Homework

1)The Great Depression

The Great Depression was a severe worldwide economic depression in the decade preceding
World War II. The timing of the Great Depression varied across nations, but in most countries it
started in about 1929 and lasted until the late 1930s or early 1940s. It was the longest, most
widespread, and deepest depression of the 20th century. In the 21st century, the Great
Depression is commonly used as an example of how far the world's economy can decline. The
depression originated in the U.S., starting with the fall in stock prices that began around
September 4, 1929 and became worldwide news with the stock market crash of October 29, 1929
(known as Black Tuesday). From there, it quickly spread to almost every country in the world.

The Great Depression had devastating effects in virtually every country, rich and poor. Personal
income, tax revenue, profits and prices dropped while international trade plunged by ½ to ⅔.
Unemployment in the U.S. rose to 25%, and in some countries rose as high as 33%. Cities all
around the world were hit hard, especially those dependent on heavy industry. Construction was
virtually halted in many countries. Farming and rural areas suffered as crop prices fell by
approximately 60%.Facing plummeting demand with few alternate sources of jobs, areas
dependent on primary sector industries such as cash cropping, mining and logging suffered the
most.

Some economies started to recover by the mid-1930s. However, in many countries the negative
effects of the Great Depression lasted until the start of World War II.

2) John Steinbeck: Life and Work

John Steinbeck was born in Salinas, California in 1902, and spent most of his life in Monterey
County, the setting of much of his fiction. He attended Stanford University intermittently
between 1920 and 1926. Steinbeck did not graduate from Stanford, but instead chose to support
himself through manual labor while writing. His experiences among the working classes in
California lent authenticity to his depiction of the lives of the workers, who remain the central
characters of his most important novels.

Steinbeck's first novel, Cup of Gold, was published in 1929, and was followed by The Pastures
of Heaven and, in 1933, To a God Unknown. However, his first three novels were unsuccessful
both critically and commercially. Steinbeck had his first success with Tortilla Flat (1935), an
affectionate and gently humorous story about Mexican-Americans. Nevertheless, his subsequent
novel, In Dubious Battle (1936) was notable for its markedly grim outlook. This novel is a
classic account of a strike by agricultural laborers and the pair of Marxist labor organizers who
engineer it, and is the first Steinbeck novel to encompass the striking social commentary that
characterizes his most notable works. Steinbeck received even greater acclaim for the novella Of
Mice and Men (1937), a tragic story about the strange, complex bond between two migrant
laborers. His crowning achievement, The Grapes of Wrath, won Steinbeck a Pulitzer Prize and a
National Book Award. It was also adapted into a classic film directed by John Ford that was
named one of the American Film Institute's one hundred greatest films. The novel describes the
migration of a dispossessed family from the Oklahoma Dust Bowl to California and critiques
their subsequent exploitation by a ruthless system of agricultural economics.

After the best-selling success of The Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck went to Mexico to collect
marine life with the freelance biologist Edward F. Ricketts, and the two men collaborated on Sea
of Cortez (1941), a study of the fauna of the Gulf of California. During World War II, Steinbeck
wrote some effective pieces of government propaganda, among them The Moon Is Down (1942),
a novel about Norwegians under the Nazis. He also served as a war correspondent. With the end
of World War II and the move from the Great Depression to economic prosperity Steinbeck's
work softened somewhat. While still containing the elements of social criticism that marked his
earlier work, the three novels Steinbeck published immediately following the war, Cannery Row
(1945), The Pearl, and The Bus (both 1947) were more sentimental and relaxed. Steinbeck also
contributed to several screenplays. He wrote the original stories for several films, including
Lifeboat (1944), directed by Alfred Hitchcock, and A Medal for Benny, and wrote the screenplay
for Elia Kazan's Viva Zapata!, a biographical film about Emiliano Zapata, the Mexican peasant
who rose to the presidency.

