The two people who brought us The Grapes of Wrath

John Steinbeck (1902–1968), an ardent propagandist for the exploited underdogs of the Great Depression, had barely enough money for subsistence during the years he spent preparing and writing The Grapes of Wrath, the protest novel regarded as his masterpiece. It made him a Nobel laureate and a very rich man. The Nobel committee praised his ‘realistic and imaginative writing, combining . . . sympathetic humour and keen social perception’. Seventy-four years after first publication, the book still sells more than 100,000 copies a year.

In his Nobel acceptance speech in 1962, Steinbeck said that ‘a writer who does not passionately believe in the perfectibility of man has no dedication nor any membership in literature’. Many a laureate has declared such a lofty credo, but Steinbeck seems really to have lived by his words, especially in the important early years of his career. When he wrote the grim saga of the Joad family of Oklahoma sharecroppers displaced by crop failure and bank foreclosure, and their gruelling trek to the inhospitable paradise of California, he was writing a controversial left-wing manifesto calling for welfare beyond Roosevelt’s New Deal.