Steinbeck scholar John Timmerman sums up the book's influence: "The Grapes of Wrath may well be the most thoroughly discussed novel – in criticism, reviews, and college classrooms – of 20th century American literature."[11] The Grapes of Wrath is referred to as a Great American Novel.[15]
At the time of publication, Steinbeck's novel "was a phenomenon on the scale of a national event. It was publicly banned and burned by citizens, it was debated on national radio; but above all, it was read".[16] According to The New York Times, it was the best-selling book of 1939 and 430,000 copies had been printed by February 1940.[3] In that same month, it won the National Book Award, favorite fiction book of 1939, voted by members of the American Booksellers Association.[3] Soon, it won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and its Armed Services Edition went through two printings.[4]
The book was noted for Steinbeck's passionate depiction of the plight of the poor, and many of his contemporaries attacked his social and political views. Bryan Cordyack wrote: "Steinbeck was attacked as a propagandist and a socialist from both the left and the right of the political spectrum. The most fervent of these attacks came from the Associated Farmers of California; they were displeased with the book's depiction of California farmers' attitudes and conduct toward the migrants. They denounced the book as a 'pack of lies' and labeled it 'communist propaganda'".[11] Some argued that his novel was filled with inaccuracies.[17] In his book The Art of Fiction (1984), John Gardner criticized Steinbeck for not knowing anything about the California ranchers: "Witness Steinbeck's failure in The Grapes of Wrath. It should have been one of America's great books...[S]teinbeck wrote not a great and firm novel but a disappointing melodrama in which complex good is pitted against unmitigated, unbelievable evil."[18] Others accused Steinbeck of exaggerating camp conditions to make a political point. He had visited the camps well before publication of the novel[19] and argued their inhumane nature destroyed the settlers' spirit.
In 1962, the Nobel Prize committee cited The Grapes of Wrath as a "great work" and as one of the committee's main reasons for granting Steinbeck the Nobel Prize for Literature.[5]
In 1999, French newspaper Le Monde of Paris ranked The Grapes of Wrath as seventh on its list of the 100 best books of the 20th century. In the UK, it was listed at number 29 among the "nation's best loved novels" on the BBC's 2003 survey The Big Read.[20] In 2005, Time magazine included the novel in its "100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005".[21] In 2009, The Daily Telegraph of the United Kingdom included the novel in its "100 novels everyone should read".[22]
The Grapes of Wrath has faced a great amount of controversy since publication, including book bans and other challenges on a variety of political and religious grounds in the United States and other countries. The early attempts to suppress and censor the book directly inspired the promulgation of the Library Bill of Rights by the American Library Association.[23][24][25]
