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When I first arrived here, I did so with a short list of pages I really, really wanted to do. This was one of them. Amy Wilson had pitched an enormous project tracing the Joads' journey across the U.S. but didn't get approval. Her pitch, however, gave me just enough meat to built two-thirds of a really interesting page celebrating the 75th anniversary of "Grapes of Wrath." My author pal Bill Peschel in Hershey, Pa., fed me an interesting anecdote to anchor the bottom segment. That, the picture of Steinbeck's Nobel Prize class -- including the discoverers of the DNA double helix, James Watson and Francis Crick -- completed my page nicely. I invited a little criticism by making the bold -- and perhaps poor -- choice to run my map upside-down. But, as I explained at the time, it wasn't about the map. It was about the narrative. April 9, 2014