In the concluding chapter of Exiles Return Malcolm Cowley had the following comment to make on the 1930s: The 1930s were the Pentecostal years when it seemed that everyone had the gift of tongues and used it to prophesy the millennium. Among the host of writers who seemed to possess this gift, none appeared in the popular imagination to embody it more perfectly than John Steinbeck, whose novels on the marginal workers and dust bowl refugees appeared to take as their text the Biblical exhor...