Steinbeck (John) The Grapes of Wrath

London, Heinemann, 1939.

First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket, priced 8s6d. Publisher’s coeval wrap-around promotional band. Housed in custom cloth drop-back box.

First UK edition of Steinbeck’s best-known novel. Driven from their Oklahoma farm by drought, debt and the banks, the Joad family set out along Route 66 for California and the promise of work, only to find exploitation, hunger and hostility in the migrant camps. The novel was published in New York by Viking on 14 April 1939 and became the best-selling book of the year, with 430,000 copies printed by February 1940. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award. It was also denounced as propaganda by agricultural interests and banned and burned in places, and the controversy contributed to the American Library Association’s adoption of its Library Bill of Rights.

The jacket’s rear panel prints an extract from Alexander Woollcott’s BBC broadcast on the book, “An American Voice”, in which he calls it “an American Les Misérables” and announces that it will be brought out by Heinemann “in the next month or two”. It is accompanied here by the publisher’s wrap-around promotional band: “Book Society Fiction Choice. Evening Standard Book of the Month. Did you hear Alexander Woollcott’s sensational broadcast?”