OBSCENE IN THE EXTREME: THE BURNING AND BANNING OF JOHN STEINBECK’S THE GRAPES OF WRATH
By Rick Wartzman. Public Affairs Books. 320 pp. $28.95
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The Grapes of Wrath is an inarguable part of the canon of North American literature. Its reputation as a classic novel extends even to people who have never cracked open a copy — although how they’ve avoided reading it is a mystery, considering its ubiquitous presence on the curricula of many a high-school and post-secondary literature class.

John Steinbeck’s most well-known book was published in the spring of 1939, before the formal beginnings of the Second World War, while America was still in the throes of the Great Depression. It’s tale of the Joad family, poor Oklahoma farmers driven to desperation by drought and the economic difficulties of the agriculture business, won the author widespread fame, substantial sales, praise from no less a person than Franklin Roosevelt for revealing the plight of the common working American, and eventually both Nobel and Pulitzer Prizes. The book became a pop-culture touchstone: Woody Guthrie, Bruce Springsteen, and Pink Floyd have all written lyrics inspired by it, Henry Fonda memorably brought Tom Joad to life on film, The Simpsons parodied it, and a Canadian alt-rock band named itself after it.

The book is so iconic that it rarely comes to mind when talk turns to legendarily censored and debated novels, but in fact, The Grapes of Wrath was at the centre of a furious censorship battle, as Rick Wartzman documents in his new book Obscene in the Extreme: The Burning and Banning of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath.

Wartzman focuses on the efforts of The County Board of Supervisors in Kern County — the very area that the story was sit in — to ban the book. They weren’t alone in their objections to Steinbeck’s novel. Some areas banned The Grapes of Wrath due to its strong language — mainly the supposed vulgarity of taking the Lord’s name in vain, as well as a few “bastard”s and “bitch”es peppered throughout its pages. And that final scene with the bum drinking milk from Rose of Sharon’s breast didn’t help matters either. But, as Wartzman reveals, naughty language had little to do with Kern County’s anti-Joad campaign. Instead, they objected to Steinbeck’s left-leaning politics, and his critique of corporations’ increasing control over California’s agriculture industry and his positive depiction of the movement to unionize farm workers.

Obscene in the Extreme is a detailed and highly readable account of a shocking example of literary censorship directed at one of its most illustrious writers. Wartzman, whose previous book The King of California delved into the rise of notorious cotton magnate J.G. Boswell around the same time period, is adept at using prewar California as a microcosm of local and national politics, unearthing what few remember and fewer realize as a dark chapter in American literary history.

One of the great heroes in Wartzman’s book is Kern County librarian Gretchen Krief. Even in her startling levelheadedness, she probably did not realize the importance of her plea: “If that book is banned today, what will be banned tomorrow?”