The Grapes of Wrath (6 page)

But
The Grapes of Wrath
has also been attacked by academic scholars as sentimental, unconvincing, and inartistic, banned repeatedly by school boards and libraries for its rebellious theme and frank language, and denounced by right-wing ministers, corporate farmers, and politicians as communist, immoral, degrading, warped, and untruthful. Oklahoma Congressman Lyle Boren, typical of the book’s early detractors, called it “a lie, a black, infernal creation of a twisted, distorted mind.” A Jesuit priest, Arthur D. Spearman, called it “an embodiment of the Marxist Soviet propaganda.” The Associated Farmers mounted a smear campaign to discredit the book and its author. Rebuttals, designed to whitewash the Okie situation, were published by Frank J. Taylor (“California’s
Grapes of Wrath
”) and by Ruth Comfort Mitchell, Steinbeck’s Los Gatos neighbor (
Of Human Kindness
). None of them had one iota of impact.

Since then, of course,
The Grapes of Wrath
has been steadily scrutinized, studied, interrogated, and analyzed by literary critics, scholars, historians, and creative writers. It is no exaggeration to say that, during the past half century, few American novels have attracted such passionate attacks and equally passionate defenses. It seems hard to believe that critics have read the same book. Philip Rahv’s complaint in the
Partisan Review
(Spring 1939) that “the novel is far too didactic and long-winded,” and “fails on the test of craftsmanship” should be judged against Charles Angoff ’s assessment in the
North American Review
(Summer 1939) that it is “momentous, monumental, and memorable,” and an example of “the highest art.” This dialectic still characterizes the novel’s critical reception. In a 1989speech, the prominent cultural critic Leslie Fiedler attacked the novel as “maudlin, sentimental, and overblown”; another review a month later by Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist William Kennedy praised it for standing “tall… a mighty, mighty book.”

The past fifty years have seen little consensus about the exact nature of the novel’s achievement, though most contemporary analysts now
treat the book as a legitimate work of fiction rather than a propagandistic tract. As a result, there is a great deal of deserving attention to Steinbeck’s art and technique. Whether
Grapes
is viewed through a social, historical, linguistic, formal, political, ecological, psychological, mythic, metaphysical, or religious lens (all examples of recent critical methods), the book’s textual richness, its many layers of action, language, and character, continue to repay enormous dividends. As scholar John Ditsky observed, “the Joads are still in motion, and their vehicle with them.” Intellectual theories to the contrary, reading remains a subjective act, and perhaps the only sure thing about
The Grapes of Wrath
is its capacity to elicit powerful responses from its audience. This of course was Steinbeck’s intention from the first. “I don’t think
The Grapes of Wrath
is obscure in what it tries to say,” he claimed in 1955. “Its structure is very carefully worked out…. Just read it, don’t count it!”

As a result of shifting political emphases, the enlightened recommendations of the La Follette Committee (that the National Labor Relations Act include farm workers), the effects of loosened labor laws (California’s discriminatory “anti-migrant” law, established in 1901, was struck down by the Supreme Court in 1941), the creation of compulsory military service, and the inevitable recruitment of migrant families into defense plant and shipyard jobs caused by the booming economy of World War II that signaled the beginning of their successful assimilation (California growers soon complained of an acute shortage of seasonal labor), the particular set of epochal conditions that crystallized Steinbeck’s awareness in the first place passed from his view. Like other momentous American novels that embody the bitter, often tragic, transition from one way of life to another,
The Grapes of Wrath
possessed, among its other attributes, perfect timing. Its appearance permanently altered the literary geography of the United States.

It also changed Steinbeck permanently. The effects of writing 260,000 words in a single year “finished” him, he told Lawrence Clark Powell on January 24, 1939. After his long siege with the “Matter of the Migrants” (“I don’t know whether there is anything left of me,” he confided in October 1939), his “will to death” was so “strengthened” that by the end of the decade he was sick of writing fiction. It was a
decision many critics and reviewers held against him for the rest of his life; they wanted him to write
The Grapes of Wrath
over and over again, which he refused to do. “The process of writing a book is the process of outgrowing it,” he told Herbert Sturz. “Disciplinary criticism comes too late. You aren’t going to write that one again anyway. When you start another—the horizons have receded and you are just as cold and frightened as you were with the first one.”

