At the start of his career, not yet having published a novel, John Steinbeck wrote a letter to a Stanford classmate in which he laid out his emerging manifesto: “I have no interest in the printed word… . I put my words down for a matter of memory. They are more to be spoken than read. I have the instincts of a minstrel rather than those of a scrivener” (Letters 19). The twenty-seven-year-old Steinbeck made this declaration in 1929, the last year of the decade in which modernism reached its apex. Steinbeck was launching his literary career in the wake of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922), James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925), Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925) and To the Lighthouse (1927), Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (1926) and A Farewell to Arms (1929), and William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury (1929). Given such predecessors, it is no wonder that the novice author chose to distance himself from “the printed word.” With such a declaration, Steinbeck attempted to clear the ground for his own work by allying himself with oral and folk traditions rather than with the literary traditions out of which the formidable novels of 1920s modernism had grown. As a self-proclaimed minstrel, he sought to draw on the language and culture of the common people and thereby remain uninfluenced by the work of his immediate predecessors. Steinbeck’s relationship to modernism is more complex than he would have it appear, however, for whether he is courting or rejecting comparisons between his own work and that of the great modernists, these authors never seem to be far from his mind.

Nowhere is Steinbeck’s conflicted relationship with modernism more apparent than in The Grapes of Wrath (1939), his undisputed masterpiece. The novel draws on two literary traditions, the long-standing one of the American protest novel and the emerging one of the modernist novel. At his best, Steinbeck manages to synthesize the two strands, putting modernist themes, techniques, and tropes to work for a social cause.

One might study The Grapes of Wrath by first locating it solidly in the tradition of the social protest novel, identifying those aspects of it that are most calculated to advance a social or political position. Steinbeck’s readiness to sacrifice characterization in favor of argumentation, as well as his moments of didacticism and oratory, make The Grapes of Wrath an inheritor to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1906), and other socially engaged novels. Other aspects of the novel, however, show Steinbeck grappling with the legacy of modernism. His experimentation with form and language can seem positively Joycean, while his interest in contrasting literary and vernacular language is reminiscent of Faulkner. After establishing some of these broad connections to modernism, one might focus on the author’s bravura use of a single word across the opening chapters of The Grapes of Wrath. Through his obsessive repetition of the word “dust” —which appears some two dozen times in the first one hundred pages of the novel—Steinbeck not only establishes his setting and dramatizes the plight of the Oklahoma farmers but also engages in a subtle competition with Eliot, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and other great modernists. In weaving this word so tightly into the fabric of his novel, Steinbeck appropriates and redeploys a modernist trope that figures in so many of the important novels and poems of the 1920s. To borrow the title of an early Faulkner novel, Steinbeck plants his own “flags in the dust,” as if to announce that he is both a social critic and a literary innovator, both a minstrel and a modernist.

Upton Sinclair, whose 1906 novel The Jungle exposed the deplorable working conditions of the Chicago slaughterhouses, was tremendously impressed by The Grapes of Wrath. Soon after the novel was released, Sinclair declared: “I have come to the age where I know I won’t be writing forever. I remember reading how Elijah put his mantle on the shoulders of Elisha. John Steinbeck can have my old mantle if he has any use for it” (Rev. 3). An author could not ask for a better endorsement than this. Sinclair was perhaps the greatest living exemplar of the tradition of muckraking, in which the novelist writes for the express purpose of bringing to light social, economic, or political injustices. Morris Dickstein terms Sinclair “a one-man reform movement and radical crusader” (vi), an author who brought his literary success to bear on a series of causes and movements. Sinclair ushers Steinbeck into the fold, declaring him heir to Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser, and Sinclair himself. Nor was Upton Sinclair the only reader to place The Grapes of Wrath in the tradition of the social protest novel. Granville Hicks praised the book in a 1939 article in the Marxist journal The New Masses, terming it a “proletariat novel” and claiming that Steinbeck’s “insight into capitalism illuminates every chapter of the book” (23).

