“They ain’t human”: John Steinbeck, Proletarian Fiction, and the Racial Politics of “The People”

Abstract

This essay argues that the humanism professed by many Popular Front writers was part of a tactical attempt to make Marxist propaganda both more effective and more responsive to the unique challenges of American racial and cultural politics. Thus, if John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1939) seems calculated to resonate with a white, middle-class audience, this is not because Steinbeck’s humanism was covertly racist and bourgeois, but because he deliberately used humanism to correct readers’ previously-held sympathies with racist and bourgeois ideologies.

Millen Brand: Embodying tensions within proletarian literature

“…Along with the more explicit moments of using free indirect discourse to humanize marginalized characters, this depiction of work also humanizes workers by zooming in on the body and labor. Such representations align Brand with writers such as Steinbeck, who, as Mollie Godfrey argues, deployed “‘humanizing’ literary strategies such as sympathetic identification […] to address and oppose conservative and racist ideologies and reading practices” (2013, 108–109). Unlike other Popular Front‐era writers such as Steinbeck, who explicitly referred to “humanity” or the “people,” however, Brand rarely uses such terms, and instead uses the techniques of free indirect discourse and focus on the laboring body “to oppose a dominant discourse that depicted African Americans, regional and ethnic minorities, and the working class as little more than animals” (2013, 109).…”