The Great Depression of the 1930s

"In the morning the circulate hung like fog?All day the sun sifted blue from the sky?an even blanket covered the earth" (Steinbeck, The Grapes of temper 6). The story of the Joad family becomes the story of all migrants who Steinbeck views as part of a greater social movement, as "lonely and perplexed" in "sadness and worry and defeat" (Steinbeck, The Grapes of pettishness 193). But eventually they endure.

The two novels ar not only books whose underlying proposition is the struggle of the subculture to achieve the American Dream under the roughly difficult conditions, and not succeeding further holding on to their basic humanity, dignity and hope. As Steinbeck writes in The Grapes of Wrath:

This you whitethorn say of man - when theories change and crash, when schools, philosophies, when narrow dark alleys of thought, national, religious, economic, get and disintegrate, man reaches, stumbles forward, painfully, mistakenly sometimes. Having footmarkped forward, he may slip back, but only half a step, never the full step back (154).

Steinbeck's own struggles to earn a livelihood and his tenacious and determined endeavor - and subsequent success- to become a prospered writer afford greater insight into this optimistic statement.

The novels are more than social protest. Steinbeck's concern with the environment and how humans think to it and to each other is an

Ed. Robert Davis. Englewood Cliffs, revolutionary Jersey:

McMichael, George, ed. Concise Anthology of American

Steinbeck is a novelist of the California experience, as these azoic novels indicate. The expansive and beautiful landscape of the Salinas Valley "where Steinbeck spent hours as a boy roaming the hills, shaped Steinbeck's creative vision" (Steinbeck Country). The Grapes of Wrath was written in Los Gatos, and the town of Watsonville, near the Santa Cruz Mountains, is most potential the setting of In obscure Battle, where a strike by migrant fruit pickers did take place. Steinbeck also traveled with stateless tenant farmers from Oklahoma to California and visited migrant labor camps to grasp deeper insight into their plight and minds.

The personal insights gained by Steinbeck offer deeper insights into the novels and their characters, and into the author's honor system.

Nolan's social conscience and politics are influenced by the political party the Communist Party although the novel does not specify this. Although Steinbeck had a strong, democratic philosophy, he was not personally involved with the organized efforts of Communism, or personally committed to any political viewpoint. Steinbeck critic, bastard Lisca, believes that the author's ideological neutrality prevented him from being too close to his fictitious material, and this kept the novel from becoming a piece of propaganda. Lisca, however, points place that Steinbeck's knowledge of the proletarian issues of his time contributes to the realism of his novels. This is especially certain of the two works, The Grapes of Wrath and In Dubious Battle (Lisca 88). Nevertheless, some(prenominal) novels were received as left wing propaganda. In Dubious Battle was condemned both as a Communist overflow on the employer class, and also as a cynical and reactionary attack on radical idealism. Steinbeck defended these charges, stating that he wrote neither to revive nor to provoke, nor to condemn, but to understand and portray honestly a
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