Book contents
- Frontmatter
- General Introduction
- PART ONE INVENTING THE AMERICAN NOVEL
- PART TWO REALISM, PROTEST, ACCOMMODATION
- PART THREE MODERNISM AND BEYOND
- Introduction: modernism and beyond
- 37 Stein, Hemingway, and American modernisms
- 38 The Great Gatsby and the 1920s
- 39 Philosophy and the American novel
- 40 Steinbeck and the proletarian novel
- 41 The novel, mass culture, mass media
- 42 Wright, Hurston, and the direction of the African American novel
- 43 Ellison and Baldwin: aesthetics, activism, and the social order
- 44 Religion and the twentieth-century American novel
- 45 Faulkner and the Southern novel
- 46 Law and the American novel
- 47 Twentieth-century publishing and the rise of the paperback
- 48 The novel of crime, mystery, and suspense
- 49 US novels and US wars
- 50 Science fiction
- 51 Female genre fiction in the twentieth century
- 52 Children's novels
- 53 The American novel and the rise of the suburbs
- 54 The Jewish great American novel
- 55 The Beats and the 1960s
- 56 Literary feminisms
- 57 Reimagining genders and sexualities
- PART FOUR CONTEMPORARY FORMATIONS
- A selected bibliography
- Index
40 - Steinbeck and the proletarian novel
from PART THREE - MODERNISM AND BEYOND
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 July 2011
- Frontmatter
- General Introduction
- PART ONE INVENTING THE AMERICAN NOVEL
- PART TWO REALISM, PROTEST, ACCOMMODATION
- PART THREE MODERNISM AND BEYOND
- Introduction: modernism and beyond
- 37 Stein, Hemingway, and American modernisms
- 38 The Great Gatsby and the 1920s
- 39 Philosophy and the American novel
- 40 Steinbeck and the proletarian novel
- 41 The novel, mass culture, mass media
- 42 Wright, Hurston, and the direction of the African American novel
- 43 Ellison and Baldwin: aesthetics, activism, and the social order
- 44 Religion and the twentieth-century American novel
- 45 Faulkner and the Southern novel
- 46 Law and the American novel
- 47 Twentieth-century publishing and the rise of the paperback
- 48 The novel of crime, mystery, and suspense
- 49 US novels and US wars
- 50 Science fiction
- 51 Female genre fiction in the twentieth century
- 52 Children's novels
- 53 The American novel and the rise of the suburbs
- 54 The Jewish great American novel
- 55 The Beats and the 1960s
- 56 Literary feminisms
- 57 Reimagining genders and sexualities
- PART FOUR CONTEMPORARY FORMATIONS
- A selected bibliography
- Index
Summary
When John Steinbeck's masterwork The Grapes of Wrath was published in 1939, the Communist Party's Daily Worker applauded it beneath the headline, “The Grapes of Wrath is a Great Proletarian Novel.” The reviewer's uncritical admiration was effusive:
It is at once a monumental protest against the horrors of a profit system whose high priests oppose the New Deal, unionization, and relief, and an infinitely compassionate portrait of the masses who suffer under the system. But out of their suffering, Steinbeck shows, will grow a great movement to restore the land to the people … It is hard to think of a more satisfying proletarian novel in America.
A few weeks later, the Party-sponsored weekly magazine New Masses put forward a more systematic appraisal by Granville Hicks, a public member of the Party and author of the notable Marxist critical study The Great Tradition: An Interpretation of American Literature since the Civil War (1933; revised 1935). Hicks's verdict was identical:
Hitherto, whenever anybody asked us what we meant by proletarian literature, we had to say, “Well, it ought to have this quality that you find in so-and-so's work, and that quality so exemplified by the other fellow, and such-and-such found in somebody else” … We shan't have to offer that kind of composite illustration any more. We can now say, “Proletarian literature? Oh, that means a book like John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath.”
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- The Cambridge History of the American Novel , pp. 671 - 685Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2011
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