The Grapes of Wrath. by STEINBECK, John - 1939

New York: The Viking Press,, 1939. Octavo. Original buff cloth, titles to spine and pictorial design to covers in dark brown, endpapers decorated with the sheet music for Battle Hymn of the Republic, top edge yellow. With the dust jacket. Housed in a custom blue cloth chemise within blue half morocco box, spine lettered in gilt, blue cloth sides. A very good copy in the dust jacket, toned, chips and splits expertly repaired on verso. First edition, first printing. A superb presentation copy, inscribed by Steinbeck to the producer of the film adaptation of The Grapes of Wrath, Darryl F. Zanuck, on the front free endpaper: "For Darryl Zannuck [sic] with thanks for a fine picture John Steinbeck 1939 Los Gatos". Steinbeck first watched Zanuck's film at Twentieth-Century Fox on 15 December 1939. He wrote an adulatory letter to his agent Elizabeth Otis shortly afterward saying that "Zanuck has more than kept his word. He has a hard, straight picture in which the actors are submerged so completely that it looks and feels like a documentary film and certainly has a hard, truthful ring. No punches were pulled? In fact, with descriptive matter removed, it is a harsher thing than the book, by far" (cited in Eagan, America's Film Legacy, p. 310). Zanuck's film adaptation, which was publicly released on 24 January 1940, is widely regarded as one of the great American films of the century, and was one of the first 25 films selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress in 1989, for its cultural, historical and aesthetic significance. Both the book and the film are seen as being among the key artistic expressions of the spirit of Depression-era America.