[In the following review, Isherwood praises Steinbeck's efforts in The Grapes of Wrath but finds the novel overly didactic and propagandistic.]

Out in the Dust Bowl of Oklahoma, the earth is dying of sheer exhaustion. Three generations back, white men took this land from the Indians. Their children grew poor on it, lost it, and became sharecroppers. Now, when the sharecroppers' landlords can no longer pay the interest on their debts, the banks step in to claim what is legally theirs. They will plough up the small holdings with their tractors, and farm them for cotton, until that crop, too, is exhausted. The land will pass to other owners. The cycle of futile, uneconomic possession will continue.

Meanwhile, the sharecroppers have to leave the Dust Bowl. They enter another great American historical cycle—the cycle of migration towards the West. They become actors in the classic tragedy of California. For Eldorado is tragic, like Palestine, like every other Promised Land. After the Land Rush, the Gold Rush, the Movie Rush, comes the Fruit Rush. The poor farmers are only too ready to believe the handbills which assure them that there will be work for everybody in the orchards and orange-groves of the Pacific Coast. They swarm over the mountains and across the deserts in their broken-down automobiles, they suffer epic and incredible hardships—only to find that they have exchanged a bad life for a worse. The fruit-picking is overcrowded, the season is short, wages have been forced down to starvation-level. The “Okies” themselves are naturally unwelcome to a resident population which sees with dismay and resentment this fresh influx of competition into the labor-market. The native Californians arm themselves to protect their own hard-won economic security. Camping miserably like nomads, on the fringes of the towns, the starving strangers are persecuted by the police. Most of them are dazed into submission. Some wander away elsewhere, or return to their ruined homesteads. A few grow angry. These form the nucleus of a future revolt. Violence will give birth to violence, as always. The Grapes of Wrath are ready for the vintage.

Such, very briefly, is the background of Mr. Steinbeck's latest novel. We follow the wanderings of the Joads, a typical sharecropper family, from the moment of their eviction from an Oklahoma farm. We accompany them on their tragic and exciting journey, across Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, dogged by accident and disaster. We are present at the final scene of their disintegration, less than a year later, in the heavy rains of a Californian winter.

There are thirteen of them in the truck, when the great trek begins—Grampa, the “heller,” a foul-mouthed, impish, violent old man, “full a piss an vinegar,” who has to be watched like a naughty child; Granma, his wife, who is fully a match for him; Pa and Ma and Uncle John; Noah, the taciturn eldest son; Tom, who has been in prison for manslaughter; Al, the smart aleck, who lives for engines and girls; Rose of Sharon, pregnant with her first child, and Connie, her husband; Ruthie and Winfield, the youngest; and the ex-preacher Casy, a neo-Tolstoyan figure, agnostic and perplexed, whose provisional creed is: “You gotta do what you gotta do.” The family decides to take him along—partly because their code forbids them to refuse hospitality; partly out of primitive reverence for the witchdoctor, the inspired mouthpiece of the little community. Casy is a kind of unwilling saint.

Grampa dies first, and is buried by the roadside: his epitaph a note stuck inside a fruit jar: “This here is William James Joad, dyed of a stroke, old old man. His fokes bured him becaws they got no money to pay for funerls. Nobody kilt him. Jus a stroke an he dyed. ‘Blessed is he whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered.’” Gramma does not survive him long; she dies while the truck is crossing the desert. Ma, resourceful as ever, smuggles her corpse past the Californian agricultural inspectors. Noah has left them already. On the banks of the Colorado River, he quietly announces his intention: “I can't he'p it. I can't leave this here water.” So he stays.

Connie is the next to go. He had hoped for so much from the Promised Land—a decent job, a little house, comforts for Rose of Sharon when their child was born. The reality is too miserable for him to face. He runs away and is heard of no more.

Then Casy is imprisoned, and later killed in a fight with the police. And Tom, who strikes Casy's murderer dead, has to go into hiding. One day he will emerge, dangerous and armed for the struggle, among the secret forces of revolt. But that is another story.

