John Steinbeck and East European Critics and Publishers

Danica Čerče

University of Ljubljana, Slovenia

ABSTRACT

Because of his uncompromising exposure of social ills in his Depression-era novels, John Steinbeck, American Nobel Prize winner for Literature in 1962, had a wide critical appeal in the communist part of divided post-war Europe. His works were manipulated by the communist propaganda and inadvertently served as political tools. This article examines the writer’s fortunes in Eastern Europe and shows how ideological forces fuelled literary discourses and affected the critical reception and circulation of his works.

KEYWORDS

John Steinbeck, communist ideology, tendentious reading of literature, translations