Other critics made the point that The Grapes of Wrath succeeded primarily as a political work, rather than as a literary one. A review in Time magazine asserted that the passages in which Steinbeck’s narrator directly addresses the plight of migrant farmers are “not a successful fiction experiment. In them a ’social awareness’ outruns artistic skill” (“Okies” 87). Perhaps the most telling commentary came from Edmund Wilson, whose monumental 1930 critical survey Axel’s Castle: A Study in the Imaginative Literature of 1870-1930 was pivotal in building the canon of modernism and in positioning Yeats, Eliot, Proust, and Joyce at the center of it. In discussing Steinbeck, Wilson drew a distinction between the craft necessary to write a good novel and the genius necessary to write a great one. In a 1940 article, Wilson wrote: “Mr. Steinbeck has invention, observation, a certain color of style which for some reason does not possess what is called magic” (“Californians” 785). A decade later, in his survey of 1940s literature, Wilson expanded on this argument: “The characters in The Grapes of Wrath are animated and put through their paces rather than brought to life; they are like excellent character actors giving very conscientious performances in a fairly well written play” (Classics 42). Wilson maintained that The Grapes of Wrath is “a propaganda novel, full of preachments and sociological interludes” (36). Wilson might be thought of as the gatekeeper of modernism, and in his treatment of The Grapes of Wrath he seemed to be turning Steinbeck away. From its first reviews, then, The Grapes of Wrath was read largely through the lens of the social issues it raised rather than through that of literary modernism.

It is certainly fair to identify The Grapes of Wrath as a social protest novel in the tradition of Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Crane’s Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893), or Sinclair’s The Jungle. Like these earlier novels, Steinbeck’s work takes an ethnographic interest in the lives of the American poor. Steinbeck may write of socially marginalized characters, but he is writing for a mainstream audience. The book therefore has a reformist slant, in that it dramatizes the lives of the powerless so that the powerful might be compelled to ameliorate their condition. As a result, the characters tend to drift inevitably toward caricature. Steinbeck is not of the same social milieu as the Joad family and their contemporaries, and his literary representation of their patterns of speech and social behavior is an act of mimicry. In this respect, Steinbeck does have “the instincts of a minstrel,” and one might go so far as to compare some of the broad humor in his representations of the Oklahoma dialect and culture to the blatantly racist tradition of blackface minstrel shows, in which white actors portrayed cartoonish African American stereotypes. Steinbeck’s Joad family members are rounded and sympathetic in a way in which minstrel-show characters were not, but mixed with Steinbeck’s sympathy is an element of condescension. Take this description of Granma Joad as she makes her first appearance in the novel:

In scenes such as this one, Steinbeck’s representation of the Joads feels less like mimicry than like mockery. The author may have great sympathy for the plight of these people, but he is also ready to present them in a comic light for the amusement of the reader. Passages such as these can be jarring, for they underscore the distance between the author or narrator and his characters. As a point of reference, Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying (1930) centers on a rural family, the Bundrens, whose mores and language are, like those of the Joads, often mined for laughs. Yet the absence of a central narrator and of a social cause eliminates in Faulkner’s novel the sense of narratorial distance that can make Steinbeck’s portrayal of the Joads feel condescending. It is precisely because The Grapes of Wrath is a protest novel that the reader may take umbrage at some of Steinbeck’s caricatures of his protagonists.

In other passages of The Grapes of Wrath, one feels a distance between the author and his characters that is part and parcel of Steinbeck’s larger social and political agenda. This is perhaps most apparent when Steinbeck uses a character as a mouthpiece for mounting an ideological argument. Some of the Reverend Jim Casy’s meditations, for example, feel like thinly veiled socialist agitprop. In his speech about his loss of faith, he explains: “I figgered, ’Why do we got to hang it on God or Jesus? Maybe,’ I figgered, ’maybe it’s all men an’ all women we love; maybe that’s the Holy Sperit—the human sperit—the whole shebang. Maybe all men got one big soul ever’body’s a part of’” (24). In the world of the novel, the preacher has arrived at his concept of a proletariat (“one big soul ever’body’s a part of”) through his own “figger”-ing. The reader, however, may feel that this concept has been handed to Casy by the author. One can sense the author behind the character, recasting the tenets of Marxism or collectivism into the preacher’s vernacular. In having his characters articulate political or societal positions, Steinbeck strikes a hard bargain: he mounts an ideological argument at the expense of organic characterization.

