Sociological Criticism Of John Steinbeck

Steinbeck was a unique and notable writer among many Americans novelist during 1930’s. His novels are rich in variety and touched each and every aspects of life. That is why he is called as realistic, socialistic, naturalistic, regionalist, pragmatic, and mythic writer. These adjectives define him as a great writer and his writings are mostly based on Man and his Life. He was called as a social critique by the use of sociological approach in his writings. Sociologist C. Wright Mill (1959) in his book Essentials of sociology says “the sociological perspective enables us to grasp the connection between history and biography” (p 2). Mill defines both history and biography under society. He says by history
“Each society is located I a broad stream

As a social critique he got inspiration from his precursors Walt Whitman and Earnest Hemingway in particular. But Steinbeck who was always favour of man rather than society specifically for poor or migrant workers of California. Harold Bloom’s in his Critical Interpretation of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath sys, like Whitman and Hemingway “he studied the nostalgia, the aboriginal sources that were never available for American, and like them he retained a profound hope for the American as natural man and women” (Bloom 4). Like Bloom said Steinbeck portrayed actual incidents and realistic characters in his novels. His characters and incidents were naturally taken from era of 1930’s what he has seen and experienced during this period. 1930’s were one of the toughest periods for America and Americans because of the ‘Great Depression’. The period of mass unemployment and economic collapse this followed the stock-market “crash” of 1929. In the rich agricultural area of California, the depression created a situation which urgently in need of reform. Another situation strike American by 1935 as ‘dust Bowl’ in the areas of Great Plains, that vast region of the United States which begins at the western limit of the Mississippi Valley and raises gradually to the foot hills of the Rocky Mountains, occupying large sections of such states like North and South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas. Cyrus Ernesto Zirakzadeh in John Steinbeck on the Political Capacities of Everyday Folk: Moms, Reds, and Ma Joad,