The Longreads Blog

How ‘The Grapes of Wrath’ Got Its Name

John Steinbeck—who would have been 113 today—wrote more than thirty books, and The Grapes of Wrath, which you were most likely assigned to read in high school, is widely considered to be his best work. The novel was published in 1939 to great acclaim, both critically and commercially; it “was a phenomenon on the scale of a national event. It was publicly banned and burned by citizens, it was debated on national talk radio; but above all, it was read.” It was also the New York Times’ bestselling book of 1939, and won both a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award.

As for the title, where did the phrase “The Grapes of Wrath” come from? As David Greetham notes  in his 1998 book Textual Transgressions: Essays Toward the Construction of a Bibliography:

As is well-known, it was Carol Henning, Steinbeck’s wife, who provided the almost-finished novel with its title, drawn, of course, from Julia Ward Howe’s “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” As Steinbeck reported in his journal for September 3, 1938, “Carol got the title last night…The book has being at last.” But what was the “being” the novel had achieved…? The story proceeds: because Steinbeck had already destroyed a 70,000-word draft of an earlier version in which California growers were polemically attacked, he was very sensitive to the political meaning of the new version and decided that one way to avoid the charge of radicalism, foreign-inspired propaganda was (almost literally) to wrap the book in the flag by insisting that the words and music of “Battle Hymn of the Republic” be printed in the endpapers. In fact, when the first proof was returned by his editor with only one verse [of the song] as prologue, Steinbeck wrote back “I meant to print all, all, all the verses of the Battle Hymn. They’re all pertinent and they’re all exciting. And the music too.”

How Testosterone Is Helping Power a New Medical Model in America

Photo by profzucker

The emerging popularity of testosterone has opened up whole new business models for entrepreneurial doctors. Chains of shops that provide the hormone have exploded all over the United States, especially across the South. How many millions more men might be willing to try testosterone if it was easy to acquire, and a clinic happened to implant itself in an adjacent office building or a local strip mall, next to an abandoned video store and the Starbucks?

We don’t need to look ahead at human genetic engineering, brain implants, or crazy designer drugs to see the real future of our relationship with our bodies. The rise of testosterone use isn’t a drill for future body hacking—it is body hacking playing out right now across the American heartland, with a substance that was first synthesized in 1935. And in the coming years, the battles over T’s use are going to be repeated for future drugs that give people—anyone with money, at least—the power to transform the body beyond its innate abilities and configurations.

The crux of the medical ethics issue is this: are people taking testosterone to cure a disease, or are they taking it to transcend the limitations normally imposed on an aging human body?

Alexis Madrigal, in Fusion, on testosterone’s rise in popularity and its future implications.

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Confessions of a Weary Restaurant Critic

After a seven-year-long stint as a restaurant critic at the Charleston City Paper Robert F. Moss is bidding the profession—or at least the beat—adieu. But before pushing away from the table for the last time, Moss has penned an essay about the difficulties of eating dinner for a living. In the excerpt below, he discusses how the writing itself can grow tedious:

Writing formal reviews is difficult. And by “reviews,” I mean it in the plural form. Composing a passable review or two is challenging enough, since it takes practice to get the hang of the form. But what’s even harder is churning out one after another, month in and month out.

There are only so many ways to describe food. You become hyper-aware of your own clichés. If you’ve gotten tired of reading “lovely,” “tinged,” and “delightful” in my reviews over the past seven years, all I can say is that you should have seen the first drafts.

Then there’s how you structure a review. It’s easy to lapse into such a rote pattern that you almost fall asleep while you’re writing.

Want to pen a textbook B-grade review? Here’s the template. Start with a capsule history of the business (“A new hook-to-table seafood restaurant that opened in May in the strip mall location once home to McGrubby’s Greek Deli.”). Next, march lockstep through the food offering. (Spoiler alert: we’ll start with the appetizers, then move on to entrees, and — surprise! — finish with the desserts.). Toss in a brief description of the interior (exposed brick and brown wood, of course), then wrap it all up with a paragraph that passes final judgement on the place.

If you do it right, the gist of that final paragraph will be that “it’s the kind of place you’ll like if you like that kind of place” and “time will tell whether local diners will embrace it,” which is reviewer code for “it doesn’t totally suck, but I give it three months tops.”

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Kitchen Rhythm: A Year in a Parisian Pâtisserie

Illustration by Kjell Reigstad

Frances Leech | Vintage | March 2013 | 14 minutes (3378 words)

The Longreads Exclusive below is based on Frances Leech’s ebook of the same name, published in 2013 by Vintage UK.

***

To make chocolate mousse, enough for 150 people, say, first whip the cream — liters and liters of it. Then, separately, whisk the egg yolks. Boil sugar and water and add to the yolks, still whisking, in a thin drizzle. Melt the chocolate, then stir, fold, and whisk everything together with some gelatin.

What is missing from this description, the bare-bones sketch in the red address book that alphabetizes all of my work recipes, is the physical sensations. When I started my apprenticeship in Paris a year ago, I learned that baking can be at once precise and vague. Measure everything to the last gram, simple enough. Harder to describe what the meringue mixture should look like when it is just right, hard to put the steady pressure of a hand piping cream into words. I looked and looked and was frustrated over and over.

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How a Legendary Rock Critic Found a Home in the Comments Section of an MSN Blog

As for the awe he inspires himself, Christgau’s devotees are smaller in number these days than in his Voice years, but they’re still extraordinarily dedicated, particularly among a small community who came together in the comments section of Expert Witness, the MSN blog he started after leaving the Voice. (He’s since moved on to the Medium site Cuepoint.) “The Witnesses are the greatest experience of my professional life,” Christgau says. “Most of them are very married kind of guys, but I’m so very married that it makes sense.”