Steinbeck married Carol Henning in 1930 and lived with her in Pacific Grove, California. He
spent much of his time in Monterey with his friend, Ricketts, at his Cannery Row laboratory, an
experience which inspired his popular 1945 novel, Cannery Row. In 1943, Steinbeck married his
second wife, Gwyndolyn Conger, with whom he had two children. 1948 was a particularly bad
year for Steinbeck: Ricketts died, and Gwyndolyn left him. However, he found happiness in his
1950 marriage to Elaine Scott, with whom he lived in New York City. Two years later, he
published the highly controversial East of Eden, the novel he called "the big one," set in the
California Salinas Valley.

Steinbeck's later writings were comparatively slight works, but he did make several notable
attempts to reassert his stature as a major novelist: Burning Bright (1950), East of Eden (1952),
and The Winter of Our Discontent (1961). However, none of these works equaled the critical
reputation of his earlier novels. Steinbeck's reputation is dependent primarily on the naturalistic,
proletarian-themed novels that he wrote during the Depression. It is in these works that
Steinbeck is most effective at building rich, symbolic structures and conveying the archetypal
qualities of his characters. Steinbeck received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1962, and died in
New York City in 1968.
3) Realism in American literature
Broadly defined as "the faithful representation of reality" or "verisimilitude," realism is a literary
technique practiced by many schools of writing. Although strictly speaking, realism is a
technique, it also denotes a particular kind of subject matter, especially the representation of
middle-class life. A reaction against romanticism, an interest in scientific method, the
systematizing of the study of documentary history, and the influence of rational philosophy all
affected the rise of realism. According to William Harmon and Hugh Holman, "Where
romanticists transcend the immediate to find the ideal, and naturalists plumb the actual or
superficial to find the scientific laws that control its actions, realists center their attention to a
remarkable degree on the immediate, the here and now, the specific action, and the verifiable
consequence"

Many critics have suggested that there is no clear distinction between realism and its related late
nineteenth-century movement, naturalism. As Donald Pizer notes in his introduction to The
Cambridge Companion to American Realism and Naturalism: Howells to London, the term
"realism" is difficult to define, in part because it is used differently in European contexts than in
American literature. Pizer suggests that "whatever was being produced in fiction during the
1870s and 1880s that was new, interesting, and roughly similar in a number of ways can be
designated as realism, and that an equally new, interesting, and roughly similar body of writing
produced at the turn of the century can be designated as naturalism" (5). Put rather too
simplistically, one rough distinction made by critics is that realism espousing a deterministic
philosophy and focusing on the lower classes is considered naturalism.

In American literature, the term "realism" encompasses the period of time from the Civil War to
the turn of the century during which William Dean Howells, Rebecca Harding Davis, Henry
James, Mark Twain, and others wrote fiction devoted to accurate representation and an
exploration of American lives in various contexts. As the United States grew rapidly after the
Civil War, the increasing rates of democracy and literacy, the rapid growth in industrialism and
urbanization, an expanding population base due to immigration, and a relative rise in middle-
class affluence provided a fertile literary environment for readers interested in understanding
these rapid shifts in culture. In drawing attention to this connection, Amy Kaplan has called
realism a "strategy for imagining and managing the threats of social change"

4)Man is a social being

No one would deny that men are social beings who co-operate with each other to better meet
their daily needs.

On one level, man's needs, feelings and desires cause him to act for his own benefit and without
regard for the needs and wishes of others. Man uses every means to fulfil his own needs: he uses
every kind of transport to reach his destination; he uses the leaves, stems and fruit of plants and
trees; he lives upon the meat of animals and their products, and takes advantage of a multitude of
other things to complement his own deficiencies in certain respects. Can man, whose state is
such that he uses everything he finds to his own ends, be expected to respect another human
being? Can he extend his hand to another in co-operation and turn a blind eye to his own desire
for the sake of mutual benefit?

The answer in the first instance must be no. It is as a result of man's countless needs, which can
never be fulfilled by himself alone, that he recognizes the possibility of fulfilling them through
the help and co-operation of others. Similarly, he understands that his own strengths, desires and
wishes are also shared by others, and just as he defends his own interests so others defend theirs.

