Preview

You Can't Take It with You

Good Essays
Open Document
Open Document
1471 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
You Can't Take It with You
English 11
The Pursuit of Happiness In the decade preceding the Second World War, America followed Adam Smith’s economic ideas into the abyss of The Great Depression. Factories went bankrupt, bank closed, millions of people lost their jobs, and most of society was in great distress. This distress produced a great number of works which reflected the public’s discontent with society. The Grapes of Wrath is a great example of those opuses which let oppressed people’s voices be noticed. Frank Capra, rather than simply criticize the cruel truth of society, brought forward his new movie, You Can’t Take it With You, in order to bring a sense of relief with his unique humor. The protagonists of You Can’t Take It With You have opportunities to make their dreams come true: The eccentric Professor Vanderhof’s good nature asserts itself and converts Anthony P. Kirby to do what he likes instead of lusting after money. The Vanderhof family lives together and enjoys life, unconcerned about being homeless. Capra’s romanticism, which is close to naiveté, tells people under the shadow of the Great Depression that “When God Closes A Door, He Leaves A Window Open.” In 1947,Capra recycled his idealistic views in his first movie after the war, It’s a Wonderful Life,an optimistic view of Capra’s dream and morality. Americans had just experienced a world of suffering and were starting families and buying houses and trying to get back to normal..It’s a Wonderful Lifeis released to provide people with hopes; teaching people never compromise to the cruel reality, and boosting people’s courage and confidence.The movie was unsuccessful in its original release, but thirty years later, It’s a Wonderful Lifehad became a classic because it is so uplifting. Capra’s movies lead people to discover the strength from suffering, the opportunity from desperation, the beauty from ugliness and the legend from ordinary. The term Capra-esque means focusing on courage and the triumph of the

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Good Essays

    In the book The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck it tells the story of how it was like to live in the times of the Great Depression. One paragraph in particular stands out from all the others. This paragraph shows the reality of what it was like to be in the Great Depression and the hard times people had to go through. The Great Depression was a horrible time in American history the government had money problems, people were losing their money or it was lost before they could even get to it. This paragraph has a lot of symbolism and imagery in a small body of words.…

    • 487 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    "How can we live without our lives? How will we know it's us without our past? No. Leave it. Burn it" (88). Do you know what it's like to move and only have room for one bag to pack? And you didn't even know if you were guaranteed a shelter or food? In the novel The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck, an migrant Oklahoma family, the Joads, sell their farm and travel west in search of a new life away from the tragedies of the Dust Bowl. A minor character, Grampa, plays a vital role with his childlike energy, common quixotism, and connection to his land and his family.…

    • 796 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Grapes of Wrath has several “layers” of understanding, but by far the most prominent of these is the idea of organizing unemployed workers. At the time it was so controversial it got the book banned and it was burned, and still today at times comes under fire for a couple of it’s themes.…

    • 820 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    What distinguishes this one novel is not only its greater authenticity of detail but also the genius of its author, who, avoiding mere propaganda, was able to raise those details and themes to the level of lasting art, while muting none of the passionate human cry against injustice.... In fact, the response of students leaves no doubt that as literature The Grapes of Wrath is generally experienced more completely today than it was in 1939, when it was much more difficult to dissociate the novel from current events or to see Steinbeck's bold technical experiments as something more than what one critic called "calculated…

    • 1702 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Better Essays

    “ . . .Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.” In the American Declaration of Independence it is established that all people are subjected to these, among other, inalienable rights. The pursuit of happiness became a focal point for many Americans during the Great Depression, a time when poverty covered this great nation. The Walls family is cursed with this poverty for much of their lives. The title of the memoir “The Glass Castle” is later shown to represent this pursuit. Through the repetition of negative circumstances, the author elaborates on the aspect of achieving happiness through tenacity. Juxtaposition between the negative, destructive decisions of the parents and the positive, beneficial decisions of the children show the potentials of the pursuit of happiness. This same juxtaposition between parent and child shows the overall success of the pursuit is not entirely dependent on monetary status. Through the repetition and juxtaposition, the author thoroughly explores the concept of the American Dream, and how it can be pursued and achieved by anyone.…

    • 859 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Good Essays

    The novel, The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck, is a classic American novel about the Great Depression. The novel is written in incalerarly chapters and is about the struggles that migrant workers faced during this time. When Steinbeck was writing his novel, he did lots of research and the struggles he writes about are from real stories. As we look closely at the chapters individually, from the syntax and diction, we are able to conclude the overall purpose of the novel. Steinbeck’s use of parallelism and diction, in chapter 5, supports his message that the farmers were against something they could not take down alone.…

    • 1275 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    The Dust Bowl Odyssey

    • 921 Words
    • 3 Pages

    The Grapes of Wrath recounts the story of the Great Depression in Southwest America. By the mid-1930s, the drought had destroyed multitudes of farm families, and America had fallen into the Great Depression. Unable to pay their mortgages or invest in the kinds of industrial equipment now required, many Dust Bowl farmers were forced to leave their land. Without employment, thousands of families traveled to California in hopes of finding new means of survival. But the farm country of California quickly became overcrowded with the migrant workers.…

