In 1997 the American historian Charles Shindo examined the evidence for Steinbeck’s story. In his book Dust-Bowl Migrants in the American Imagination (University Press of Kansas), Shindo concluded that much of it was false.
John Gardner:
“One trouble with having read nothing worth reading is that one never fully understands the other side of one’s argument, never understands that the argument is an old one (all great arguments are), never understands the dignity and worth of the people one has cast as enemies. Witness John Steinbeck’s failure in The Grapes of Wrath. It should have been one of America’s great books. but while Steinbeck knew all there was to know about Okies and the countless sorrows of their move to California to find work, he knew nothing about the California ranchers who employed and exploited them; he had no clue to , or interest in, their reasons for behaving as they did; and the result is that Steinbeck wrote not a great and firm novel but a disappointing melodrama in which complex good is pitted against unmitigated, unbelievable evil.”
A piece of trashy socrealist propaganda.
I didn’t find the novel to be Good Vs Evil at all. Every other chapter is written in highly impressionist modernist prose. It’s not trash at all. It’s as experimental as he got. I’m sure the Russian translation whitewashed this aspect of it.