The unabated sales, the frenzied public clamor, and the vicious personal attacks over
The Grapes of Wrath
confirmed his worst fears about the fruits of success and pushed the tensions between the Steinbecks to the breaking point, a situation exacerbated by his willful romance with Gwyn Conger (they were wed from 1943 to 1948; the marriage produced two children) and his repeated absences in Hollywood and Mexico. Steinbeck did not quit writing, as he had threatened, but by the early 1940s he was no longer content to be the man he had once been. His letter of November 13, 1939, to former Stanford roommate Carlton Sheffield pulls no punches: “I’m finishing off a complete revolution…. The point of all this is that I must make a new start. I’ve worked the novel—I know it as far as I can take it. I never did think much of it—a clumsy vehicle at best. And I don’t know the form of the new but I know there is a new which will be adequate and shaped by the new thinking.” Steinbeck’s change from social realist to meta-fictionist was not caused by a bankruptcy of talent, a change of venue, or a failure of nerve or honesty. Rather, it was the backlash from an unprecedented and unanticipated success, a repugnant “posterity.” “I have always wondered why no author has survived a best-seller,” he told John Rice in a June 1939 interview. “Now I know. The publicity and fan-fare are just as bad as they would be for a boxer. One gets self-conscious and that’s the end of one’s writing.” His new writing lacked the aggressive bite of his late 1930s fiction, but it had the virtue of being different and varied. After 1940much of his important work centered on explorations of a newly discovered topic: the implications of individual choice and imaginative consciousness. A prophetic post-modernist, Steinbeck’s deep subject in
Sea of Cortez
(1941),
Cannery Row
(1945),
East of Eden
(1954),
Sweet Thursday
(1954),
The Winter of Our Discontent
(1961), and
Journal of a Novel
(1969) was the creative
process itself, the epistemological dance of the law of thought and the law of things.

The Grapes of Wrath
is arguably the most significant indictment ever made of the myth of California as a Promised Land. And ironically, as John Steinbeck composed this novel that extolled a social group’s capacity for survival in a hostile world, he was himself so unraveled in the process that the angle of vision, the vital signature, the moral indignation that made his art exemplary in the first place, could never be repeated with the same integrated force. Once his name became inseparably linked with the title of his most famous novel, Steinbeck could never escape the influence of his earlier life, but thankfully neither can we. Wherever human beings dream of a dignified and free society in which they can harvest the fruits of their own labor,
The Grapes of Wrath
’s radical voice of protest can still be heard. As a tale of dashed illusions, thwarted desires, inhuman suffering, and betrayed promises—all strung on a shimmering thread of hope—
The Grapes of Wrath
not only summed up the Depression era’s socially conscious art but, beyond that—for emotional urgency, evocative power, and sustained drama—has few peers in American fiction.

Primary works by John Steinbeck

Note: Steinbeck’s holograph manuscript of
The Grapes of Wrath
is in the Clifton Waller Barrett Library, Special Collections Department, University of Virginia Library, Charlottesville, Virginia. The typescript is in The Library of Congress Manuscript Division, Washington, D.C.

The Harvest Gypsies: On the Road to The Grapes of Wrath
. Introduction by Charles Wollenberg. Berkeley, CA: Heyday Books, 1988.

Working Days: The Journals of The Grapes of Wrath, 1938–1941
. Robert DeMott, ed. New York: The Viking Press, 1989.

Correspondence, interviews, and adaptations

Conversations with John Steinbeck
. Thomas Fensch, ed. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1988.

Letters to Elizabeth: A Selection of Letters from John Steinbeck to Elizabeth Otis
. Florian J. Shasky and Susan F. Riggs, eds. Foreword by Carlton Sheffield. San Francisco: Book Club of California, 1978.

Steinbeck: A Life in Letters
. Elaine Steinbeck and Robert Wallsten, eds. New York: The Viking Press, 1975.

The Grapes of Wrath
. Playscript by Frank Galati. New York: Penguin, 1991.

Biographies, memoirs, and creative sources

Astro, Richard.
John Steinbeck and Edward F. Ricketts: The Shaping of a Novelist
. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1974.

