Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath & Crane's Maggie

 The two great American classics, Stephen Crane's Maggie: Girl of the Streets (1893) and John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath (1939), emerge as pioneers works within this country's literary tradition. Maggie scandalized the late Victorian world with its frank depiction of a young woman forced into prostitution. The Grapes of Wrath with its vivid depiction of the poverty of migrant farm workers attempting to eek out a living in the midst of the dustbowl of the 1930s. Notorious within their respective eras, these two works have emerged as classics due to their author's great storytelling abilities and the universality of the stories told. Maggie and the Joad family emerge as memorable American literary figures who struggle with such dominant themes as eternal youth or naivete, the American dream, identity, conflict in values and alienation.

Written as the first novel in America to deal with slums, Maggie also emerges as the first naturalistic novel of any merit within the American literary tradition. Crane appears to have been fascinated by the task of struggling to present an average girl, considered by her contemporaries to be good and wholesome, being forced into prostitution to earn a living. Crane focuses on the Maggie's naivete and dramatically exploits how her innocence is corrupted. Yet Maggie serves as a foil for Crane's even greater ambition of unveiling the hypocrisy of her society. It is only when the mourners

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by the Rose of Sharon giving birth to a dead baby. Crane and Steinbeck's writings indicate that not only does the American Dream elude many, but it also screens the fact that many Americans live in its shadow, burdened by an economic and spiritual poverty which ultimately robs them of their humanity. Crane emphasizes urban decay in Maggie: Girl of the Streets. One of his talents as a naturalists is to show urban grime and its stultifying effects with remarkable effect. Following after his master Zola, Crane indicates how easily a girl like Maggie who lives with her alcoholic mother in a New York City tenement setting of the 1890s is fooled into believing that a better world is just a step away. When Maggie becomes infatuated with Pete, her brother Jimmie's friend, she naively believes that becoming involved with him will immediately transport her to a happier and more secure social position. Crane writes with compressed ferocity, "she saw the golden glitter of the place where Pete was to take her" (Crane 21). After he has dumped her, Crane changes his emphasis upon an imagery of color to that of sound. Meeting Pete, she had glimpsed gold, now abandoned by him she walks away amidst "an unceasing babble of tongues over all
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Approximate Word count = 2188
Approximate Pages = 9 (250 words per page)