Claremont Insider: The Grapes of Wrath Meets Twitter

Wednesday, April 15, 2009

The Grapes of Wrath Meets Twitter


Yesterday's Daily Bulletin contained an article by Joe Blackstock, resident historian, memorializing the 70th anniversary of the publication of John Steinbeck's, The Grapes of Wrath. For a local hook, Blackstock invoked Route 66, the road by which the Okies traveled to California. He does a nice job illuminating the California part of the road through the prism of the Joads. According to Blackstock, it's not entirely clear that Steinbeck had the Joads following the real "Mother Road" all the way through Claremont though, instead taking them west from Barstow, over the Tehachapis, to the Central Valley.

In this faster-paced, high tech day and age, Steinbeck would've had to adopt all the modern media to get his novel out. Brevity is the soul of wit, and nothing makes for brevity more than the 140-character limitation on Twitter messages (tweets). There are even Twitter novels, and here is the Twitter version of The Grapes of Wrath as Steinbeck would no doubt have written it:

The Grapes of Wrath
Times is hard. My sister suckles a starving stranger. I'm so outta here.