Here is the contrarian take, and I will defend it: The Grapes of Wrath is not Steinbeck’s best book. It is not even his second-best book. It is the book that won him the Nobel Prize and cemented his place in the American canon, and the canon-makers chose wrong.
East of Eden is better. The Pearl is tighter. Cannery Row is more alive. Of Mice and Men is more ruthless. The Log from the Sea of Cortez, his non-fiction collaboration with Ed Ricketts, is a richer thinker’s book than anything he wrote alone. Grapes is the book that got him the room. It is not the book that shows you why he deserved to be in the room.
I say this having read it three times. Once in high school, where I was assigned it and resented it. Once in my twenties, where I loved it because it made me feel politically sophisticated to love it. Once last year, at the kitchen table in Otaru, where I read it slowly and finally admitted what had been bothering me for thirty years.
What had been bothering me: Steinbeck’s thumb is on the scale. On every page. For seven hundred pages.
This is not a criticism of his politics. His politics were largely correct. The Dust Bowl migrants were betrayed. The California growers were criminal. The banks were a self-perpetuating machine that ate the people who fed it. Every historical point Steinbeck makes is a point I agree with. That is not the issue. The issue is that he does not trust his reader to agree with him, and so he narrates the agreement for the reader, in the famous intercalary chapters, in voices that are meant to sound biblical and end up sounding like an earnest graduate student explaining the Okies to a room of Stanford donors.
Read the intercalary chapter about the turtle. It is famous. It is taught. It is also a college sophomore’s idea of a parable. The turtle does not need to be symbolic. The turtle is already a turtle. Steinbeck could not leave him alone.
Compare this to Orwell, who for all his faults never narrated the reader’s agreement. Compare it to Agee and Evans in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, who reported the tenant farmers of Alabama with such merciless accuracy that the reader is left alone in the room with the facts, and the facts do the work. Compare it, even, to Steinbeck himself in The Harvest Gypsies, the newspaper reportage he wrote in 1936 that became the raw material for Grapes. The Harvest Gypsies is better than the novel that came out of it. It is shorter. It is plainer. It trusts the reader.
I will say what Grapes of Wrath does well. It does the Joad family beautifully. Ma Joad is one of the great characters in twentieth-century American fiction, and the final scene — which I will not spoil for the three of you who have not read it — is the single most committed act of gambling on imagery a major novelist pulled off in the twentieth century. Either it lands for you or it does not, and if it lands for you it erases the sermon that preceded it and the book becomes great for five pages and you close it and forgive everything.
But you should only have to forgive what the book did not earn.
I know this take is not popular. I know the book is loved, is taught, is passed from parent to child, is part of what a certain generation of American reader thinks of as the education of a decent person. I am not trying to take it from anyone. I am only trying to say that the canon is wrong about Steinbeck’s peak, and if Grapes is your entry to him, please do not let it be your exit. Read East of Eden next. That is where the man is all the way loose. That is where he trusts you.
A related vagobond.com piece: A Question of Authority: Can There Be Authority in an Anarchist Society.
Readers and fans of The Grapes of Wrath will really enjoy The Anarchist Manifesto Project 2026 — twenty-six kinds of anarchism, A through Z in the phonetic alphabet, each one written from inside its own life. The argument Steinbeck was trying to make, made twenty-six more ways, without the sermon. Have a look and let me know what you think.
CD Damitio writes at indignified.substack.com — essays on utopias, dystopias, and the spaces between. Free to read. No algorithm, no sponsored content. His books can be found on Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/stores/CD-Damitio/author/B001JP7NWA
CD Damitio writes INDIGNIFIED — utopias and dystopias explored. Free to read.
