Plymale, watched as the flames consumed the book. Pruett, along with his boss, the cotton titan, Bill Camp, and Associated Farmers board member, L. As a newspaper photographer snaps a shot, Clell Pruett, a local sharecropper, tosses the book into the trashcan, which was then followed by a match. On August 24, 1939, three men stood above a small metal trashcan with a copy of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath in hand. And when the last food was gone, they stared at the grey water and in the night they did not lie down for a long time.The Banning of Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath The family ate the steaming boiled potatoes with their fingers. Ma watched him sullenly while he chopped out part of the inner wall of the car, built a fire and scooped water into a pan. On the morning of the second day Pa splashed through the camp and came back with ten potatoes in his pockets. The rain had become intermittent now-little wet squalls and quiet times. Under the blanket she hoarded the remains of the store bread. Sometimes Ma whispered to her and sometimes sat up quietly, her face brooding. During that day and night the men slept suddenly, side by side on the box-car door. The water was six inches deep in the car before the flood spread evenly over the embankment and moved into the cotton-field on the other side. The family huddled on the platforms, silent and fretful. Harness, cart, seeders, little bundles of hoes. Eighteen dollars for that plough, plus freight-Sears Roebuck. Bring out those tools-get a few dollars for them. That plough, that harrow remember in the war we planted mustard? Remember a fella wanted us to put in that rubber bush they called guayule? Get rich, he said. The men went into the barns and the sheds. The men were ruthless because the past had been spoiled, but the women knew how the past would cry to them in the coming days. Picked over their possessions for the journey to the west. In the little houses the tenant people sifted their belongings and the belongings of their fathers and of their grandfathers.

Steinbeck the grapes of wrath