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This is not simply culturally but also because Bread Givers emerges as a far more hopeful work. Steinbeck shows the blood, toil, and tears it takes to produce the grain that the women of the bread givers make for the men studying Torah. Although the Grapes of Wrath became a novel, by reading John Steinbeck's Harvest Gypsies: On the Road to the Grapes of Wrath, the reader gains access to the real-life portraits of the California's white migrant farm workers that inspired the book. These people were denied access to the American dream of the bounty of the family farm and the right of every American to his or her own plot of land in a way that seems far more insurmountable than Yezierska's immigrants. These migrants, rather than moving up in the world, suddenly lose everything and find themselves with no opportunities for social advancement and education.
This occurs because of economic and class-based rather than cultural reasons. The long-time residents of America worry just as much about money as tenement residents, but can see no way out of their economic slavery to wealthy agribusiness capitalists. The migrant workers have little educational opportunities...
Yezierska's work is a thinly disguised autobiography, blending fictional techniques like dialogue with a passionate, personal narrative voice. Steinbeck's work is a nonfiction newspaper piece that eventually became one of the greatest works of 20th century Depression-era fiction, and it uses dialogue and other fictional techniques to make the reader care about the families, not merely take note of the facts about their existence, and thus promote outrage and political change. Although both works come to different conclusions about the possibility of hard work leading to advancement, they show the ability of emotion and anecdotal experience to paint a richer picture of the economic difficulties of making a new life in America, or sustaining an older form of sustenance.
Works Cited
Steinbeck, John. Harvest Gypsies: On the Road to the Grapes of Wrath. Heyday, 1996.
Yezierska, Anzia. Bread Givers. Persea Books, 2003.
Works Cited
Steinbeck, John. Harvest Gypsies: On the Road to the Grapes of Wrath. Heyday, 1996.
Yezierska, Anzia. Bread Givers. Persea Books, 2003.
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