Status Updates From Whose Names Are Unknown

A white man saying he’s equal to a Black man AND saying he wants the Black man’s respect…in a book written in 1938-1939?! No wonder they said they couldn’t publish another book about the Dust Bowl after Grapes of Wrath, why publish a more progressive book when you could just hype up the very white one instead.

I understand that this book is often considered “unsentimental” but there’s so much heart in the deceptively simple prose that I can’t help but feel for this family.

“Strange how a man longed for both freedom and security, and the one couldn’t be had together with the other. He could walk home by this road, or to the highway and then into the world outside that he had seen so little. Was it some planned contrariness of nature or some vast mistake in the framework of men’s lives?