Anglo-American Literature – prof. Minganti Michele Morselli - 0000709843 michele.morselli@studio.unibo.it 00 39 333 190 88 97 Re-appropriating the myth of Tom Joad Steinbeck, Ford, Guthrie and Springsteen: Seventy-five years of dreaming a better America through those who willed it and those who lived it. Introduction: How do you become a myth? What is ‘folk’? We tend to consider ‘folk’ a cultural product that originates among the people, something that is deeply rooted in those strata of the population that – for social or economical reasons - are not often in touch with ruling institutions such as universities or academies, or else do not take any part – actively as producers, passively as audience – in the world of the so-called canonic culture. One of the best descriptions of folk culture has been given by Alessandro Portelli: « La cultura popolare ci offre l’esempio di forme e prodotti culturali che stabiliscono una corrente di comunicazione bilaterale, multilaterale, anziché unilateralmente diretta dal produttore al fruitore di cultura. E con questo contribuisce alla caduta di un altro corollario della unilateralità, e cioè la tendenza del prodotto artistico a porsi – per mancanza di interlocutori diretti […] – al tempo stesso come il massimo della soggettività e come il massimo della generalità e universalità. » 1 What I wonder is if this definition could be amplified. What if we considered ‘folk’ even the cultural phenomena that – having a high-cultural source - are addressed to a folk public? And what about those that describe folk situations but addressing to a high-culture audience? In this (short) paper I will try to resume an answer to both these questions through the study of the singular case of Tom Joad, a literary American figure that went across almost a century of social history constantly modifying his shape and medium but non his spirit of fight for better conditions of life and work. In particular, what interests me most about Tom Joad is the fact that the product of a single mind – the product of a scholar, or a cultivated artist such as John Steinbeck – become part of 1 AA.VV. (introduzione e cura di Alessandro Portelli), Canzoni e poesie proletarie americane, Roma, Savelli, 1976, p. 16 1