John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath as a Primer for Cultural Geography

There is no need to write additional textbooks in cultural geography. All the messages of the profession are already committed to ink. The motivations, processes, patterns and the consequences of human interaction with the landscape have all been discovered and chronicled with grace and clarity. Authors dedicated to the comprehension and elucidation of order within the overtly haphazard flow of human events have given academics the materials needed to profess the patterns which illustrate this order. We fail, however, as scholars to make adequate use of these data for the simple reason that this material is labelled ‘fiction’. ¹