So Influential, So California: ‘The Grapes of Wrath’

There are a handful of American books that changed not only their readers’ hearts and minds, but also the country’s legal and political landscape.

Three of the most notable--Frank Norris’ “The Octopus,” Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle” and John Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath”--were written by Californians. So, it’s particularly apt that the California Council for the Humanities has chosen Steinbeck’s masterpiece as the catalyst for a statewide reading and discussion program that will get underway in October.

A variation of the popular “one city, one book” movement (in Los Angeles, Mayor James Hahn has proposed Ray Bradbury’s “Fahrenheit 451”), the commission’s initiative is the first “one state, one book” plan and will involve 180 public libraries.

It’s only coincidental that Steinbeck was chosen this year, on the 100th anniversary of his birth, says the commission’s executive director, Jim Quay. The commission, he says, has an ongoing project “to encourage contemporary Californians to tell their California stories .... We wanted a book for people to model. My associate director, Ralph Lewin, and his wife, Caitlin, were driving down the Central Valley, thinking about what book might serve, and Caitlin suggested ‘The Grapes of Wrath,’ which seemed like the perfect choice.”

So, too, are the questions Quay would like to see readers pose: “Who are the Joads of today, but also, where are the Steinbecks?”

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In the Words of Charles Colson?

Since serving time for his part in the Watergate scandal, onetime Nixon aide Charles Colson has founded a national prison ministry and emerged as a leading figure among evangelical Christians. His 38 books have sold more than 5 million copies, and he is a daily radio commentator and a columnist for Christianity Today, generally regarded as America’s most influential evangelical magazine.

There, Colson’s column occupies an entire page topped by his byline and photograph. And the prose suggests that while the author may have found God behind bars, he lost none of the confrontational style that made him one of the hard men in a self-consciously tough administration. In the magazine’s most recent issue, for example, Colson attacks the “Post-Truth Society,” and one of the column’s two sub-headlines notes that “even the man on the street sees little wrong with lying.”

Colson names names, clubbing everyone from football coaches to hysterical teenagers. Historian Stephen Ambrose comes in for particular censure and is described as “dealing in deceit” because he “plagiarized portions of other historians’ works and--notwithstanding his public apology--seemed hardly disturbed by the resulting controversy.”

The problem with all this is that--notwithstanding his byline and picture--Colson did not write the column, according to current and former employees. The actual author, they say, was Anne Morse, one of two full-time writers Colson employs, along with various “contract” writers and an editor.

Nor is this the first time questions have arisen about Colson’s actual contribution to the books and commentaries ascribed to him. In the mid-1990s, Christianity Today received a letter that criticized Colson’s reliance on ghostwriters.

Around that time, he decided to share credit for his column with Nancy R. Pearcey, who says that at that point, she had been writing the column “for two years.” Colson, she says, “sometimes suggested ideas he wanted inserted, but usually just approved the drafts I had written.”

According to Pearcey, who no longer works for Colson, that relationship “continued until 1999, when Chuck and I wrote a book, [the bestselling] ‘How Now Shall We Live?’ with the understanding we would share credit. I wrote the majority of the chapters, Chuck wrote some, and another contract writer wrote nine. But when the cover design and the ads came out, my name wasn’t on them.”

Pearcey said that when Colson’s most recent column appeared, she recognized it as Morse’s work and “called to compliment her. She told me how she’d researched it and run it by other friends ... before Chuck approved the final version.”

Another Colson employee, who asked to not be identified, agreed with Pearcey’s account. Colson was unavailable and Morse declined comment.

David Neff, who edits Christianity Today, says that “with Mr. Colson we presume people understand that he has a gigantic output and that one human being can’t put out all those words.”

Still, Neff said, he was under the impression that after the relationship with Pearcey ended, Colson “started writing his own columns ... but I have been thinking that the time has come to raise the question with him again.”

When Neff does, Pearcey believes, he will find that “overall, Chuck’s contribution is much less than the public imagines.”

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What They’re Working On

Bestselling short-story writer and novelist Janet Fitch is the author of, among other works, the novel “White Oleander.”

Asked about her work in progress, she replied: “I’m writing a novel set primarily in Los Angeles in the 1920s. My grandmother came here in 1922 as the wife of a studio wardrobe man. He had gone back to his old neighborhood in Brooklyn, married a 15-year-old girl and proceeded to make her life a living hell with his womanizing and alcoholism. I asked myself why. I posited the idea that he must have been trying to prove something to someone and--with that in mind--I started to write their story. And everything changed: He became a cameraman and then a photographer. She is now 16. I am trying to make them unique characters, pieces of myself really and no longer my grandmother and her rotten first husband.

“Right now, I am in 1922, seeing Los Angeles as it was then. People had come here from all over the world trying, for various reasons, to find a new way of being, and that’s what I’m really interested in exploring. It was a time when the First World War had discredited the past and only the modern was still untarnished.”