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The Grapes of Wrath as Fiction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Peter Lisca
Peter Lisca*
Affiliation:
University of Washington, Seattle 5
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Extract

When The Grapes of Wrath was published in April of 1939 there was little likelihood of its being accepted and evaluated as a piece of fiction. Because of its nominal subject, it was too readily confused with such high-class reporting as Ruth McKenny's Industrial Valley, the WPA collection of case histories called These Are Our Lives, and Dorothea Lange and Paul S. Taylor's An American Exodus. The merits of The Grapes of Wrath were debated as social documentation rather than fiction. In addition to incurring the disadvantages of its historical position, coming as a kind of climax to the literature of the Great Depression, Steinbeck's novel also suffered from the perennial vulnerability of all social fiction to an attack on its facts and intentions.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 72 , Issue 1 , March 1957 , pp. 296 - 309
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1957

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References

Note 1 in page 296 American Fiction 1920-1940 (New York: Macmillan, 1941), pp. 327-347; The Novels of John Steinbeck (Chicago: Normandie House, 1939), pp. 54–72; The Philosophy of Literary Form (Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1941), p. 81; L'Age du roman américain (Paris: Editions du Sueil, 1948), pp. 178–195; “The Grapes of Wrath: In the Light of Modem Critical Theory,” College English, v (March 1944), 308–313.

Note 2 in page 297 The Craft of Fiction (New York: Peter Smith, 1945), p. 33.

Note 3 in page 298 This and all subsequent references are to the 1st ed. of The Grapes of Wrath (Viking Press, 1939).

Note 4 in page 301 New York: Viking Press, 1941.

Note 5 in page 302 Joseph Henry Jackson, “John Steinbeck: A Portrait,” Sat. Rev. of Lit., xvi (25 Sept. 1937), 18.

Note 6 in page 303 One of the oddest interpretations of this scene is Harry Slochower's in No Voice is Wholly Lost (New York: Creative Age Press, 1945), p. 304, n. Mr. Slochower uses this incident to explain the novel's title: “The grapes have turned to ‘wrath,‘ indicated by the fact that the first milk of the mother is said to be bitter.”

Note 7 in page 303 In a recent article Bernard Bowron fails to perceive this larger significance of the Joads's journey and attempts to make far too much out of some obvious similarities to the Covered Wagon genre. “The Grapes of Wrath: A ‘Wagons West’ Romance,” Colorado Quart., iii (Summer 1954), 84–91.

Note 8 in page 306 “The Harvest Gypsies,” San Francisco News, 6 Oct. 1936, p. 3.

Note 9 in page 308 The Novel and Society (Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1941), p. 18.

Note 10 in page 308 Further parallels between Casy and Christ: see Martin Skockley's “Christian Symbolisra in The Grapes of Wrath,” CE, xviii (Nov., 1956), 87–90.

Note 11 in page 309 For parallels to this scene see Maupassant's “Idylle”; Byron's Childe Harold, Can. iv, St. 148–151; Rubens' painting of old Cimon taking milk from the breast of Pero; and an 18th-century play called The Grecian's Daughter, discussed in Maurice W. Disher's Blood and Thunder (London: Frederick Muller Ltd., 1949), p. 23. See also Celeste T. Wright, “Ancient Analogues of an Incident in John Steinbeck,” WF, xiv (Jan., 1955), 50–51.