[APG Public List] [TGF] Origin of a homemaker's habit

[Ray Beere Johnson II]

     I'm familiar with The Grapes of Wrath, but, although I could be forgetting a detail, I don't recall any mention of the way cups or glasses were stored in the book. Even if there were such a scene, anyone who understands the techniques of fiction writing will recognise that it might not be significant. The fiction writer is concerned less with depicting reality accurately (compare dialogue in _any_ story with the real thing) than with selecting elements appropriate to the story _and symbolic elements_ which will reinforce the theme of that story.
     Of course, if there is such a reference in The Grapes of Wrath, it might well have been the _source_ of the idea this practice originated in the Dust Bowl, whether or not that assertion is true.
                          Ray Beere Johnson II


--- On Thu, 9/9/10, Debbe Hagner <debbehagner at yahoo.com> wrote:

> The Grapes of Wrath is a novel published in 1939 and written by John 
> Steinbeck, who was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1940 and the Nobel 
> Prize for Literature in 1962. Set during the Great Depression, the 
> novel focuses on a poor family of sharecroppers, the Joads, driven from 
> their Oklahoma home by drought, economic hardship, and changes in the 
> agriculture industry. In a nearly hopeless situation, partly because 
> they were trapped in the Dust Bowl, they set out for California along 
> with thousands of other "Okies" in search of land, jobs and dignity. 
> When preparing to write the novel, Steinbeck wrote: "I want to put a 
> tag of shame on the greedy bastards who are responsible for this [the 
> Great Depression and its effects]." The book won Steinbeck a large 
> following amongst ordinary people and the working class, partly due to 
> the book's sympathy to the worker's movement and its accessible 
> style.[1]