sounds just like him.
Any additional comments?
Overall the book was wonderful except for the jolting harmonica music transitions from each chapter that were so loud I had to turn down the volume. I absolutely HATED that. I appreciate that the tunes were of the period and the instrument would be easily carried on the road. But it doesn't work for me and spoiled an otherwise wonderfully written and narrated story.
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62 people found this helpful
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- H. Martin
- 02-23-18
Book quality reduced by terrible sound effects
I enjoyed the narrator's many voices and the story was quite compelling. The book was nearly ruined for me by jarring loud harmonica at the ends of scenes and chapters. It was too loud and inappropriate. A terrible decision by the producers. I cannot recommend this audio book. Find another version or read it in print.
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- Kathy in CA
- 07-24-13
Don't Miss This Classic!
I put off listening to this book for quite a while after getting it on sale. I knew it was a well-rated classic that I really wanted to read. My reluctance, however, was due to the fear that it might be outdated, slow moving, or even boring. Oh how wrong I was!
Listening to Dylan Baker's awesome narration of Steinbeck's masterpiece, it felt like I was carried away to a different time and place. Each character had their own particular voice--it was hard to believe there was only one narrator.
I was always engrossed in the story, I learned much about a period in our history that never caught my attention before, and I felt very sad as I followed the Joad familly's desperate plight for survival.
Steinbeck's writing style made it so easy to visualize the story and the characters. I felt like I was immersed in their lives, almost a fly on the wall. I really cared what happened to each and every one of them. And finally, I was prepared for an abrupt ending, but that brought quite a surprise. I wasn't sure I believed my ears. It was totally unexpected and will remain with me for a long time to come.
Highly recommended book! Don't procrastinate. Jump right in!
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- Dan Harlow
- 07-07-13
Almost more relevant now than when it was written
Any additional comments?
Replace farmers from Oklahoma with migrant workers from Mexico and I doubt you'd be able to tell that this novel was written back in 1939. And that's what really stuck me about this novel - how relevant it still is - in some ways even more now than then.
The first similarity is economic. As I write this we are still either going through a 'great recession' or are slowly emerging from an economic downturn. The causes are different, of course, here in the novel it was bad farming techniques mixed with new technology that drove the farmers from their land. Today it's an over-saturated housing market - people banking all their futures on the bubble of hope that perhaps the value of their own home will increase enough for them to make a tidy profit. And just like land that's been worked too hard, people worked the housing market too hard and it collapsed. Banks came to take the farms in the novel and banks came to take the homes in our own time.
And both examples were of people running as fast as they could just to stay a little ahead of disaster. The farmers grew crops that destroyed the soil because they had no choice - they couldn't compete with the new farms, the corporate farms and machine efficiency. A family can't compete with a fleet of harvesters and tractors - working the land by hand can't keep up with a tractor. And the same goes for the people with houses these days. Everybody borrowed on cheap credit from the bank to hopefully 'buy low' and then 'sell high', but when everyone does it then there isn't no value in any of it and it all falls apart and everyone still owes the banks. And all they wanted was a piece of a dream, a chance to stay afloat economically, to send their kids to a good college, to make the car payments, put food on the table.
In the novel the Californian's hated the Oakies, called them lazy, called them animals, called them thieves; in today's world we call the homeowners who lost it all idiots, greedy, lazy. But we also hate the banks. Call the banks greedy, inhumane, a great machine that's too big to die and too big to fail and everybody has to keep feeding it because nobody is really too sure how to control it anymore.
But there is one difference, and that's the work. When the people lost the value on their homes, when the banks realized that the amount of money in the economy was based on a weak speculation and that there was actually a lot less money than there really was, when that caused credit to dry up, and when that caused smaller businesses to close up because they couldn't run the businesses with no credit, which in turn caused people to lose their jobs, and that caused the economy to drag down deeper and created a vicious cycle that made it worse and worse - after all that, the people had nowhere to go because all the 'poor jobs', the type of work Steinbeck writes about in the novel had all been taken by the immigrants.
And that cussed more issues. The poor American middle-class blamed the Mexican's and now militia patrol the borders to kick the Mexican's out or do worse things in the desert at night when nobody is looking. A man like Casey in the novel is no different than a immigrant getting killed by some militia border patrol.
