SOURCE: Hughes, Jr., Robert S. “What Went Wrong? How a ‘Vintage’ Steinbeck Short Story Became the Flawed Winter of Our Discontent.” Steinbeck Quarterly 26, nos. 1 & 2 (winter-spring 1993): 7-12.

In the following essay, Hughes analyzes the relationship between “How Mr. Hogan Robbed a Bank” and the novel The Winter of Our Discontent and explicates the reasons for the story's critical success and the novel's failure.

Steinbeck's novel The Winter of Our Discontent (1961) has often been compared, almost always unfavorably, with the short story from which it grew, “How Mr. Hogan Robbed a Bank” (1956). Though both works were written late in his career, the short story has been called “vintage Steinbeck” and praised for its objective, nonteleological point of view, whereas the novel has been criticized for its heavy-handed moralizing and cited as proof of the author's decline.¹ How can two so closely related works supply such opposite evidence of Steinbeck's art...