The Grapes of Wrath.

STEINBECK, John.

Item Number: 146236

New York: The Viking Press, 1939.

First edition, with “First Published in April 1939” on copyright page and first edition notice on the front flap of the dust jacket. Octavo, original beige cloth. Presentation copy, lengthily inscribed by the author in the year of publication on the front free endpaper with three drawings, one is Steinbeck’s very strange Duck doodle, the second is an oinking pig, and the third is a drawing of a woman’s vagina, and then the book is inscribed, “Harry Beneson, Chicago! Maternity Center. ‘39. For Benny, Who will never know how much I like to sign this. John Steinbeck.” In 1939, John Steinbeck traveled to Chicago with his friend, Pare Lorentz, the great film director documentarian of the Depression and the Dust Bowl, to make the film, The Fight for Life (released in 1940), a feature length semi-documentary on the struggle to provide adequate natal (obstetric) care at the Chicago Maternity Center. John Steinbeck worked on the project with Lorentz writing the narrative dialogue and helping with the actual physical making of the picture. Fine in a fine dust jacket. Jacket design by Elmer Hader. Housed in a custom half morocco clamshell box. An exceptional example, with such a lengthy inscription, with three doodles (the most we have seen) and in the year of publication.

"The Grapes of Wrath is the kind of art that’s poured out of a crucible in which are mingled pity and indignation. Its power and importance do not lie in its political insight but in its intense humanity. [It] is the American novel of the season, probably the year, possibly the decade" (Clifton Fadiman). It is the basis for the 1940 John Ford directed film, bearing the same name starring Henry Fonda. It is widely considered as one of the greatest American films of all time. In 1989, this film was one of the first 25 films to be selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant." Listed by Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of the twentieth century.