    • 921 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    Capra himself has many deeply instilled values and all of his films portray that being a great example for auteur theory. Though some of his films show these morales more forth right than others, all of them contain a bit of Capra somewhere, or in one of the characters. In Capra's films "It's a Wonderful Life" and "Pocketful of Miracles" there are many similarities and differences between Capra's characters, and thematic elements.…

    • 1213 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    Advice I have for future readers; I know we hear this saying a lot, and we do not heed by it ever, but its time we should- ‘Don’t judge a book by its cover’. Really. Don’t. You’ll only end up tripping yourself up. For once I began to stop paying attention to the people around me, but rather focused my attention on my books, I began to realize that each one was special and relatable in its own way. Shockingly enough, I am glad I read these books. Not only am I able to say I have survived The Grapes of Wrath, but I would also recommend it to my fellow peers. Not that they would listen to me… but it’s worth a…

    • 1917 Words
    • 8 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    Grapes of Wrath

    • 2467 Words
    • 10 Pages

    The Grapes of Wrath is an American allegory of human suffering that takes place in a dark period of the history of our nation, brought on by the Dust Bowl migration from Oklahoma, Texas, and Arkansas, during the 1930s and the depression. People experience this tragedy in different ways. The landowner who had to remove the families was torn in turmoil; Steinbeck writes, “ Some of the owner men were kind because they hated what they had to do and some of them were angry because they hated to be cruel, and some of them were cold because they had long ago found that…

    • 2467 Words
    • 10 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Good Essays

    Grapes Of Wrath

    • 962 Words
    • 4 Pages

    Tied with the economic catastrophe of the Great Depression, this crisis forced thousands of people, many of them agriculturalists, off their property, wandering from place to place in hunt of work to survive. Several of these people, attracted by promises of opportunity, moved to California. Although they were from several states, “the term ‘Okie’ - coined for a native of Oklahoma, one of the hardest-hit areas - was attached to the waves of families desperately heading West, their few remaining possessions piled high on old, barely operating vehicles. Those who made it to California found little work, poor living conditions, a great deal of resentment and prejudice, and even violence directed against them.”(The Grapes of Wrath) These were the environments Steinbeck revealed in the late 1930s when he visited migrant camps in northern California for the San Francisco…

    • 962 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    Of Mice and Men

    • 924 Words
    • 4 Pages

    John Steinbeck (born in 1902) was a talented Californian writer. Steinbeck spent much of his time in New York and the Salinas Valley. Although he spent a few years at Stanford University, he desperately wanted to be a writer, therefore he started writing. His work includes The Grapes of Wrath, Cannery Row, The Red Pony, East of Eden and of course, Of Mice and Men. Hollywood loved Steinbeck and even made these very books in to film adaptations. Steinbeck was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1962 for his realistic but imaginative writings. In this essay I will be talking about one of John’s well known books, Of Mice and Men. This story is about two travelling ranch workers, George and Lennie, trying to earn enough money to get their own house and farm. The tale is based is 1930’s America during the Great Depression. This book encompasses themes of prejudice, racism and the fight for personal independence.…

    • 924 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Good Essays

    John Steinbeck’s novel, ‘Of Mice and Men’, was published in 1937. At this time America was still suffering the from the depression and the wandering workers who form the basis of the novel were very much within the consciousness of a nation separated by wealth yet driven by the idea of ‘the American dream’. Steinbeck’s novel is, however, essentially a tale of loneliness and of men struggling alone against a cold, uncaring and forgettable destiny.…

    • 953 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    The ideal of the ‘American Dream’ has hardly changed over the past century. The dream is a unique American phenomenon. It represents a nebulous concept that is exemplified by a number of American values. Many deem wealth and success to be the means to this paradigm. When stability, security and family values also become part of the suburban lifestyle, the American Dream comes close to becoming reality. Nick Carraway, the candid narrator of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel, The Great Gatsby analyzes the legitimacy of this principle through the inevitable downfall of Jay Gatsby. The novel takes place during the ‘roaring twenties’ in two sophisticated, affluent Long Island neighborhoods. The people in these neighborhoods epitomize the superficiality and arrogance that distorts the American Dream. Fitzgerald utilizes this environment and its people to examine the negative attributes of the American Dream that eventually withered. So the ‘American Dream’ wasn’t dramatized in this book.…

    • 1021 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” that is just one of many quotes of the idea of the American Dream. Many people have different perceptions of what they think the American Dream is; some people believe the American Dream doesn’t exist, some believe it’s about having a sustainable job and a family to take care of, and some people think it’s all about being rich and living life in the fast lane. There are many different opinions about this topic but the best one to ever come up is happiness. The key to the American Dream is happiness, there’s no point of going through life feeling sad and wanting people to feel bad for us, we as Americans can dictate those negative emotions and decide whether we want to be depressed for the rest of our lives or pursue the dream we’ve always wanted to achieve through hard work, personal values, and education.…

    • 1718 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Better Essays