Thus, out of necessity, he co-operates with the social nexus and gives a certain measure of his
own efforts to fulfill the needs of others; in return he benefits from the efforts of others in order
to full fill his own needs. In truth he has entered into a market-place of social wealth, always
open to traders and offering all the benefits obtained by the collective work of the society. All
these factors are placed together in this market- place of pooled human resources and each
person, according to the importance society attaches to his work, has a share in these benefits.

Thus man's first nature incites him to pursue the fulfillment of his own needs using others in the
process and taking advantage of their work for his own ends. It is only in cases of necessity and
helplessness that he lends a hand to co-operate with society.

This matter is clear when we observe the nature of children: anything a child wants he demands
in an extreme way; he emphasizes his demand by crying. As he grows older, however, and
becomes a part of the social fabric, he gradually puts an end to his excessive demands. More
evidence for the truth of this may be seen when a person accumulates power which exceeds that
of others and he rejects the spirit of cooperation and its restrictions of society; such an individual
uses people and the fruits of their labours for himself without giving anything back in return.

5)The Grapes Of Wrath

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.

The Grapes of Wrath is frequently read in American high school and college literature classes. A
celebrated Hollywood film version, starring Henry Fonda and directed by John Ford, was made
in 1940; the endings of the book and the movie differ greatly.
Plot
The narrative begins just after Tom Joad is paroled from prison for homicide. On his journey
home, he meets former preacher Jim Casy whom he remembers from his childhood, and the two
travel together. When they arrive at his childhood farm home, they find it deserted. Disconcerted
and confused, he and Casy meet their old neighbor, Muley Graves, who tells them that the family
has gone to stay at Uncle John Joad's home nearby. He goes on to tell them that the banks have
kicked all the farmers off their land, but he refuses to go. Tom and Casy get up the next morning
to go to Uncle John's. There, Tom finds his family loading a converted Hudson truck with what
remains of their possessions; the crops were destroyed in the Dust Bowl and as a result, the
family had to default on their loans. With their farm repossessed, the Joads cling to hope, mostly
in the form of handbills distributed everywhere in Oklahoma, describing the fruitful country of
California and the high pay to be had in that state. The Joads are seduced by this advertising and
invest everything they have into the journey. Although leaving Oklahoma would be breaking
parole, Tom decides that it is a risk worth taking. Casy joins the family as well.

Going west on Route 66, the Joad family discovers that the road is saturated with other families
making the same trek, ensnared by the same promise. In makeshift camps, they hear many stories
from others, some coming back from California, and are forced to confront the possibility that
their prospects may not be what they hoped. Along the road, Grampa dies and is buried in the
camp; Granma dies close to the California state line, both Noah (the eldest Joad son) and Connie
(the husband of the pregnant Joad daughter, Rose of Sharon) split from the family; the remaining
members, led by Ma, realize they have no choice but to go on, as there is nothing remaining for
them in Oklahoma.

Upon arrival, they find little hope of making a decent wage, as there is an oversupply of labor
and a lack of rights, and the big corporate farmers are in collusion, while smaller farmers are
suffering from collapsing prices. A gleam of hope is presented at Weedpatch Camp, one of the
clean, utility-supplied camps operated by the Resettlement Administration, a New Deal agency
that has been established to help the migrants, but there is not enough money and space to care
for all of the needy. As a Federal facility, the camp is also off-limits to California deputies who
constantly harass and provoke the newcomers.

In response to the exploitation of laborers, there are people who attempt for the workers to join
unions, including Casy, who had gone to jail to cover for Tom's attack of a deputy. The
remaining Joads unknowingly work as strikebreakers on a peach orchard where Casy is involved
in a strike that eventually turns violent. Tom Joad witnesses the killing of Casy and kills the
attacker, becoming a fugitive. He bids farewell to his mother, promising that no matter where he
runs, he will be a tireless advocate for the oppressed. Rose of Sharon's baby is stillborn;
however, Ma Joad remains steadfast and forces the family through the bereavement. When the
rains arrive, the Joads' dwelling is flooded, and they move to higher ground, where Rose of
Sharon breast feeds a man too sick from starvation to eat solid food.

