Criticism > Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism > The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck - Duane R. Carr (essay date summer-fall 1975)


The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck - Duane R. Carr (essay date summer-fall 1975)

Duane R. Carr (essay date summer-fall 1975)

SOURCE: Carr, Duane R. “Steinbeck's Blakean Vision in The Grapes of Wrath.” Steinbeck Quarterly 8, nos. 3-4 (summer-fall 1975): 67-73.

[In the following essay, Carr uses Jim Casy's speech at Grandpa Joad's graveside as a starting point to analyze instances of allusion to the poetry of William Blake in The Grapes of Wrath.]

Steinbeck criticism has come a long way since Edmund Wilson's early judgment of The Grapes of Wrath as principally about animals, not humans,1 and Stanley Edgar Hyman's rather harsh judgment of Steinbeck as interested only in the study of ecology.2 Three critics in particular—Peter Lisca, Warren French, and Joseph Fontenrose—have demonstrated Steinbeck's interest in the growth of the individual man from self-centered isolation to involvement in the human community,3 and Fontenrose notes that “Steinbeck is an heir of the...

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