"John Steinbeck, Richard Wright, and Ernest Hemingway shared two significant similarities in the late 1930's. First, they wrote the most important American novels of 1939 and 1940: The Grapes of Wrath, Native Son, and For Whom the Bell Tolls, novels that enjoyed enormous critical acclaim and popular success. Second, they had recently gravitated to the Left or were already residing there when they wrote these novels, and their political commitment directly informed their fiction" -- |