And that causes resentment on all sides and the center can't hold.
And that's just the economic similarity between the novel and today's times. Politically it's the same too. A conservative will say the poor just gotta work, but the conservative will also be on the side of the businessman and when everyone needs work, the businessman can keep wages down and in turn keep the poor really poor. But that's supposed to be ok because the conservative will say the poor can take help from a charity or a church - but that's easy to tell someone else when it's not you having to beg and take charity, easy to tell another man to beg. But the conservative man is holding on by a thread as thin as can be too and he's causing his own demise because soon the corporation will put him out of work too, his job will be lost and he'll have to go begging and he won't be so mean and conservative anymore. He'll see the value of sticking by your fellow man instead of blaming him for his troubles.
And that's what the book is about - about family, about sticking together, about helping, about not letting the fruit on the vine rot when others go in need. And that's why it's an even more radical novel today than when it was written because it 'smells' of Communism or of Socialism. And the conservative man doesn't want to hear about that, he doesn't want a union because union men are lazy and he doesn't want socialism because the government will tell him what to do and he doesn't want communism because he can take care of his own family.
That is until he can't, then he'll be singing a different tune or he'll be turning on his own people like some of the people in the novel who turned against their own just to put food on the table; the great selfishness.
That's the saddest thing about the book - how spot on Steinbeck was about human nature. And for as beautiful as the novel is, as well written as it is, nothing can compare to how true it is. And maybe that's the thing that makes people still so angry about it - that it reveals a truth we don't want to accept about ourselves, that deep down we know that they way we live, that the American dream is not working, that it never really worked and that we either side with the people who will toss us on the heap of irrelevance or we fight the powers that be. And maybe if we worried a little more about if their neighbor has enough in his bowl and a little less about if we have enough in our own then maybe things would be better.
The novel is a microcosm of American, then and now. And that's quite an achievement because how many novels ring this true 75 years after they were written? And the novel is a damning indictment too, and that's why it still scares people.
And that ending. What an ending too. It's both hopeful and sad. It's religious and it turns religion on it's head too. It's bleak and yet it's also comforting.
Now I didn't realize it at first, but this is the third in a series of books I've been reading that deal explicitly with society - 'The Seven Pillars of Wisdom' talked about a people fighting for their independence in the deserts of Arabia, '100 Years of Solitude' about a village coping with modernity, and now this novel about a country having to find a new direction. And they are also about the poor, about people who have been taken advantage of by a government or an economy and have been cast aside. And that's been a struggle since man understood ownership and it will continue to be a struggle as long as some men side with the very forces that could steamroll everyone in the end.
'Don't turn on your own kind', Tom says. Well I hope Tom is still somewhere out there keeping an eye on everyone, helping where he can, beat up and bloody but still fighting. The world needs more Tom's and more Ma's. Someone's gotta keep the family together.
Anyway, brilliant novel. Pure genius.
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- RSolomons
- 05-21-13
Every Character a Gem!
What made the experience of listening to The Grapes of Wrath the most enjoyable?
I felt as if I lived the pain and the sorrow of The Joad family. In this trek from Oklahoma to California i traveled and suffered with these people. The way Steinbeck weaved hope, despair and the struggle of the human spirit for something better into this story places him in a class by himself
What other book might you compare The Grapes of Wrath to and why?
Night by Elie Wiesel, The Canterbury Tales, The Painted Bird
Which scene was your favorite?
I enjoyed the introduction of Tom Joad. When the trucker picked him up and started to talk to him he knew right away he was being sized up. Having just been released from prison, he was edgy, truthful and proud and wasn't going to be looked down upon. The dialogue and characterization in this scene brought his character to life as the hopeful hero.
Did you have an extreme reaction to this book? Did it make you laugh or cry?
From start to finish each one of the characters, because they were so well formed and realistic, evoked empathy but never to the point of pity. Every character bore their share of hardship. You walk away from this experience feeling stronger for having been in their company. These were people to be admired.
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Pleased
I've literally waited 5 years for this audio to be released of what is hands down the best piece of American literature ever written. I think the pace and clarity of the narrator is perfect. It does have odd, blunt interludes of harmonica music that can snap you out of the trance the book puts you in, but other than that its a pretty flawless rendition of an American Classic.
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