Casy can be compared to Joyce’s Leopold Bloom, who, like the preacher, is full of ideas about how society might be run more progressively. At a funeral, for example, Bloom finds himself thinking about how well the mourners would be served were a tramline laid down from the city to the cemetery (81). This is an eminently sensible idea, yet there is no sense that Bloom is speaking on behalf of Joyce himself or propounding an idea that Joyce subscribes to outside of the context of his novel. One might make the same argument regarding Hemingway’s Jake Barnes, Faulkner’s Quentin Compson, and Woolf’s Mr. Ramsey: each has a coherent worldview, and one can assume that the author sympathizes with that view to one extent or another, but the expression of the character’s viewpoint in the context of the novel serves no didactic purpose. The triumph of modernism lies in its depiction of the human mind at work, and its major innovations, such as stream-of-consciousness narration, all work to create psychological verisimilitude. Steinbeck is willing to sacrifice some of this verisimilitude in order to advance a social and political argument.

The passages in which the reader is most aware of Steinbeck’s presence as a narrator and of the ideas and positions animating The Grapes of Wrath are found in the interchapters, in which the author speaks directly to the reader. These passages have great power, in part because Steinbeck breaks out of the dialect of his protagonists. Their power is more than rhetorical, however; there is force to the author’s analysis itself. He frames the struggle of the Joads against the larger backdrop of banking regulations, agricultural policy, demographic patterns, supply-and-demand market dynamics, and capitalism as a whole. In the best of these interchapters, Steinbeck marshals the indignation of a preacher or a prophet railing against the failings of his people. Meditating on the agribusiness policy of destroying produce and livestock to keep down prices, for example, Steinbeck writes:

This is a powerful argument that challenges some of the basic assumptions of free market capitalism; it shows the human cost of decisions that are made on purely economic grounds. Reading the interchapters, one can see why Steinbeck’s contemporaries tended to focus on the social cause that he advocates rather than on the literary techniques that he uses. The social agenda that runs throughout the novel and this sort of impassioned argumentation is not found in Joyce, Woolf, Fitzgerald, or Faulkner, and none of their novels have the didactic intent that marks The Grapes of Wrath.

The term “didactic” has become a pejorative one, particularly when it is referring to literature. The twenty-first-century reader views didacticism suspiciously, as he or she might a piece of propaganda or an advertisement. In literary circles, modernism itself was a powerful force in marginalizing didactic literature. The modernist novel or poem places a premium on aesthetics rather than on social utility, and, as a result, The Grapes of Wrath is in some ways more akin to novels written before the 1920s than to those written after. However, given that it is important to read a work of literature on its own ground, it may be worth reexamining assumptions about the value of didacticism. Novelist and theologian C. S. Lewis mounted several impassioned defenses of it. In The Personal Heresy, he argued that “the poet is not a man who asks me to look at him; he is a man who says ’look at that’ and points” (11). This is a good model for what Steinbeck is doing in The Grapes of Wrath: pointing at an American injustice and saying “look at that.” By this definition, the novel is a stunning success.

Indeed, comparing The Grapes of Wrath with a work of high modernism, such as Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, might prompt one to reconsider how a “great novel” is defined. Most readers and critics would agree that Faulkner’s novel is greater by purely literary standards; it surpasses Steinbeck’s best work in its language, depth of characterization, layered complexity, and mix of comedy and tragedy. To take up Edmund Wilson’s point, Faulkner may have a genius or a “magic” that Steinbeck does not. Yet, read through a political and a social lens, Steinbeck’s novel may surpass Faulkner’s. One can imagine a person of great power—say, a senator, a banker, or the head of a corporation—reading The Grapes of Wrath and being moved or shamed into using his or her political or economic power to improve the terrible situations Steinbeck describes. In point of fact, Eleanor Roosevelt was one such powerful figure who took direct action after reading The Grapes of Wrath, visiting a migrant camp in 1940 and afterward remarking “I have never thought The Grapes of Wrath was exaggerated” (qtd. in DeMott xl). Steinbeck’s novel calls for a practical response in a way that Faulkner’s work does not, and if it seems unlikely that a novel could move its readers to take dramatic political action, one should remember the words that Abraham Lincoln is reported to have said to Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin: “So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war!” The protest novel, at its core, attempts to be a catalyst for larger social or political change. Its value therefore should be measured not on purely aesthetic grounds but with regard to the effect it has on its readers and on the world outside the novel.

