ry and defeat" (Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath 193). But ultimately they endure.
The two novels are not only books whose underlying theme is the struggle of the subculture to achieve the American Dream under the most difficult conditions, and not succeeding but holding on to their basic humanity, dignity and hope. As Steinbeck writes in The Grapes of Wrath:
This you may say of man û when theories change and crash, when schools, philosophies, when narrow dark alleys of thought, national, religious, economic, grow and disintegrate, man reaches, stumbles forward, painfully, mistakenly sometimes. Having stepped forward, he may slip back, but only half a step, never the full step back (154).
Steinbeck's own struggles to earn a livelihood and his long and determined endeavor û and subsequent success- to become a successful writer afford greater insight into this optimistic statement.
The novels are more than social protest. Steinbeck's concern with the environment and how humans relate to it and to each other is another theme. The plots of his fiction center around misfits, migrants, and striking workers, but each work reflects people in the context of their environments. In the early 1930s, he wrote, "the trees and the muscled mountains are the world û but not the world apart from man-the world and man-the one inseparable unit man and his environment. Why they should ever have been understood as bein
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