Reading is its own reward
I was reminded today just why I love John Steinbeck, and why I am so lucky to be doing this course. Working on my Documentary Photography essay I've dug up a lot of the same sources that I used for my A-level history coursework, where I analysed The Grapes of Wrath as an historical document. It's like meeting old friends. I heard the voice of the Migrant Mother, and got that shivery feeling when you realise you are hearing something real, a part of proper history.
And I opened up Steinbeck's The Winter of Our Discontent, and in the place where you normally read the standard 'all characters and places in this novel are fictional' spiel, I found the following, sitting there, rather innocuously:
Readers seeking to identify the fictional people and
places here described would do better to inspect their
own communities and search their own hearts, for this
book is about a large part of America today.
I think I have drunk too much Lucozade, and not eaten enough today. I continue to feel peculiar.