SOURCE: "Audience and Closure in The Grapes of Wrath," in Studies in American Fiction, Vol. 22, No. 1, Spring, 1994, pp. 19-36.

In the following essay, Visser discusses the historical context of The Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck's persuasive depiction of social injustice, and narrative strategies employed to present a politically radical message to a large public audience.

Although The Grapes of Wrath continues to be regarded as Steinbeck's major achievement, changing critical fashions have ensured that the novel's status remains uncertain. The novel's standing came under pressure as early as the decades immediately following its publication, as literary studies with the onset of the Cold War intensified a longstanding tendency in modern poetics to strip literary texts of social and political implications. It was not difficult to decontextualize most of the literature of earlier times, but because the thirties were part of living memory, and because so much of the decade's...