Format:
Book
Title:
Dust bowl migrants in the American imagination / Charles J. Shindo.
Author:
Shindo, Charles J.
Call Number:
C700.103 S556du 1997
Publisher, Date:
Lawrence : University Press of Kansas, c1997.
Description:
xv, 252 p. : ill. ; 25 cm.
Summary:
"More than any other event of the 1930s, the migration of thousands of jobless and dispossessed Americans from the Dust Bowl states to the "promised land" of California evokes the hardships and despair of the Great Depression. In this innovative new study, Charles Shindo shows how public memory of that migration has been dominated not by academic historians but by a handful of artists and reformers."--BOOK JACKET. "Shindo examines the images of Dust Bowl migrants in photography, fiction, film, and song and marks off the various distances between these representations and the realities of migrant lives. He shows how photographer Dorothea Lange, novelist John Steinbeck, Hollywood filmmaker John Ford, and folksinger Woody Guthrie, as well as folklorists and government reformers, sympathized with the migrants' plight but also appropriated that experience to further their own aesthetic and ideological agendas."--BOOK JACKET. "Lange's "Migrant Mother" and other photos, the powerful story of the Joad family in Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, Ford's poetic cinematic adaptation of that novel, and the gritty plainfolk lyrics of Guthrie's Dust Bowl Ballads have all combined to portray the migrants as down-and-out victims of the Great Depression. Shindo, however, contends that these artists failed to fully grasp the essence of "Okie" culture and were more concerned with promoting views and agendas that the migrants themselves might have found inaccurate or unappealing."--BOOK JACKET.
Series:
Rural America
Rural America (Lawrence, Kan.)
Subjects:
Migrant agricultural laborers in art.
Arts, American.
Arts, American -- 20th century.
Migrant agricultural laborers -- United States -- History.
Depressions -- 1929 -- United States.
Dust storms -- Great Plains.
Labor camps -- California.
Droughts -- Great Plains.
Great Plains -- Rural conditions.
California -- Rural conditions.
Contents:
Displaced Voices: The Migrants as American Victims -- 1. The Ideals of American Democracy: New Deal Reformers and the Migrant -- 2. The Passion and the Humanity: Dorothea Lange and Migrant Mother -- 3. The Perfectibility of Man: John Steinbeck and The Grapes of Wrath -- Photo Essay - Introducing Americans to America: The Image of the Migrants -- 4. The World-Old Desire to Tell a Story: John Ford and The Grapes of Wrath -- 5. The Things That You Fight For: Woody Guthrie and the Dust Bowl Ballads -- 6. The Uses of American Culture: Folklorists and the Migrant -- The Ghost of Tom Joad: The Persistence of Dust Bowl Representations.
ISBN:
0700608109 (alk. paper)