The Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck [20]
Plenty of other people had interest though. The Grapes of Wrath was widely and favorably reviewed and its fidelity to fact discussed and debated in the popular press when it was first published. It had been praised by the left as a triumph of proletarian writing, nominated by critics and reviewers alike as “The Great American Novel,” given historical vindication by Senator Robert M. La Follette’s inquiries into California’s tyrannical farm labor conditions, and validated by Carey McWilliams, whose own great work, Factories in the Field, is the renowned sociological counterpart to Steinbeck’s novel. The Grapes of Wrath was defended on several occasions by President and Eleanor Roosevelt for its power, integrity, and accuracy. For instance, after inspecting California migrant camps in 1940, Mrs. Roosevelt said, “I have never thought The Grapes of Wrath was exaggerated.” (Steinbeck responded gratefully: “I have been called a liar so constantly that . . . I wonder whether I may not have dreamed the things I saw and heard.”)
But The Grapes of Wrath has also been attacked by academic scholars and cultural critics for its alleged sentimentalism, stereotyped characterizations, heavy-handed symbolism, unconvincing dialogue, episodic, melodramatic plot, misplaced Oklahoma geography, and inaccurate rendering of historical facts, and has been banned repeatedly by school boards and libraries for its rebellious theme and frank language, and denounced by right-wing ministers, corporate farmers, and politicians as communist propaganda, immoral, degrading, warped, and untruthful. Oklahoma congressman Lyle Boren, typical of the book’s early detractors, called it a “a lie, a black, infernal creation of a twisted, distorted mind.” A Jesuit priest, Arthur D. Spearman, branded it “an embodiment of the Marxist Soviet propaganda,” and an editorial in the Oklahoma City Times claimed “it has Tobacco Road looking as pure as Charlotte Brontë.” The Associated Farmers and the newly formed California Citizens Association mounted smear campaigns to discredit the book and its author. Rebuttals, designed to whitewash the Okie situation, were published by Frank J. Taylor (“California’s Grapes of Wrath”), by Ruth Comfort Mitchell, Steinbeck’s Los Gatos neighbor (Of Human Kindness), and by M. V. Hartranft, whose slapdash volume Grapes of Gladness was billed as California’s refreshing and inspiring answer to The Grapes of Wrath. None of these reactionary, antiseptic texts had one iota of impact in the long run.
Since then, of course, The Grapes of Wrath has been steadily scrutinized, studied, interrogated, and analyzed by literary critics, scholars, historians, and creative writers. It is no exaggeration to say that, during the past sixty-plus years, few American novels have attracted such passionate attacks and equally passionate defenses. Its commercial success and its popularity with general readers have always made it a suspect text to many intellectuals and/or academicians, a point tellingly established by Mary M. Brown’s essay, “The Grapes of Wrath and the Literary Canon of American Universities in the Nineties,” which appears in The Critical Response to John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. Indeed, according to the master critical narrative about John Steinbeck (established in part by critics such as Edmund Wilson, Arthur Mizener, and Harold Bloom), The Grapes of Wrath is a deeply problematical novel. It is so flawed, so perplexing, so undisciplinable, that perhaps schizophrenic is a handier term with which to describe its reception during the past seven decades. Depending on which critic we read, a very different version of (and attitude toward) the novel surfaces. In fact, it seems hard to believe that critics have read the same book. Philip Rahv