and it is as a novel that it has endured. The Joad family, unlike the Rudkus family, stands on its own, above and beyond the circumstances in which it was portrayed.
If The Grapes of Wrath is the greater work of literature, both books deserve to be remembered as well as works of fictionalized reportage. Sinclair and Steinbeck alike plunged intensively into first-hand research on their subjects; at least in Steinbeck's case at considerable personal risk. Thus, if the members of the Joad family is more richly developed as individuals than are the members of the Rudkus family, the social and economic circumstances in which they are shown are equally vivid and realistic in both cases. It is this aspect of these two books, what may be called the journalistic aspect, with which we are concerned here: what do these books tell us about the lives and circumstances of working-class American families at two periods of twentieth-century American history?
In setting, the two books are a generation and two thirds of a continent apart. One takes place in industrial Chicago, the other begins in Oklahoma and shifts for its principal development to agricultural California. One takes place in the booming and generally optimistic America of the early twentieth century, the other takes place in the Great Depression. Nevertheless, the Rudkuses and the Joads have a great deal in common. The Rudkuses are Lithuanian peasants who emigrate to American. The Joads are Oklahoma tenant farmers--far closer to peasants than to the prosperous conventional image of the American "family farmer"--who emigrate to California.
The circumstances of emigration are drastically different, however. When we first meet Jurgis Rudkus and his young wife Ona, they are already living in Chicago. We are told only in brief retrospect about their journey to America, and their reasons for making it.
It was Jonas who suggested that they all go to America, wh...