So completely has John Steinbeck (1902–68) disappeared from academic courses in the twentieth-century American novel that it comes as something of a shock to be reminded that he was one of the most popular and beloved novelists of his time. Every writer probably suffers some drop in attention in the decades after his death. It is part of the inevitable fluctuation of literary reputations on a stock market of sorts where a writer survives—or doesn’t. Even when a good writer dies, the common reader (supposing that such a fiction exists) seems quite ready to turn away. A great many people appear to agree with Emerson, who put it with finality that “power ceases in the instant of repose” and that “only living avails, not the having lived.” We want the novelty of what our contemporaries can give us. When Steinbeck died in 1968, many thought there was nothing more to be expected from that quarter; the author of The Grapes of Wrath was dead; the worlds created by his imagination had come to an end. Where to? What next?

In accounting for the sag in Steinbeck’s reputation, it does him no injustice to remember that a great many new novelists have appeared since his death. Alice Walker, E. L. Doctorow, William Gaddis, Thomas Pynchon, and Toni Morrison all have a current academic following. Hearing about them, the common reader may seek power and vitality in their work. Academics—even those few not driven by extraliterary ideology—feel a commendable obligation