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When Richard Wright's Native Son appeared in 1940, it was hailed by critics on the left, several of whom compared Wright's book to one that had appeared the previous year: John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath. As Michael Gold, author of Jews Without Money (1930) and founder of The New Masses (1926-1948), put it "American proletarian literature . . . has finally culminated in two sure classics- Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath and Richard Wright's Native Son" (qtd. in Sillen, "The Response" 81). Ironically, such comparisons were common in more conservative forums as well; thus, the Book-of-the- Month Club claimed that, "like Grapes of Wrath," Native Son was "no tract or defense plea" but "a fully realized story of unfortunates, uncompromisingly realistic and quite . . . human" (Canby 40). The equal praise with which these books were met on both the leftand the right suggests that much of what the two classics of American proletarian literature had in common was the fact that they did not look like proletarian literature: they were not propagandistic but "human." Or was it that their humanity actually made them more effective as propaganda? As Samuel Sillen, an editor at New Masses, described Native Son, "only a critic whose esthetic senses are blunted or whose social prejudices are unalterable will attempt to shout this novel down with the old cry of 'propaganda.' And yet, like The Grapes of Wrath, it will jar men and women out of their routine ways of looking at life and sweep them toward a new conception of the way things are and the way they ought to be" ("Review" 59).
From today's vantage point, the comparison of Steinbeck to Wright seems odd for a number of reasons, one of which only left-wing critic Malcolm Cowley noticed in 1940: that Steinbeck's novel was by far the more "sentimental" ("Review" 67) of the two-a significant point given that, in writing Native Son, Wright saw himself as taking a radical step away from writing that "even bankers' daughters could read and weep over and feel good about" ("How Bigger" 454). Since 1989, critics have begun to declare that Steinbeck had done precisely what Wright had wanted to avoid, with Leslie Fiedler calling The Grapes of Wrath "maudlin, sentimental...