Steinbeck’s Masterpiece Turns 50

April 14, 1989, marks the 50th anniversary of the publication of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. Viking Press, which published the original edition, is publishing an anniversary edition ($25; 619 pp.) with an introduction by Studs Terkel. Penguin, the paperback half of Viking Penguin, Inc., offers a quality paperback edition ($9.95) and a mass market edition ($4.95) of that landmark novel by the only Californian ever to win the Nobel Prize for literature.

Not surprisingly, this anniversary year has also brought a small crop of books about Steinbeck. Viking offers Working Days: The Journals of ‘The Grapes of Wrath,’ edited by critic Robert DeMott. The journals are Steinbeck’s, all right, but what modest interest the book has comes almost entirely from DeMott’s thoughtful notes and introduction. (He is editor of the Steinbeck Quarterly.) The title should be contrasted, perhaps, with “Thinking Days,” for there is next to no reflection in them, just the hasty record of hard literary labor.

Some journalists dream that their author interviews will be read 50 years later. That depends mostly (if not entirely) on the authors they may have interviewed. Conversations With John Steinbeck (University of Mississippi Press: $19.95; 112 pp.) collects some of the newspaper and magazine interviews that Steinbeck gave at the time his book was being published. As a “proletarian novel” at a time when communism was still an influence in the American labor movement, the book was uniquely controversial in its day. These interviews carry at least some of the electricity of that controversy with them.

It may be no accident that “The Grapes of Wrath” worked so well in the newspaper: The novel arose from a series of articles on the agony of the migrant workers that Steinbeck had written in 1936 for a progressive newspaper, the San Francisco News. The Harvest Gypsies (Heyday: $7.95; 62 pp.) reprints those articles, which were reprinted in their own day as an activist pamphlet. The Heyday edition includes an introduction by Berkeley historian Charles Wollenberg and striking period photos.

No unabridged audiocassette of “The Grapes of Wrath” is in print, but Caedmon Audio has two different recordings of excerpts from the novel read by the late Henry Fonda, who starred in the film version, which appeared only a year after the book. Recorded Books Inc. (1 800 638-1304) has also chosen this season to offer for sale or 30-day rental an unabridged recording of Steinbeck’s much briefer Cannery Row.

Of all the Steinbeck offerings in this anniversary year, however, the most enjoyable may be Jackson J. Benson’s Looking for Steinbeck’s Ghost (University of Oklahoma Press: $24.95; 231 pp.), from which the adjoining comparison of Steinbeck and Hemingway has been excerpted. Benson, a Californian who grew up in the region Steinbeck writes about in “The Grapes of Wrath,” spent 15 years writing his The True Adventures of John Steinbeck, Writer (Viking). That book appeared in 1984, just five years ago. Benson’s new book is in some sense the unauthorized companion to his authorized biography. Written, however, with a uniquely engaging combination of modesty and a kind of easy-going intimacy, it is if anything gentler rather than tougher than the biography (which won the PEN USA Center biography prize the year it was published). This time out, Benson is writing about himself, committing at length and in public the biographer’s unforgivable sin, but what he has to say delivers Steinbeck to us as our contemporary in a way that nothing less subjective ever could. Every writer who lives on lives in the heart of someone who loves him and can tell you why. In this little book about the writing of his big book, Benson is that someone.