also be viewed as actively participating within the traditions of proletariat fiction. Here Steinbeck is showing that murder and stillborn lives may crop up in the midst of misery and dejection rather than being actually pursued by desperate humans. Steinbeck shows that after Casey, the former preacher, is killed, Tom Joad accidentally kills a deputy who is trying to arrest him. Yet, with an eery and almost ironic parallel to the potential for conversion which greets Maggie's death, Steinbeck chooses to have Tom carry on Casey's work. Death does not seem capable of completing erasing the good which Casey started. Curiously within the American literary tradition innocence is often not completely obliterated as much as modified or transferred. Maggie dies but her mother is forced to become more forgiving, more understanding of others' weaknesses. Casey is killed but Tom Joad struggles to carry on his mission, not even being overly delayed by emerging as an accidental killer. Crane and Steinbeck indicate that in order for true growth ignorance must be changed into knowledge, innocence be transformed into wisdom.
Part of the reason that both Crane's Maggie and Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath have emerged as classics is that they both show a brutal shattering of the American dream. Born into a world of poverty, living near places tellingly called Rum Alley and Devil's Row, Maggie's life deteriorates even further when her father dies (Crane 1). Instead of depicting a life on the ascent, Crane offers a determinist's portrait of life on the skids, on the decline. For Maggie there appears to be no access to the American Dream, no way to acquire the better life. After Maggie becomes involved with her brother Jimmie's friend Pete the bartender and he casts her aside, Crane shows her life as one without options. Abandoned, she appears literally forced into prostitution to support herself.
Steinbeck portrays The Grapes of Wrath...