Characters
 Tom Joad — Protagonist of the story; the Joad family's second son, named after his
father. Later on, Tom takes leadership of the family even though he is young.
 Ma Joad — matriarch. Practical and warm-spirited, she tries to hold the family together.
Her given name is never learned; it is suggested that her maiden name was Hazlett.
 Pa Joad — patriarch, also named Tom, age 50. Hardworking sharecropper and family
man. Pa loses his place as leader of the family to his wife.
 Uncle John Joad — Older brother of Pa Joad, age not given (but Tom describes him as
"a fella about 60"), feels responsible for the death of his young wife years before when he
ignored her pleas for a doctor because he thought she just had a stomachache, when she
actually had a burst appendix. Filled with guilt, he is prone to binges involving booze and
prostitutes, yet tries to repent for his sins and guilt by spoiling Ruthie and Winfield with
candy when he can.
 Jim Casy — A former preacher who lost his faith after fornicating with willing members
of his church numerous times, and from his perception that religion has no solace or
answer for the difficulties the people are experiencing. He is a Christ figure and shares
his initials with Jesus.
 Al Joad — The second youngest son who cares mainly for cars and girls; looks up to
Tom, but begins to find his own way.
 Rose of Sharon Joad Rivers — Childish and dreamy teenage daughter (about 16 or 17)
who develops as the novel progresses to become a mature woman. She symbolizes
regrowth when she helps the starving stranger (see also Roman Charity, works of art
based on the legend of a daughter as wet nurse to her dying father). Pregnant in the
beginning of the novel, she delivers a stillborn baby, probably as a result of malnutrition.
Her name is pronounced "Rosasharn" by the family.
 Connie Rivers — Rose of Sharon's husband. Young and naive, he is overwhelmed by
the responsibilities of marriage and impending fatherhood, and abandons her shortly after
arriving in California. He is stated to be 19 years old upon his and Tom's first encounter
before leaving for California.
 Noah Joad — The oldest son who is the first to willingly leave the family, choosing to
stay by the Colorado river and survive by fishing. Injured at birth, described as "strange",
he may have slight learning difficulties or autistic spectrum disorder.
 Grampa Joad — Tom's grandfather who expresses his strong desire to stay in
Oklahoma. His full name is given as "William James Joad". Grampa is drugged by his
family with "soothin' syrup" to force him to leave but dies in the evening of the first day
on the road after of a stroke.
 Granma Joad — The religious wife of Grampa Joad, she seems to lose the will to live
(and consequently dies while crossing the desert, possibly as a result of exposure to the
heat while crossing New Mexico and Arizona) after her husband's death.
 Ruthie Joad — The youngest daughter, age twelve.
 Winfield Joad — The youngest male in the family, aged ten. He and Ruthie are close.
 Muley Graves - A neighbor of the Joads, he is offered to come along to California with
them but refuses. Two of the family dogs are left in his care, while the third goes along
with the family and is killed by a car on the road when they stop for gas).
 Ivy and Sairy Wilson — Kansas folks in a similar predicament, who help attend the
death of Grampa and subsequently share the traveling with the Joads as far as the
California state line. It is implied Sairy is too ill to carry on.
 Mr. Wainwright — The father of Aggie Wainwright and husband of Mrs. Wainwright.
Worries over his daughter who is sixteen and in his words "growed up".
 Mrs. Wainwright — Mother to Aggie Wainwright and wife to Mr. Wainwright. She
helps deliver Rose of Sharon's stillborn baby with Ma.
 Aggie Wainwright — Sixteen years of age. Daughter to Mr. and Mrs. Wainwright.
Intends to marry Al. Aggie takes care of Ruthie and Winfield when Rose of Sharon goes
into labor. She has limited interactions with the other characters. Her real name is Agnes.
 Floyd Knowles — the man at the Hooverville who urges Tom and Casy to join labor
organizations. He agitates the police and this results in Casy going to jail.
 Mike - A deputy who is hit by Floyd, tripped by Tom and knocked out by Casy at the
Hooverville. He claims that Casy did not hit him (as he did not see it) but Casy convinces
him he did. In the film, his name is Joe.
 George - A guard at the peach orchard. He kills Casy, and is then killed by Tom.

Marcus Diana Maria

Clasa a XII-a C