A History of American Literature

466 Making It New: 1900–1945

is what gives it also a prophetic fervor. Steinbeck was never to write anything

nearly as powerful or influential as his story of the Joads, although there were to be

many further novels about the poor (Cannery Row (1945)), about family troubles

and tensions (East of Eden (1952)), and a book about Steinbeck’s own journeying

across America (Travels with Charley (1962)). The Grapes of Wrath stands, though,

as a worthy equivalent in the twentieth century of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in the

nineteenth: a work founded on the conviction that things should and could change

which, thanks to its author’s mixing of the documentary and the visionary, argument

and sentiment, managed to ensure that many others were equally convinced.

Community and Identity

Immigrant writing

“Where is America?” asks the narrator of “America and I” (1923), a short story by

Anzia Yezierska (1885–1970). “Is there an America? What is this wilderness in which

I’m lost?” The teller of the tale is, she informs the reader, an immigrant who has

fled from “the airless oppression of Russia” to what she believes will be “the Promised

Land.” “From the other end of the earth from where I came,” she says, “America was

a land of living hope, woven of dreams, aflame with longing and desire.” That dream,

which mirrors the dream Steinbeck’s migrants carry in their hearts as they cross the

American continent, begins to be challenged when she arrives in the New World.

“I was in America, among the Americans, but not of them,” she recalls. Working first

as a servant and then in a sweatshop, she cannot find what she calls “my America,

where I could work for love and not for a living.” Still, “the feeling that America

must be somewhere, somehow” survives. It encourages her to learn the language

and become “a trained worker.” She goes to her factory teacher, then to the local

Vocational Guidance Center. “What do you want?” she is asked; to which she replies,

“I want America to want me.” “You have to show that you have something special

for America before America has need of you,” she is told. “America is no Utopia. First

you must become efficient in earning a living before you can indulge in your poetic

dreams.” That lesson learned, and “stripped of all illusions,” she begins to read

American history. There she discovers, she tells the reader, that “the great difference

between the first Pilgrims and me was that they expected to make America, build

America, create their own world of liberty. I wanted to find it ready made.” “Then

came a light – a great revelation!” the narrator reveals. “I saw America – a big idea – a

deathless hope – a world still in the making.” She realizes, at last, that “it was the glory

of America that it was not yet finished” and that she, “the last comer,” could have “her

share to give, small or great, in the making of America, like those Pilgrims who came

in the Mayflower.” So she concludes, she began to play her part in the creation of “the

America that is every day coming to be.” And she began “to build a bridge of

understanding between the American-born” and herself by opening up her life and

the lives of her people to them. “In only writing about the Ghetto I found America.”

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