A COMPANION TO THE GRAPES OF WRATH

This Companion has been designed especially for college and high school students for whom Grajes of Wrath is required reading. It is made up of a collection of essays, articles and reviews, of varying quality and mostly out of the ""morgue"", concerning pro and con aspects of the Grapes from social, cultural and journalistic perspectives. The editor, Warren French, offers on all of these documents interlocking commentaries, which though enormously conscientious are not particularly bracing, and appends an appreciation of his own, equally slack, as to the novel's enduring excellence. As to that, by and large it's deemed a middlebrow classic, but one dissident highbrow, represented here, in spiky, spirited language calls the book, among other things, a Wagons West Romance. The form of reference throughout is the troubled thirties, with side swipes at the satisfied sixties.