John Steinbeck has the seemingly oxymoronic distinction of having been both a Nobel laureate and best-selling author and yet also one of the most underrated and misunderstood American authors of the twentieth century. After producing an assortment of brilliant short stories, novels, and one play during the 1930s, Steinbeck became a national figure in 1939 with the publication of The Grapes of Wrath. This Pulitzer Prize-winning novel was denounced on the floor of the United States House of Representatives as a "dirty, lying, filthy manuscript," but its veracity was publicly attested to by Eleanor Roosevelt. Although the reading public that had followed Steinbeck through comedies with sad endings, tragedies-in-miniature, and compelling strike novels continued to buy his increasingly varied post-Grapes of Wrath works in great numbers, most leading American critics never forgave him for continuing to change. When the Swedish Academy announced that Steinbeck was the 1962 recipient of...