Ma fights desperately to hold the remaining members of her family together, but further trials await her. Al pairs off with a girl, and breaks away from the group. Rose of Sharon's child is stillborn. And, in the winter floods, the truck itself has to be abandoned. We get one last glimpse of the Joads as they stagger miserably into a barn; and Rose of Sharon kneels to give her unwanted milk to the lips of a starving cotton-picker. The narrative ceases, but the story does not end. There can be no end to it, as long as such wretchedness is permitted to exist upon the earth.

Readers of the earlier novels and stories do not need to be reminded that Mr. Steinbeck is a master of realistic writing—a master among masters, for America is extraordinarily rich in his peculiar kind of talent. In the presence of such powers, such observation, such compassion, such humor, it seems almost ungrateful to make reservations—to ask that what is so good should be even better. But a writer of Mr. Steinbeck's caliber can only be insulted by mere praise; for his defects are as interesting as his merits. What are these defects? Why isn't The Grapes of Wrath entirely satisfying as a work of art?

It is a mark of the greatest poets, novelists and dramatists that they all demand a high degree of cooperation from their audience. The form may be simple, and the language plain as daylight, but the inner meaning, the latent content of a masterpiece will not be perceived without a certain imaginative and emotional effort. In this sense, the great artist makes every one of his readers into a philosopher and poet, to a greater or lesser degree, according to that reader's powers. The novelist of genius, by presenting the particular instance, indicates the general truth. He indicates, but he does not attempt to state it—for to state the general truth is to circumscribe it, to make it somewhat less than itself. The final verdict, the ultimate synthesis, must be left to the reader; and each reader will modify it in accordance with his needs. The aggregate of all these individual syntheses is the measure of the impact of a work of art upon the world. It is, in fact, a part of that work. In this way, masterpieces, throughout the ages, actually undergo a sort of organic growth.

At this point arises the problem of the so-called propaganda-novel, and the often-repeated question: “Can propaganda produce good art?” “All art is propaganda,” the propagandists retort—and, of course, in a sense, they are right. Novels inevitably reflect contemporary conditions. But here the distinction appears. In a successful work of art, the “propaganda” (which means, ultimately, the appeal to the tribunal of humanity) has been completely digested, it forms part of the latent content; its conclusions are left to the conscience and judgment of the reader himself. In an imperfect work of art, however, the “propaganda” is overt. It is stated, and therefore limited. The novelist becomes a schoolmaster.

Mr. Steinbeck, in his eagerness for the cause of the sharecroppers and his indignation against the wrongs they suffer, has been guilty, throughout this book, of such personal, schoolmasterish intrusions upon the reader. Too often, we feel him at our elbow, explaining, interpreting, interfering with our own independent impressions. And there are moments at which Ma Joad and Casy—otherwise such substantial figures—seem to fade into mere mouthpieces, as the author's voice comes through, like another station on the radio. All this is a pity. It seriously impairs the total effect of the novel, brilliant, vivid, and deeply moving as it is. The reader has not been allowed to cooperate, and he comes away vaguely frustrated.

Overt political propaganda, however just in its conclusions, must always defeat its own artistic ends, for this very reason: the politico-sociological case is general, the artistic instance is particular. If you claim that your characters' misfortunes are due to the existing System, the reader may retort that they are actually brought about by the author himself. Legally speaking, it was Mr. Steinbeck who murdered Casy and killed Grampa and Granma Joad. In other words, fiction is fiction. Its truths are parallel to, but not identical with the truths of the real world.

Mr. Steinbeck still owes us a great novel. He has everything which could produce it—the technical ability, the fundamental seriousness, the sympathy, the vision. There are passages in this book which achieve greatness. The total artistic effect falls short of its exciting promise. The Grapes of Wrath is a milestone in American fiction, but I do not believe that it represents the height of its author's powers.