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Few books have caused as big a stir as John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, when it was published in April 1939. By May, it was the nation’s number one bestseller, but in Kern County, California -- the Joads’ newfound home -- the book was burned publicly and banned from library shelves. Obscene in the Extreme tells the remarkable story behind this fit of censorship.

When W. B. “Bill” Camp, a giant cotton and potato grower, presided over its burning in downtown Bakersfield, he declared: “We are angry, not because we were attacked but because we were attacked by a book obscene in the extreme sense of the word.” But Gretchen Knief, the Kern County librarian, bravely fought back. “If that book is banned today, what book will be banned tomorrow?”

Obscene in the Extreme serves as a window into an extraordinary time of upheaval in America -- a time when, as Steinbeck put it, there seemed to be “a revolution... going on.”

Publishers Weekly

Monday, Jun 23, 2008
During May of 1939, as the Nazis were burning books throughout Germany, the people of Bakersfield Calif., did exactly the same thing with John Steinbeck's new bestseller, The Grapes of Wrath. As Wartzman (The King of California) shows in this intriguing account, the banning of Steinbeck's masterpiece throughout California's Kern County was orchestrated by rich local growers: men who were busy exploiting scores of Joad families, the very men Steinbeck exposed in his novel. As a pretext, the growers cited, among other things, Steinbeck's use of "foul" language ("bastard," "bitch") and vivid scenes such as Rose of Sharon, having lost her baby, offering her milk-filled breast to a starving man. One lone librarian, Gretchen Knief, led the charge against the censors, but the book -- by then a Pulitzer Prize winner -- remained banned a year later. While all this was happening, Steinbeck was suffering the strains of his collapsing first marriage. In telling this unique tale, Wartzman artfully weaves the personal and the political in a book that readers will find engaging on more than one level.

Additional praise for Obscene in the Extreme

“Rick Wartzman gives us a dramatic glimpse of a dark American past, where John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath is burned as obscene and farm workers are prosecuted as communists for trying to form a union. It was only 1939. Are the seeds of hate dead?”
-- Anthony Lewis, former New York Times columnist and author of Freedom for the Thought That We Hate: A Biography of the First Amendment

“Rick Wartzman has made a dramatic and tension-filled narrative out of the story of how The Grapes of Wrath was banned in Kern County, and he has given us a chapter of our history many might not know. His new book is invaluable and exciting.”
-- Susan Straight, author of A Million Nightingales

-- Scott Martelle, Los Angeles Times