John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath remains one of the defining American novels of the twentieth century — a portrait of displacement, endurance, labor, and survival during the Dust Bowl migration west.

This copy is a true first edition, first printing, published by The Viking Press in 1939, retaining its original first issue dust jacket.

Beyond the book itself, this example carries an unusual history. The front endpaper is inscribed to Major Ben Bruce Blakeney of Oklahoma City in 1939. Blakeney would later become connected to the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal following the Second World War and lecture at Tokyo University. The volume was later acquired in Kyoto and still bears small pencil annotations in Japanese characters on the flyleaf — traces of the book’s long movement across continents and generations.

The jacket shows wear consistent with age, including fading to the spine, edge tears, and some loss near the lower spine/front panel, though it remains largely intact and presents beautifully in archival protection. The binding remains square and solid, with a notably clean interior for a book now more than eighty-five years old.

A deeply human novel in a copy that has clearly lived a life of its own.