John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath and Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio serve as interesting subjects for comparison because of their complementary solutions to the problem of writing about the lives of common people. Both writers selected modes that were peculiarly suited to the nature of the lives they observed and each wrote about the collective lives of human beings in a certain place and situation. Anderson's concision and brevity make the most of few words and he tries to express more with less. Steinbeck, however, wrote an epic in which he attempted to create lives on a very large scale--even if they were the lives of very ordinary people.
The choice of form also reflects the authors' conceptions of the people they wrote about. The grotesques trapped in Anderson's Midwestern town lead very small lives and their existence is capsulized and as tightly restricted by Anderson's chosen form as by their fictional circumstances. But Anderson intended to observe his subjects in order to discover something about the "hundreds and hundreds" of truths they possessed (23). These were, however, truths that already existed rather than truths in the process of becoming. Steinbeck saw possibilities in his people and attempted to set them in the framework of historical progress and discover how they might react to events. Anderson's people exist as they are, prior to and separate from the points at which their stories are taken up. They are essentially static and their lives are fashioned into sharply drawn cameos. Steinbeck is looking for process, however, and he is most interested in the ability of the human race to produce leaders who can commit themselves to altruistic behavior when circumstances force it on them. His narrative rolls forward along the American highways after the fashion of most epic journeys, while almost no one budges from Winesburg. The marked contrast between the future-orientation of Steinbeck's wor...