The Grapes of Wrath possessed a certain timeliness as one of several indelible texts that arose from the same historical era—U.S.A., An American Exodus, and Factories in the Field, as well as Erskine Caldwell and Margeret Bourke-White’s You Have Seen Their Faces, James Agee and Walker Evans’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, and novels such as Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust, and Richard Wright’s Native Son. In concert with these and other counter-narratives that pull no punches in attempting to document, represent, or interpret “America” as a contested place, The Grapes of Wrath’s
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