SOURCE: Pizer, Donald. “John Steinbeck: The Grapes of Wrath.” In Twentieth-Century American Literary Naturalism: An Interpretation, pp. 65-81. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1982.

In the following essay, Pizer finds the Joads the embodiment of Steinbeck's ideals in spite of, rather than because of, Steinbeck's literary expression of them.

Steinbeck's most famous novel is enshrouded in a number of myths about its origin and nature. Here is a work which appears to be the epitome of the 1930s proletarian novel in that all its good people speak bad English, which sweetens its animal view of human nature with an anomalous mixture of Christian symbolism and scientific philosophy, and which appeals principally on the level of sentimentality and folk humor. The Grapes of Wrath, in short, is naturalism suffering the inevitable consequences of its soft thinking and its blatant catering to popular interests.¹

The Grapes of Wrath is...