Steinbeck succeeded in writing not merely a social protest novel but a book that bears comparison to the work of Joyce, Eliot, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and other modernists of the 1920s and 1930s. Steinbeck freely adopted and adapted techniques from many of these authors, and as such The Grapes of Wrath can be read as an engagement with and continuation of the modernist tradition.

What most clearly allies Steinbeck’s novel with the modernist canon is his interest in language itself. He structures the novel around a clash of voices: the dialect of the Joads and their contemporaries, the lyrical observations of the third-person narrator, and the prophetic, biblical voice that thunders across the interchapters. In this respect, Steinbeck’s novel bears comparison to the work of Faulkner and Joyce. Like these two predecessors, Steinbeck allows the form of his novel to change radically in response to its content. The chapter in which the Joads buy a used car, for example, opens with a description of the used-car lots on the edge of town but almost immediately modulates into the language of the signs lining the road:

Later in the chapter, the language of the signs gives way to the staccato patter of the salesmen. Writing in this experimental, Joycean mode allows Steinbeck to replicate for the reader the sense of confusion and uncertainty that the Joads themselves face in trying to negotiate a decent price for a used car. The reader is as overwhelmed by the salesmen’s patter as are the characters. This is an extremely effective way for Steinbeck to ally the reader’s sympathies more closely with the migrant family; the reader not only identifies them but also identifies with them. Moreover, this chapter gives Steinbeck a chance to perform, for he shows not only that he can convincingly adopt a voice and language that is far from his own but also that he can experiment boldly with novelistic form in the manner of Joyce. The car lot chapter is one of several instances in which Steinbeck’s experimentation with modernist techniques works both to advance his social cause and to burnish his own credentials as a literary modernist.

Steinbeck engages with modernist traditions in more subtle ways as well. One way to examine Steinbeck’s modernist qualities is to analyze his use of the “dust” motif within the first several chapters of the novel. Of course, The Grapes of Wrath is set during the Dust Bowl of the 1930s in Oklahoma, and so it is only natural that the word “dust” should appear with great frequency. For his novel to succeed, Steinbeck must convey the gravity of the situation facing the Oklahoma farmers. In Steinbeck’s hands, however, the word “dust” speaks not only to the reality of life on the Great Plains during the 1930s but also to the modernist tradition itself. Steinbeck’s dust imagery effectively links the novel to some of the touchstones of the previous twenty years of poetry and fiction.

A generation before the Joad family and their contemporaries arrived, the Great Plains were grasslands inhabited by herds of buffalo and by Native Americans whose nomadic way of life was built around hunting these animals. The plains of Oklahoma and the surrounding states had always been buffeted by high winds, but the grass that blanketed them held the soil in place. The plains, in short, were a delicate ecosystem. In his recent best seller The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl, Timothy Egan details the series of economic and political decisions that led to the utter devastation of these grasslands. The buffalo were systematically eradicated, the Native Americans relocated to reservations, and the land itself parceled out and sold to ranchers and farmers. In the 1920s, a decade that saw high levels of rainfall, the future of the Great Plains seemed bright. The new farms produced record amounts of wheat and other staples, turning the plains into a new American breadbasket. The Oklahoma farms were not sustainable, however: when the wet 1920s gave way to the droughts of the 1930s, the exposed soil was prey to the high plains winds. The stage had been set for a human-made ecological disaster.

The Grapes of Wrath opens with a description of “the last rains” to settle on the Oklahoma plains. The rains are not heavy enough to break through the hard crust of the dry ground, and after those last rain clouds move through, the barren earth lies exposed to the sun. The crops dry up and the ground grows hard and then, under the weight of wagon wheels and automobile tires and the shoes of human beings, the dry earth turns to airborne dust:

Over the course of the novel’s next several chapters, Steinbeck uses dust imagery to create a wholly convincing portrait of life in drought-ridden Oklahoma. His descriptions are more than journalistic reportage; instead, they gesture toward the mythic and the archetypal, as in the conclusion of the first chapter: “As the day went forward the sun became less red. It flared down on the dust-blanketed land. The men sat in the doorways of their houses; their hands were busy with sticks and little rocks. The men sat still—thinking—figuring” (4). This description is concrete and objective, yet it is also shot through with symbolic overtones; there is a sense of gravity and timelessness in the landscape and in the plight of its inhabitants.

