"As a high school kid struggling to write fiction, some books meant more than others, and some burst upon me with the power of a thunderbolt. John Steinbeck's 'Grapes of Wrath was one of those. The humanity of the story lifted me as a reader, but as an apprentice in the craft of writing, I was excited--almost breathless, really--with the audacity of Steinbeck's technique. He shifts, especially in the early going, from the wide focus (as the Okies stream west toward California) to the narrow with the aplomb of an acrobat. Probably the best example of Steinbeck working in tight focus is the turtle-crossing-the-road segment in 'Grapes'...I was moved by his ability to indicate the eternal by delineating the prosaic." "It is a very long novel, the longest that Steinbeck has written, and yet it reads as though it had been composed in a flash, ripped off a typewriter and delivered to the public as an ultimatum. It is a long and thoughtful novel as one thinks about it. It is a short and vivid scene as one feels it." "[T]here are moments when THE GRAPES OF WRATH reads like an early glimpse of what would become the phenomenon of economic globalization."