ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the last moment in the West when extreme poverty was still a daily reality: in fascist Italy, as shown in the writings of Silone and Carlo Levi, and in the Depression-era United States, in Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. Silone and Levi expose the conditions of the Italian peasantry and attack the Mussolini government for ignoring the poor. While the economy of northern Italian cities was advanced, the peasantry, especially in the south, remained in almost medieval conditions. Steinbeck, too, attacks government, local and federal, for failing to deal with the crisis of the Midwest Dust Bowl during the Depression. He indicts the capitalist system as heartless, dispossessing large numbers of landowners and leaving them without support. Though sympathetic to socialism, Steinbeck acknowledges the fundamental strength of democratic government: he does not depict the migrants as victims; rather, as rugged American individualists, accustomed to the vicissitudes of the frontier, and refusing to give in.
