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the prominent cultural critic Leslie Fiedler attacked the novel as “maudlin, sentimental, and overblown”; another review a month later by Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist William Kennedy praised it for standing “tall . . . a mighty, mighty book.” The tug-of-war has continued through the recent Steinbeck centenary in 2002: Keith Windschuttle, writing in the conservative journal The New Criterion, proclaims “there is now an accumulation of sufficient historical, demographic, and climatic data about the 1930s to show that almost everything about the elaborate picture created in the novel is either outright false or exaggerated beyond belief.” On the opposite side, liberal novelist Norman Mailer, writing in John Steinbeck: Centennial Reflections by American Writers, says: “I wonder if any of us since have been equal to Steinbeck’s marvelous and ironic sense of compassion . . . daring all the time to go up to the very abyss of offering more feeling than the reader can accept. What a great novel was The Grapes of Wrath.” Harold Bloom, who had qualifiedly praised the novel’s “compassionate narative” in 1988, completely reversed his position during the centenary. In his Chelsea House BioCritique, John Steinbeck (2003), Bloom lambasts the novel, preferring instead Ford’s cinematic version, which he considers “superior.” The lesson here seems to be that readers pay their money and take their pick. In this regard, John Seelye’s claim that “Steinbeck is a gravely misunderstood writer,” is especially accurate and relevant.

The past seven decades have seen little consensus about the exact nature of the novel’s achievement, though most contemporary analysts now treat the book as a legitimate work of fiction rather than a propagandistic tract. As a result, whether Grapes is viewed through a social, historical, linguistic, formal, political, ecological, regional, mythic, psychological, metaphysical, gender, religious, or materialist lens (all examples of recently applied theoretical and critical methods), the book’s textual richness, its many layers of action, language, imagery, theme, and character, continues to repay dividends. As John Ditsky observed, “The Joads are still in motion, and their vehicle with them.” Intellectual theories to the contrary, criticism remains a subjective act, a kind of fiction passing for objective discourse, and perhaps the only sure thing about The Grapes of Wrath is its capacity to elicit powerful responses from its audience. This may have been Steinbeck’s intention from the first. “I don’t think The Grapes of Wrath is obscure in what it tries to say,” he claimed in 1955. “Its structure is very carefully worked out. . . . Just read it, don’t count it!”

As a result of shifting political emphases, the enlightened recommendations of the La Follette Committee (that the National Labor Relations Act include farmworkers), the effects of loosened labor laws (California’s discriminatory “anti-migrant” law, established in 1901, was struck down by the Supreme Court in 1941), the creation of compulsory military service, and the inevitable recruitment of migrant families into defense plant and shipyard jobs caused by the booming economy of World War II that signaled the beginning of their successful assimilation, the particular set of epochal conditions that crystallized Steinbeck’s awareness about the white homeless underclass in the first place passed from his view. (Kevin Starr notes that California growers soon complained of an acute shortage of seasonal labor.) Like other American works that embody the bitter, often tragic transition from one epoch or period or way of life to another, The Grapes of Wrath possessed a certain timeliness as one of several indelible texts that arose from the same historical era—U.S.A., An American Exodus, and Factories in the Field, as well as Erskine Caldwell and Margeret Bourke-White’s You Have Seen Their Faces, James Agee and Walker Evans’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, and novels such as Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust, and Richard Wright’s Native Son. In concert with these