He credits the Witnesses with helping him to stay current. Nick Farruggia, at 25 years old, is one of the youngest members of the group; he first heard of Christgau when he was 15 and trying to branch out musically. During the hours and hours he spent researching music on the internet, he began to notice that the same critic’s name kept appearing in nearly every Wikipedia entry. (At first, “I thought he was really pompous and pretentious,” he admits now.)

Eventually though, Christgau became a kind of reference book for all the things Farruggia was curious about in music. He found the Expert Witness blog, and quickly mixed in with its surprisingly robust comment community: The Witnesses meet up in person occasionally, usually at shows by Wussy, an Ohio indie-rock band that has been Christgau’s favorite for the last few years.

“It sounds so weird, to be honest,” Farruggia says. “We have a hard time explaining it to our spouses that there is this group of people who all have respect for this one older guy, and who collectively constitute this amazing group of friends.”

If Expert Witness is essential to the Christgau diehards, it’s an even more necessary outlet for the author himself. “There’s the sense that there is just not enough time for him to get everything out that he needs to get out,” Farruggia says.

—Leah Carroll, profiling rock critic Robert Christgau in Deadspin. Christgau spent three decades reviewing music for the Village Voice.

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How to Tell Your Children and Friends That Your Father Is a Serial Killer

Recently, Roy Wenzl profiled a woman named Kerri Rawson for The Wichita Eagle. Rawson’s life was upended a decade ago, when an FBI agent knocked on her door and informed her that the man she’d always known as a loving father was in fact the BTK serial killer. Wenzl’s piece is a compelling and meticulous portrait of a woman slowly coming to terms with the impossible. Below is an excerpt:

When friends questioned whether it was wise for them to have children, Kerri ignored them. She never worried about her kids inheriting a serial killer gene.

When Emilie, at 5, understood what “grandfather” meant, she asked where her grandfather was.

“In a long time-out,” Kerri replied.

Couldn’t Kerri go see him? Emilie asked.

“It’s a really long time-out,” Kerri replied.

Kerri asked friends: “Don’t tag our children” on Facebook. When friends asked why, she didn’t know how to answer them. She told some of them that “my dad did something terrible.”

“What?”

“Just Google me.”

And they would. And then: “Oh.”

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Can the Navel-Gazing Norwegian Novelist Tell Us Anything About America?

By Soppakanuuna. Image via Wikimedia Commons

Peter deemed my proposed plan — driving 12 hours back east to Maine to glimpse my dreamed-of American landscape — completely unrealistic, and rightly so, as I realized with a sudden sense of shame. At the same time, I had the feeling that he really wanted me to see Detroit. And why not? It was just a few hours north, so we could get there this afternoon.

As we drove through the snow-covered landscape, surrounded by cars with smoke fluttering out of their exhaust pipes, under the gray-white sky, past rows of run-down buildings, interspersed with clumps of colorless trees standing in colorless fields, the feeling I got was that something here was over, that something had been emptied out and that nothing new had begun. But perhaps that was too harsh a judgment to pass on a whole country after spending three hours in it?

-From Part One of Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard’s travel narrative across the United States of America for the New York Times Magazine. Knausgaard’s My Struggle, the bestselling and award-winning series of six autobiographical novels, are considered to be a breakthrough in style and format, winning a wide readership despite their some 3,500 pages in length. This portion of his American journey touches on the blight of Detroit, Nabokov’s Lolita, Kerouac, Vikings, and Minnesota’s hoax ancient archaeological Scandinavian artifact, the Kensington Runestone.

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The Holy Junk Heap

Solomon Schechter studying the fragments from the Cairo Geniza, Photo via Cambridge University Library.

Adina Hoffman & Peter Cole | Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza | Schocken | April 2011 | 18 minutes (4,838 words)

 

Below is an excerpt from the book Sacred Trash, by Adina Hoffman & Peter Cole, as recommended by Longreads contributor Dana Snitzky.

* * *

Cambridge, May 1896

When the self-taught Scottish scholar of Arabic and Syriac Agnes Lewis and her no-less-learned twin sister, Margaret Gibson, hurried down a street or a hallway, they moved—as a friend later described them—“like ships in full sail.” Their plump frames, thick lips, and slightly hawkish eyes made them, theoretically, identical. And both were rather vain about their dainty hands, which on special occasions they “weighed down with antique rings.” In a poignant and peculiar coincidence, each of the sisters had been widowed after just a few years of happy marriage to a clergyman. Read more…

Hooah to All That: On Leaving NYC for a Writing Life in a Military Town

Photo: "Choke" by Gisela Giardino on Flickr. (CC BY-SA 2.0)

My writer friends tend to see my new world as grist for writing, and I suppose it is. But this is also my life, not some sociological quest. I am not play-acting the soldier’s wife; my husband is not play-acting deployment; we are not play-acting strained 1 AM phone conversations that are being monitored in Afghanistan. This may be a journey I’m undertaking, but on many days it feels like a destination in which I am stuck: I’ve arrived, and this is it, this is all.

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The Army – and this, I’m sure, will be a real shocker – is a lot about fitting in: Wearing the right clothes, having the right values. Tossing around one’s real opinions can be a dangerous activity here, and, so, to a certain extent, we all play-act out of a pressing need to survive; we hide the parts of ourselves that we think may be indecent or suspicious. Writing feels like one of these things, a kind of taboo, a questionable waste of time. Sometimes, I feel as though I’m back in high school, hiding my bad poetry away in my math folder, afraid that people might find out who I actually am.

Simone Gorrindo writing in Vela Mag, on leaving New York for a small, conservative military town and the dissonances between the writing life and being a soldier’s wife.

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