Steinbeck, John (Vol. 124) | Louis Owens (essay date 1989)
Louis Owens (essay date 1989)
SOURCE: "The Culpable Joads: Desentimentalizing The Grapes of Wrath," in Critical Essays on Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, edited by John Ditsky, G. K. Hall, 1989, pp. 108-16.
[In the following essay, Owens draws attention to Steinbeck's effort to evoke sympathy for the Joad family without sentimentalizing their plight. According to Owens, Steinbeck incorporates panoramic interchapters to offset over-identification with the Joad family.]
The Grapes of Wrath is one of John Steinbeck's great experiments, perhaps his greatest, a novel that exploded upon the American conscience in 1939, bringing home to American readers both the intimate reality of the Joads' suffering and the immense panorama of a people's—the Dust Bowl migrants'—suffering. In spite of howls of outrage from opposite ends of the novel's journey—both Oklahoma and California—America took the Joads to heart, forming out of...
[The entire page is 3626 words long]
Navigate
