Obscene in the Extreme: The Burning and Banning of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath
ShareIn conversation with William Deverell, Director USC-Huntington Institute on the West
Coinciding with Banned Books Week is the revelatory story behind the 1939 burning and banning of Steinbeck's book in Kern County, Calif., home of the fictional Joads.
Rick Wartzman is director of the Drucker Institute at Claremont Graduate University, an Irvine senior fellow at the New America Foundation and a columnist for BusinessWeek magazine. Previously, he spent two decades as a reporter and editor at the Wall Street Journal and the Los Angeles Times. He is the co-author, with Mark Arax, of The King of California: J. G. Boswell and the Making of a Secret American Empire. A bestseller, it won, among other honors, a California Book Award and the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing.
William Deverell is a professor of history at USC, where he specializes in the history of California and the American West and directs a scholarly institute that collaborates with the Huntington Library in Pasadena. He is the author of Whitewashed Adobe: The Rise of Los Angeles and the Remaking of Its Mexican Past and Railroad Crossing: Californians and the Railroad, 1850-1910. With Greg Hise, he is co-author of Eden by Design: The 1930 Olmsted-Bartholomew Plan for the Los Angeles Region. Bill is a fellow of the Los Angeles Institute for Humanities at USC.
