John Steinbeck in the Current World

           In order to sufficiently and accurately analyze how John Steinbeck would react to a current event, I will compare two similar events, one of modern day and one of Steinbeck's time period. Steinbeck has extensively shown sympathy in his writing for the working class and their struggles. The current recession that America has been in since 2008 until now can be compared with the Great Depression that Steinbeck lived through, which influenced many of his writings. Steinbeck notably responded to the Great Depression through his novel The Grapes of Wrath. Based upon this, it is likely predict that he would respond to the recent recession in a similar manner. In The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck focuses on a poor family of sharecroppers who struggle to adjust to the shifting economy, the drought, and other hardships created by the Great Depression. Steinbeck would probably use a modern family with similar circumstances as a literary device to describe the recession. For example, it is possible that Steinbeck would consider the life of someone who does manual labor, or a blue collar worker, who was already struggling and working extreme amounts of hours just to support his family. Maybe the worker's skills would be becoming unnecessary due to the recent changes in technology. Such circumstances would be similar, yet not quite as extreme, to those in The Grapes of Wrath, as the struggling family was faced with transformation of the financial and agricultural industries. His book would most certainly be very sympathetic to the worker.