Obscene in the Extreme: the Burning and Banning of John Steinbeck's "The Grapes of Wrath"
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.
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