Omnibus (1967)

The Great American Novel (1x23)

Uitzenddatum: Apr 16, 1968

A C.B.S. News documentary, testing out the truth of two famous books in real life. "How valid today are Sinclair Lewis's Babbitt and John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath?," writes Stephen Hearst, Head of BBC-tv's Arts Features. To evoke Babbitt in contemporary terms, C.B.S. News producer Arthur Barron chose Duluth, Minnesota, the model for Sinclair Lewi's Zenith City, and there filmed the activities of members of the Duluth Lions Club and their wives. For The Grapes of Wrath, Barron followed a Kentucky farmer and his family on their flight to the anticipated haven of industrial Chicago. "The members of the Duluth Lions Club hear the same speech that Babbitt gave to Zenith's Booster Club and we hear the audience's reactions to words spoken forty-seven years ago as fiction. Accompanying the westward emigration of the Kentucky farmer, we hear Steinbeck's words, written over thirty years ago. Barron's method appears to me to be a brilliant departure in the presentation of literature on th