I’m Fixing to Feel a lot Better

I’m fixing to feel a lot better.

And it’s all because of a book I just read, and it wasn’t a current best seller, nor was it written by some inspirational guru. On the contrary, it was published in 1939 and won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award.

Set during the Great Depression, it focuses on economic hardship due to changes in the financial system and agricultural industries. Sound familiar?

What I’m feeling better about is these hard economic times we’ve been going through for the past several years. I thought they were about the toughest times folks have ever had in America, that is, until I read this book.

It’s about folks who had to default on their loans and had their farms repossessed, lost all their savings and were left with nothing. Sound familiar?

The story is about this one family of 12 from Oklahoma who packed up and headed for California in a rickety old truck, along with hoards of others like themselves.

Grandpa died along the way and they had to bury him in a grave beside the road. Then Grandma died when they finally limped across the California state line.

Things didn’t get any better in California, where the farm work they had been enticed by was almost impossible to find, and only paid starvation wages when they did.

They were forced to live in migratory camps and at times subsided on flour fried in lard, and the children were ragged, hungry and cold.

The author of this classic tale is John Steinbeck (1902-1968), and the title, taken from a line of the Battle Hymn of the Republic, is The Grapes of Wrath, and 72 years after its publication it still sells 150,000 copies a year.

Mr. Steinbeck was born in California, attended Stanford University, but never graduated. In 1925 he went to New York where he failed as a free-lance writer and returned to California to become a successful writer. Among others, his works also include Of Mice and Men and East of Eden.

So after reading a personal account of what a family went through during the Great Depression, 2011 doesn’t seem like it was so bad after all, and I’m fixing to feel real good about 2012.