Drucker Institute director to discuss his new book, ‘Obscene in the Extreme: The Burning and Banning of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath’

Rick Wartzman, director of the Drucker Institute, will discuss his new book, Obscene in the Extreme: The Burning and Banning of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, on Sept. 4 at ALOUD, the public lecture series at the Los Angeles Central Library.

Joining Wartzman for this onstage conversation will be William Deverell, professor of history at USC and director of the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West.

Wartzman’s book has been called “revelatory and stunning” by Pulitzer Prize-winning oral historian Studs Terkel, while Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author Anthony Lewis has praised it for providing “a dramatic glimpse of a dark American past.” Publishers Weekly, meanwhile, has said that “Wartzman artfully weaves the personal and the political in a book that readers will find engaging on more than one level.”

“Although I began to write this book several years ago, before I joined the Drucker Institute, its main theme is certainly one that would have interested Peter Drucker: the class politics of the 1930s,” Wartzman said. “Indeed, this was a subject that he himself explored in his first major work, The End of Economic Man.”

The event is set for 7 p.m. Although it is free and open to the public, reservations are strongly encouraged. For more information, click here.

Drucker Institute