The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck First Edition 1939

The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck First Edition 1939. Literary description of nature. Writers like Chekhov oppose the use of similes and thick descriptions of nature. Sentences like 'the sea roared like a lion.' Chekhov and others say the sea does not roar, it waves, it is turbulent, etc. However, roaring is a term specific to a real animal. Perhaps the hypothetical sentence mentioned earlier has been overused for centuries, and Chekhov is right. But what if the writer says 'the sea was like an old lion, silent yet still majestic.'? Chekhov's argument only applies against old-fashioned or pseudo-literary writers; otherwise, one cannot make a very general judgment, and each sentence should be evaluated based on its specific value. If someone writes 'the sea was like a sickly lion,' the reader might smile and imagine a sick and swollen lion, but envisioning a weak and feeble sea is like imagining a white blackness! Impossible. Thus, although the simile structure provides numerous possibilities for word combinations, these possibilities are not infinite. Steinbeck and American writers, in general, are not known for literary embellishments and poetic styles, but Steinbeck utilizes the literary capacities of the English language. The description of the last two months of spring and the beginning of summer, May and June, which in Steinbeck's hometown in Southern and Central California is always warm, is like a time-lapse filming of a flower's growth; for example, if you take a picture every hour, when you see all the pictures in sequence, you can see the growth that took a week in just one minute and understand it better. The second page continues the description of nature's movements. Only from the third page do references to people and humans begin, but everything is still overshadowed by nature. I have lived in Southern California and am familiar with the area that serves as the backdrop for this book, the 'Fresno' region and its surroundings. I have seen the farms that Steinbeck describes, although nowadays, the majority of workers there are Mexican and South American and Filipino (from the eighties when I saw it, I don't know about now). Of course, the cities along the Pacific Ocean are beautiful, and there are extraordinary and unique pieces of nature in that region (like the 'Pacific Coast Highway' from south to north California), but compared to the East Coast of America, the color palette of nature in this area is limited.