“Come Down from Your Thinkin’ and Listen a Minute”: The Multiple Voices of The Grapes of Wrath

Abstract

When John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath was published in 1939, readers embraced the novel’s plea to end the mistreatment of migrant workers who had been forced to leave their homesteads and travel west for jobs. The nov- el’s protagonists, the Joad family, revealed to Americans the injustice of the \wages and working conditions on large farms, as well as the cruelty toward and dehumanization of these workers. The polemical power of Steinbeck’s novel contributed to its overwhelming popularity, the Pulitzer Prize it earned for Steinbeck, the success of John Ford’s film adaptation, and the book’s place in the literary canon. However, that same power has also been a major source of complaints about the novel: many critics see The Grapes of Wrath as a historical relic, a work that had a major effect on American society during its time but that suffers under literary analysis. For instance, Harold Bloom, in the introduction to his 1987 edited collection on Steinbeck, says that the author “is not an original or even an adequate stylist” (4). He defends The Grapes of Wrath’s placement in the canon only because “Compassionate narrative that addresses itself so directly to the great social questions of its era is simply too substantial a human achievement to be dismissed” (5). As Robert Demott summarizes the critical interpretation of the novel, “The Grapes of Wrath has been less judged as a novel than as a sociological event, a celebrated political cause, or a factual case study” (xxiv).