In Steinbeck’s view, that is the most common thing of all. His characters are poor, but they can use their connections to other people and the land to stay happy and sane even with nothing else going for them. He wrote about common people, not just meaning “poor,” but actually “common” in their appetites, needs, and loves. To explain this dramatic difference between what Steinbeck wanted his books to do and how people actually reacted to them-and his depression that resulted-observations of the deeper themes of his works has to be made as well as finding out how Steinbeck felt that his audience had failed him. This is not uncommon for authors, but it was a particularly intense experience for Steinbeck most interpretations of Tortilla Flat, for instance, describe its characters as “not quite human beings” (Wilson “New Republic”), which enraged the author, and even the response to arguably his greatest novel, The Grapes of Wrath, had the strange effect of creating a backlash against him for representing the plight of farm workers. He often felt that people had missed the point of his writing. Steinbeck was consistently irritated with the reception of his books. He felt that many of his readers had “taken these people up with the vulgarity of duchesses who are amused for and sorry for a peasantry.” When he talks about “these people,” he is talking about something that occupied him through most of his writing career-common laborers in the poorer parts of America. It will never happen again.” (Steinbeck “Foreword,” 1937) promised American novelist John Steinbeck, talking about the response to many of his novels, and Tortilla Flat in particular. If I have done them harm by telling a few of their stories I am sorry. good people of laughter and kindness, of honest lusts and direct eyes. They are people whom I know and like, people who merge successfully with their habitat. “It did not occur to me that were curious or quaint, dispossessed or underdoggish.

Tortilla flat