SOURCE: Owens, Louis. “The Culpable Joads: Desentimentalizing The Grapes of Wrath.” In Critical Essays on Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, edited by John Ditsky, pp. 108-16. Boston: G. K. Hall and Co., 1989.

In the following essay, Owens examines the elements with which Steinbeck balances the potential sentimentality in The Grapes of Wrath.

The Grapes of Wrath is one of John Steinbeck's great experiments, perhaps his greatest, a novel that exploded upon the American conscience in 1939, bringing home to American readers both the intimate reality of the Joads' suffering and the immense panorama of a people's—the Dust Bowl migrants'—suffering. In spite of howls of outrage from opposite ends of the novel's journey—both Oklahoma and California—America took the Joads to heart, forming out of The Grapes of Wrath a new American archetype of oppression and endurance, survival if not salvation.¹ So warmly did readers embrace the...