GRAPES & GATSBY CRITICS

Melvyn Bragg: Communism

Steinbeck accused of being a ‘vicious red’

Melvyn Bragg: Route 66

‘The migrant road … a biblical exodus’

Melvyn Bragg: Jobs

‘142 workers for every 100 jobs’

Melvyn Bragg: The Battle of Salinas

16th September 1936. Communists vs facists. Prompted Steinbeck to write ‘in dubious battle’

Melvyn Bragg: Steinbeck’s intentions

‘I am trying to write history’ ‘This book has a job to do, to point the finger at the greedy bastards responsible’

Melvyn Bragg: Reaction to Grapes

‘The bestselling book of 1939 was widely burned’

Jay McInerney: This Side of Paradise

‘A book about flappers, written for philosophers’

Jay McInerney: Zelda quote

In 1921, Zelda said ‘I hope it’s (her daughter) a beautiful little fool’ which Daisy says in Gatsby

Jay McInerney: The American Dream

‘Anyone can reinvent themselves but the American Dream is always out of reach’

Jay McInerney: Gatsby as a whole

‘A novel of illusions’

Jay McInerney: Interviews of Fitzgerald

‘Interviewers often struggled to tell him apart from the characters which he wrote about’

F Scott Fitzgerald: Gatbsy

‘Not a great man, but talent has a certain grandeur’

Andrew Blades: Individualism

‘Individualism was implied in skyscraper. The individual triumphed over the collective’

Andrew Blades: Steinbeck

A ‘muckraking journalist and novelist’

Andrew Blades: Gatsby and the past

Fitzgerald preoccupied with ‘the protagonist’s determination to turn back the clock’

Andrew Blades: Veblen

‘Gatbsy is a textbook example of Veblen’s theories of conspicuous consumption’

Andrew Blades: Greatness

‘Gatsby’s greatness is in many ways ironic, even empty’

Andrew Blades: Escape

‘The Grapes of Wrath is partly a novel about escape’

Andrew Blades: Realism

‘Steinbeck achieved an almost savage realism’

Andrew Blades: Individualism

‘The novel picks apart the wilful optimism of the pioneer and questions the limits of individualism’

Andrew Blades: The ending of Grapes

‘The novel’s final scene, Rose of Sharon suckling a starving man, is a biblical image of renewal’

Malcolm Bradbury: 1920s America

‘An age of Puritanism and prohibition but also of psychoanalysis and flappers, jazz and music’

Malcolm Bradbury: Fitzgerald’s education

‘Going to Princeton in 1913, he was allured by the world of wealth and privileged promise’

Malcolm Bradbury: Fitzgerald and the Depression

‘The depression of 1929 becomes the crisis of his generation’

Malcolm Bradbury: The artist and the symbol

‘Gatbsy is also a portrait of the artist chasing a symbol with his creative passion’

Malcolm Bradbury: Naturalism

‘The social concerns of the 1930s lead other American writers back towards naturalism and it’s concern with social determination’

Malcolm Bradbury: American aspiration

Steinbeck reminds us that ‘transcendental American aspiration did not die in the depression ’.

Richard Gray: The American Dream

‘Gatsby’s dream is the American dream, a story about the reinvention of the self’

Richard Gray: The Buchanans

‘The Buchanans are morally responsible too’ for Gatsby’s death’

Richard Gray: Self-help manual

Gatsby’s self-help manual ‘a parody of Benjamin Franklin’s and all those other self-help manuals which have thrived in American literature ever since’.

Richard Gray: Eden

Gatsby believed in ‘an ideal of Edenic innocence’

Richard Gray: Nick Carraway

‘Nick replicates, in his telling of the tale, what fundamentally Gatsby is doing in the tale being told’

Richard Gray: Steinbeck’s American Dream

‘The betrayal of the American Dream may be what gives the novel its quality of barely controlled rage.’

Richard Gray: An ideal America

Steinbeck ‘outlines not only what America is but what it might be’

Richard Gray: Change

Grapes is ‘A work founded on the conviction that things should and could change’

Professor Susan Shillinglaw

Where Fitzgerald ‘wrote about money and people’s fascination with money’ and materials, ‘Steinbeck got it right in his depiction of those who have to work for a living’