The Grapes of Wrath, no 65 in this series, is a novel with blood on its teeth. Yet this domesticated bourgeois pet would never, as it were, lose a capacity to bare its teeth and drag the reader back into the wild.
More subtle considerations would come to dominate the genre. Of course, over time, as the idea of the novel matured, and its readership developed, these comparatively raw instincts would become more sophisticated, getting softened, deepened and tamed. I began this series with the suggestion that the enduring classics of English and American fiction were novels written either from a burning need for self-expression, often in extremis ( Pilgrim’s Progress), or from a passionate desire to entertain an audience with bravura storytelling ( Tom Jones).
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