Rather than zeroing in on a multiracial cast of characters as he did in many of his West Coast-set books, the characters that populate The Winter of Our Discontent are almost entirely white. We’re also a long way from the Californian settings of many of Steinbeck’s best-known works. With respect to The Winter of Our Discontent, we’re a long way from the more energetic, playful Steinbeck of Tortilla Flat or The Long Valley. In some ways, it feels like a late-period novel from a literary lion: thoughtful, rife with symbolism, and somewhat stark in its prose. It’s not one of Steinbeck’s better-loved novels: over the years, it’s amassed neither the accolades of East of Eden or The Grapes of Wrath or the cult dedication of Cannery Row. That novel is 1961’s The Winter of Our Discontent. But while Steinbeck’s work often grappled with class and poverty, one novel from his late period grappled with questions of immigration-and did so in ways that resonate uncomfortably with Trump-era America. Steinbeck’s name has also served as shorthand for a kind of socially-aware fiction. Steinbeck wrote about economic desperation far better than most, and approached some of his fiction with an eye towards the grander systems that left many impoverished. There’s a very good reason that readers return again and again to John Steinbeck’s fiction when it comes to its handling of class in America.
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