The Grapes of Wrath
It is a story of the migration of agricultural workers from Oklahoma to Califonia. It consists of two blocks of material: the westward long hard journey of the Joads and the other disposed Oklahomans, the the general picture of the Great Depression. The Great Depression throws the country into abject chaos and makes life intolerable for the luckless million. Farmers in one of the worst stricken area become bankrupt and begin to move in a body toward California, where they hope to have a better life. It is a most tragic and brutalizing human experience for families like the Joads. There is unspeakable pain and suffering on the road, and deaths occurs frequently. Everywhere they go, they see a universal landscape of decay and desolation. When they reached California and try to settle down, they meet with bitter resistance from the local landowners.
  The implication of the title: As grape will mature, anger will be mature, and it will result in revolutionary. As injustice building up and up, something is going to explode into violence.
1. The novel is full of bitterness but not exactly despair. There is still a ray of hope.
2. It helped toward increasing the nation’s awareness of its problem.
3. It is Steinbeck’s clear expression of sympathy with the disposed and the wretched. So it was accused of being communist-oriented and banned for a long time. And Steinbeck himself is regarded as “Spokesman of the oppressed”
4. Style of Steinbeck: conversation dialect and full of slang
Unit 18
Black American Literature
Frederick Douglass 道格拉斯 (1817-1895)
Born a slave, he is a leading figure in the abolitionist movement.
My Bondage and My Freedom 我的奴役和我的自由
An autobiography, a moving and historically interesting book, relates how the archetypal story of Blacks escaping from the cruel and wicked white master to emancipation. It was expanded into The life and Times of Frederic Douglass我的自述 to include his civil War experience.

Booker T. Washington (1856-1915)
Washington’s stance was one of compromise. He made a speech in 1895, saying that Blacks will ask for no vote, no social equality, no political power, but they should have to work even though it may not be higher-level; they should have education, thought it may not be higher educator, and they should make money to live well. His position in history is dubious. He was accused of selling Blacks to the whites. His autobiography, Up From Slavery(1901), tells about this speech and its interesting-though dubious result.

William E.B.Dubois1868-1963 杜波依斯
A sociologist and a historian, intellectual leader of Black protest at that time. Join the communist party in 1961, visited China twice.
The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches黑人的灵魂

Langston Hughes (1902-1967)兰斯.顿休斯
The most important person in the Harlem Renaissance, one of the major authors to help to make Black culture.
Poem: The Weary Blues 疲倦的布鲁士人(1926): sad in tone, describing the fact of having to live in a very cruel and oppressive world, but there is no fight in them.
Collection of short stories: The Ways of White Folks白人的行径 (1934), exposing the savagery of the southern capitalists, talking about depression.
He created an endearing character: Jesse B.Simple: Simple Speaks His Mind辛普尔倾吐衷情; The Best of Simple辛普尔的高明; Simple’s Uncle Sam.辛普尔的山姆大叔
 Montage of a Dream Deferred: It is an angry book and shows a Hughes no longer able to contain his anger at the conditions of the Blacks and the wretched poor.

Richard Wright (1908-1960)里查德.怀特
One of the greatest of Black writers
Uncle Tom’s children: Four Novellas汤姆叔叔的孩子们
Black Boy黑孩子 (1944), an autobiography relating the bitter experience of his youth.
Native Son土生子 his master work, dealing with racial question. Bigger Thomas is born and brought up in a slum environment where rats are everywhere, (the story begins with how he kills a rat in the only room in which four of the family live). As he is jobless, the whole family lives in gloominess and tension . The discrimination turns him an outsider of the society. He is struggling against poverty, fear, humiliation and hatred. Then he works for a white family as a chauffer. One night, he drives the only daughter, Miss Mary home. As Mary is dead drunk, and can not walk, he takes her to her room in his arms. Just then, her blind mother turns up. He is seized with panic, because he will be accused of breaking into the white lady’s room at night. So he covers her mouth with a pillow, but unfortunately, suffocates her. It seems to be a tragedy to him, but Bigger finds his significance, his own value as a Black from the violence and feels proud of himself, because what he does shocks the whole white society, the whole America. He is sent to electric chair in the end. 
The message in it for the Blacks is clear, that they are human beings, and should be treated as such, and that if nothing else can help to assert their dignity and identity, then it is legislative to resort to violence. Bigger Thomas, the hero of the book, embodies a new type of Black personality. Rebellious by nature, he never is able to feel at ease with the world in which he finds himself. Thus he represents a higher level of Black racial awareness. In him and his actions, the Blacks saw their identity and the whites their folly and obligation. As a result, to say that Richard Wright began the contemporary Black literary tradition of violent self-assertion is not exaggerated.

Ralph Ellison 拉尔夫.艾里森
Invisible Man看不见的人
 As the story begins, the hero-narrator was in the hole of mine, relating his bitter experience of having lived a death of life for some twenty years until he discovered his invisibility. He began his life with great expectations and won the approval of the whites of his region with his speech at middle school graduation ceremony. Thus he got a scholarship to a state college for Negroes, but was expelled for having showing a white benefactor of the institution around places unfit for his eyes. Then he went to New York to seek his own identity. He worked in a factory, but the black foreman suspected him of a spy of the labor union. Later on the occasion of an old Black couple being out of a flat, he made a radical speech which put him in touch with a “brotherhood”, but then a divergence arose between him and the leader of “brotherhood”. What was worse, what he did aroused hatred of another Black Nationalist organization, and was run after by them. To escape, he jumped into a hole of mine.
It tells an archetypal story of modern times. The protagonist-narrator is nameless apparently because he is invisible (invisible because people refuse to see him). What he tried to do is to be seen. In fact, the novel is about modern man’s quest for self-realization, and it concerns the plight not merely of a Black individual, even not the Black race alone.，but of the modern existence of man as a whole.

James Baldwin 鲍德温1924-1986
Go Tell It on the Mountain (1954)向苍天呼吁
Relates the galling reality of Black life against a historical background which shows the Blacks as a race have been over the centuries trying to attain self-recognition and emotional and psychological maturity. Tells his people that they are suffering an age-old injustice, and they must fight with all one’s strength.
Notes of a Native Son 土生子札记
Nobody Knows My Name
The Fire Next 下一次将是烈火 (calls for the Blacks to resort to means including force so as to bring about the nation’s self-assertion, and he prophesies that the fire will come next time if they fail in their mission.
Giovanni’s Room乔凡尼的房间： concerned essentially with homosexuality.
Another Country另一个国家 How Long the Train Been Gone告诉我火车开走了多久, treating the two Baldwin theme, race and homosexuality.