A Novel is Fiction

Migrant Car

John Steinbeck wrote a novel, and I am pretty sure he would be the first person to admit that. He did not set out to tell the most truthful, documentary tale possible. He crafted a fictional family, the Joads, and interspersed truths he had learned in his own travels among the story of theirs. The author realized something major was going on around him in America and he wanted to capture as close of an understanding of the situation as possible. And, for a while, he wrote an article for a San Francisco newspaper chronicling his findings. These articles should probably be taken for fact as seen through the eyes of John Steinbeck. The novel he wrote later based on this emigrational experience, however, should not.

Keith Windschuttle’s work Steinbeck’s Myth of the Okies manages to point out every single historical discrepancy present in The Grapes of Wrath. Windschuttle writes:

“Although it is about the experiences of the fictional Joad family, The Grapes of Wrath was always meant to be taken literally…Steinbeck interspersed his fictional chapters with passages that gave a running account of the prevailing social, climatic, economic, and political conditions…Unfortunately for the reputation of the author, however, 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 (Windschuttle, 2002).”

To which I have to respond, who cares?

Ok, so “dust storms in the Thirties affected very little of the farming land of Oklahoma.” And the majority of people who moved from Oklahoma to California did so in post World War II boom times; and of those people, the majority were actually quite young and moved from cities to cities, not from farms to other rural areas. Windschuttle also argues it was not the banks that killed agriculture but Roosevelt’s New Deal policies that forced the tenants of the land. But beyond these blatant discrepancies, Windschuttle points out that of the people who did actually go to California before 1940 to work the land, the majority was successful and prospered.

Windschuttle thinks the only enduring quality about Steinbeck’s work is his use of the biblical theme of the Exodus. The Joads are a typical American family experiencing an event of biblical proportions. Apparently, that detail and that detail alone makes The Grapes of Wrath the seminal book of the American Great Depression. But this entire view is so narrow-minded. While we may have the equipment to look bad and realize Steinbeck’s book is less than 100% truthful, we should not even bother. A novel is fiction for a reason: so an author can make a story up or take licenses with one he or she may already know. So Windschuttle, cut the guy some slack.