Benson, Jackson J.
The True Adventures of John Steinbeck, Writer
. New York: The Viking Press, 1984.

—.
Looking for Steinbeck’s Ghost
. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1988.

DeMott, Robert.
Steinbeck’s Reading: A Catalogue of Books Owned and Borrowed
. New York: Garland Publishing, 1984.

Fensch, Thomas.
Steinbeck and Covici: The Story of a Friendship
. Middlebury, VT: Paul S. Eriksson, 1979.

Lorentz, Pare.
FDR’s Moviemaker: Memoirs and Scripts
. Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1992.

Sheffield, Carlton.
Steinbeck: The Good Companion
. Portola Valley, CA: American Lives Endowment, 1983.

Bibliographies

DeMott, Robert.
John Steinbeck: A Checklist of Books By and About
. Bradenton, FL: Opuscula Press, 1987.

Goldstone, Adrian H., and John R. Payne.
John Steinbeck: A Bibliographical Catalogue of the Adrian H. Goldstone Collection
. Austin, TX: Humanities Research Center, 1974.

Harmon, Robert B., with the assistance of John F. Early.
The Grapes of Wrath: A Fifty Year Bibliographic Survey
. San Jose, CA: San Jose State University Steinbeck Research Center, 1990.

Hayashi, Tetsumaro.
A New Steinbeck Bibliography, 1927–1971
. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1973.

—.
A New Steinbeck Bibliography. Supplement I: 1971–1981
. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1983.

Riggs, Susan F.
A Catalogue of the John Steinbeck Collection at Stanford University
. Stanford: Stanford University Libraries, 1980.

White, Ray Lewis. “
The Grapes of Wrath
and the Critics of 1939.”

Resources for American Literary Study
13(Autumn 1983), 134–64.

Books and Book-Length Collections on
The Grapes of Wrath

Note: Selected contemporary reviews and a bountiful sampling of standard and original critical assessments of Steinbeck’s novel are available in the following books.

Bloom, Harold, ed.
Modern Critical Interpretations of The Grapes of Wrath
. New York: Chelsea House, 1988.

Davis, Robert Con, ed.
Twentieth Century Interpretations of The Grapes of Wrath
. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1982.

Ditsky, John, ed.
Critical Essays on Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath
. Boston: G.K. Hall, 1989.

Donohue, Agnes McNeill, ed.
A Casebook on The Grapes of Wrath
. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1968.

French, Warren, ed.
A Companion to The Grapes of Wrath
. New York: The Viking Press, 1963.

—.
Film Guide to The Grapes of Wrath
. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1973.

Hayashi, Tetsumaro, ed.
Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath: Essays in Criticism
. Steinbeck Essay Series, No. 3. Muncie, IN: Ball State University Steinbeck Research Institute, 1990.

Lisca, Peter, ed.
Viking Critical Library The Grapes of Wrath: Text and Criticism
. New York: The Viking Press, 1972.

Owens, Louis.
The Grapes of Wrath: Trouble in the Promised Land
. Boston: Twayne, 1989.

Shillinglaw, Susan, ed. “
The Grapes of Wrath
: A Special Issue.”
San Jose Studies
xvi (Winter 1990).

Wyatt, David, ed.
New Essays on The Grapes of Wrath
. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

Additional References on Steinbeck and
The Grapes of Wrath

Note: Two journals are devoted to Steinbeck studies:
Steinbeck Quarterly
(1969–), edited by Tetsumaro Hayashi at Ball State University, Muncie, Indiana; and
The Steinbeck Newsletter
(1987–), edited by Susan Shillinglaw at the Steinbeck Research Center, San Jose State University, San Jose, California. The following entries are not reproduced in any of the books listed above.

Benson, Jackson J. “Through a Political Glass, Darkly: The Example of John Steinbeck.”
Studies in American Fiction
12(Spring 1984), 45–59.

Bluefarb, Sam.
The Escape Motif in the American Novel
. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1972, 94–112.

Bristol, Horace. “John Steinbeck and
The Grapes of Wrath
.”
Steinbeck Newsletter
2(Fall 1988), 6–8.

Collins, Thomas A. “From
Bringing in the Sheaves
, by ‘Windsor Drake.”’
Journal of Modern Literature
5(April 1976), 211–232.