the 21st century

The 21st century is the historical period in which John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath has continued to be read, studied, and debated, demonstrating the novel's enduring relevance across successive generations. As a literary classic that speaks directly to readers' concerns in successive historical and cultural eras, the novel has found new and relevant meanings for each generation of readers in the 21st century, just as it did in the decades following its publication in 1939.

Reception and Cultural Presence in the 21st Century

In the 21st century, The Grapes of Wrath has maintained a powerful cultural presence. A graph in Book (July/August 2003) indicated that of the fifty bestselling "classic" British and American novels in 2002, Grapes ranked eleventh, five spots behind Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby but seven ahead of Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea. In that same issue, Jerome Kramer included Grapes as one of the twenty books that changed America. Turn-of-the-century polls by Radcliffe Publishing Course, Modern Library Board, Hungry Mind Review, San Francisco Chronicle, Heath Anthology of American Literature Newsletter, Library Journal, and British booksellers Waterston's all placed The Grapes of Wrath among the premier works in English of the twentieth century. A Writer's Digest (November 1999) survey of readers, writers, editors, and academics ranked John Steinbeck as the number one writer among the century's "100 Best."

The Steinbeck Centennial and Public Engagement

The year 2002, Steinbeck's one hundredth birthday, saw an unprecedented and ambitious project by California's Humanities Council, which invited everyone in the state to read and discuss the novel at 140 public library venues. This effort was itself part of a nationwide Steinbeck centennial honoring the "Bard of the People," which, according to Anne Keisman, became the "largest single author tribute in American history." The novel's capacity to elicit powerful responses from its audience has remained undiminished, with readers continuing to find something new and relevant about it that speaks to their times.

Critical Debate and Scholarly Analysis

In the 21st century, the critical tug-of-war over the novel has continued. Keith Windschuttle, writing in the conservative journal The New Criterion in June 2002, proclaimed "there is now an accumulation of sufficient historical, demographic, and climatic data about the 1930s to show that almost everything about the elaborate picture created in the novel is either outright false or exaggerated beyond belief." On the opposite side, liberal novelist Norman Mailer, writing in John Steinbeck: Centennial Reflections by American Writers, said: "I wonder if any of us since have been equal to Steinbeck's marvelous and ironic sense of compassion . . . daring all the time to go up to the very abyss of offering more feeling than the reader can accept. What a great novel was The Grapes of Wrath." Harold Bloom, who had qualifiedly praised the novel's "compassionate narrative" in 1988, completely reversed his position during the centenary, lambasting the novel in his Chelsea House BioCritique, John Steinbeck (2003), and preferring instead John Ford's cinematic version, which he considered "superior."

Enduring Significance

In the broadest sense, the novel continues to perform meaningful cultural work in shaping perceptions toward social justice, compassion, and understanding, perhaps more important than ever in the unstable global climate of the new century. Wherever human beings dream of a dignified and free society in which they can live in right relationship with the environment and other humans, and harvest the fruits of their own labor, The Grapes of Wrath's insistent message is still applicable. As novelist Don DeLillo claimed in his centennial reflection, "Steinbeck shaped a geography of conscience" in The Grapes of Wrath, "for it is a novel in which there is something at stake in every sentence." For emotional urgency, evocative power, sensational design, sustained impact, prophetic reach, and continued controversy, The Grapes of Wrath still has few peers in American fiction.