The “dust-blanketed land” that Steinbeck evokes owes something to the landscapes of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922) and “The Hollow Men” (1925), two poems in which dust and the desert stand as symbols of humankind’s spiritual aridity. In the former poem, an unidentified speaker with the cadences of an Old Testament prophet describes a stony land and says:

The handful of dust is fearful because it is a reminder of human mortality, as in the lines from Genesis that serve as a liturgical refrain on Ash Wednesday: “Dust you are, and to dust you shall return” (3:19). Steinbeck’s characters fear the dust in a way that is far more literal and immediate, yet the “dust-blanketed land” in which they find themselves is akin to that of Eliot’s poem. Eliot’s wasteland has also seen its last rains; it is now a place of “no water but only rock/ Rock and no water and the sandy road” (331-32). In the last section of the poem, the reader encounters people who have much in common with Steinbeck’s farmers:

Steinbeck’s landscape effectively dramatizes the plight of the Oklahoma farmers, but it also moves that plight to the same plain as Eliot’s poem. His farmers squatting in the dust inhabit a wasteland that partakes of the mythic and the symbolic. Steinbeck’s powerful language and his evocation of Eliot both write large the desolation facing the farmers and draw his novel into the orbit of the modernist tradition.

One might compare Steinbeck’s dust imagery to imagery in several other works by his modernist forerunners. In The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald makes a similar raid on Eliot’s imagery in writing of the valley of ashes that lies between New York City and the north shore of Long Island. The trains and automobiles passing from the city to the gentrified shoreline must pass through this placeless place, a modern wasteland of ash and dust:

Fitzgerald creates a landscape that perfectly symbolizes the nihilism and spiritual deadness underlying the gilded world that Nick, Tom, Daisy, and Jay Gatsby inhabit. The city and the countryside alike have relationships to the valley of ashes, for the lifestyles of both places are grounded in the refuse of this industrial landscape. It is fitting that an encounter in the valley of ashes will doom Gatsby. Of course, the name echoes a place described in the book of Psalms: the valley of the shadow of death. As in Eliot’s poem—and in Steinbeck’s later novel—a modern landscape takes on prophetic and mythic overtones.

Steinbeck’s repetition of a single, simple word in long descriptions of a landscape also feels distinctly Hemingwayesque. In fact, some of Steinbeck’s greatest passages describing the Dust Bowl seem to echo the magisterial opening of Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms. Hemingway’s narrator, Frederic Henry, describes the Italian countryside on the brink of World War I:

Hemingway is a master of the compound sentence, using “and” to string together simple phrases that create a powerful whole. The sense of movement and transformation in this paragraph is undeniable; this is not a static description of a landscape but rather a moving picture of a landscape in flux, for the soldiers raise dust that settles back on the trees around them.

Steinbeck shares Hemingway’s interest in creating through words a fair and true representation of the natural world, and many of the passages in The Grapes of Wrath describing the landscape of the Dust Bowl show the author animating a scene through Hemingwayesque repetition and rephrasing. Like Hemingway, Steinbeck uses polysyndeton; the simple conjunction “and” produces long compound sentences that create the illusion of motion:

Passages such as this show Steinbeck reveling in his own abilities as a writer rather than advancing an argument or a cause. His descriptions of the movement of dust are brilliant and bear comparison to Faulkner’s descriptions of horses and dogs in Spotted Horses and of floodwaters in Old Man. Like a painter choosing a particularly challenging subject to depict and then putting his or her stamp on it—the way, say, Monet makes water lilies his own or Turner brilliantly captures a certain kind of seascape—Steinbeck sets himself a task that showcases his own virtuosity.

The Grapes of Wrath is one of the great American novels on account of both the gravity of its subject matter and the surety and inventiveness of its author’s prose. Had Steinbeck placed himself wholly in either the tradition of the social protest novel or that of the modernist novel, his book would no doubt be a lesser achievement. As it is, the author’s fusion of these two strands of American literature allowed him to bring all of his talents to fruition in a powerful, hybrid novel. The Grapes of Wrath is therefore a singular achievement: the most literary of protest novels and the most socially engaged of modernist ones.

Works Cited