464 Making It New: 1900–1945thought that scores a corrupt present by measuring it against what has been
irretrievably lost and what might still be gained. Yesterday is gone, leaving only its
failures, its corrupted residues; today is a tale of waste and want, but there is still
tomorrow; there is still the future, which might become a bright mirror of a more
mythic past.
A similar vein of prophecy is at work in the fiction of John Steinbeck (1902–1968),
although, in this case, prophecy is more closely wedded to political vision. Born in
California, Steinbeck studied marine biology at university: a subject that may
have later helped shape his interest in humanity as a kind of collective biological
organism, and the mass movement of that mass humanity as the fundamental
condition of life. His first book, published in 1929, was a romantic tale about
buccaneering; his second, The Pastures of Heaven (1932), a collection of stories
about people in a farm community; and his third, To a God Unknown (1933), a novel
about a farmer whose religion is a pagan belief in fertility and who sacrifices himself
on a primitive altar to bring an end to drought. It was Tortilla Flat (1935), however,
a vivid portrait of life among the poor in Monterey, that brought Steinbeck to
prominence. And it was In Dubious Battle (1936), the story of a strike among
migratory workers in the California fruit orchards, that brought a new political
edge to his work. With Of Mice and Men (1937), Steinbeck firmly established himself
as the novelist of the rural poor, dispossessed farmers and destitute farm laborers
and migratory workers. It is the tale of two itinerant farm workers, drawn in to a
brotherhood of suffering with each other, who yearn to find some sort of home.
With the Depression wreaking economic havoc and drought turning vast swaths
of agricultural land into a Dust Bowl, farmers and their families were reduced to
absolute poverty, forced out of their homes and buildings; they needed desperately
to find another, better place where they could settle and survive. As they traveled
across America, as so many did at this time in search of work, they also needed to
find a voice, someone to make the nation aware of their suffering. And they found it
in Steinbeck, particularly with the publication of his most famous and influential
novel, The Grapes of Wrath, in 1939.
The origins of The Grapes of Wrath lie, typically for the time, in a series of
newspaper articles Steinbeck wrote about migratory laborers. Published in 1936,
they were reprinted as a pamphlet, Their Blood is Strong, with an epilogue added, in- It was then that Steinbeck decided to turn fact into fiction to gain maximum
impact: to tell a story that would enable his readers to experience the suffering
he had seen. So he invented the Joad family, Oklahoma farmers who are driven off
their land by soil erosion, and who drive to California hoping to take advantage of
what they imagine to be a land of plenty. The migration of the Joad family is
punctuated by interchapters, written in gravely intense lyrical prose, that general-
ize the experience of the family and force us to see what happens to them as
representative, a type of what was happening to all the rural poor of the time.
Steinbeck plays cunningly with different mythical structures, too, to add resonance
and representativeness to his story. The journey of the Joads recalls many other
earlier, epic migrations: notably, the biblical journey to the Promised Land and the
GGray_c04.indd 464ray_c 04 .indd 464 8 8/1/2011 7:54:01 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 01 AM