SOURCE: Taylor, Walter Fuller. “The Grapes of Wrath Reconsidered: Some Observations on John Steinbeck and the ‘Religion’ of Secularism.” Mississippi Quarterly 12, no. 3 (summer 1959): 136-44.

In the following essay, Taylor finds that readers twenty years after the publication of The Grapes of Wrath will come away with a considerably different experience than those who read the book while the social issues of its time were fresh in their consciousness.

John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath is, of course, vintage of 1939; and now that the wine has aged for twenty years it reveals underlying flavors that in the first flush of discovery were overlooked. Since some of these flavors have a noticeable acerbity, suggestive less of grape than of green persimmon, and since they have undoubtedly been there from the beginning, it is a bit surprising that they should have been so long neglected. Yet the flavor, the “meaning” of...