"The American Dream" and Steinbeck's "The Winter of Our Discontent"

Elizabeth Long examines the depiction of success in mid-twentieth century best-selling novels in The American Dream and the Popular Novel (1985). In the book's fifth chapter, Long examines the shift from the depiction of moral compromise to succeed in business to moral abandonment to succeed in business and includes as an example of this shift the moral decline of Ethan Hawley, the main character in John Steinbeck's The Winter of Our Discontent. Using Sloan Wilson's The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit as her example of moral compromise, Long then uses both Winter and Jerome Weidman's The Enemy Camp as examples of moral abandonment. Long's interpretation of Hawley (96-98) indicates that the anti-bourgeois tendency in Steinbeck remained evident, even twenty-two years after publication of The Grapes of Wrath.
Steinbeck's novel The Winter of Our Discontent (1961) is a series of variations on the theme of success and what motivates men towards it, set in motion as the hero assesses the way the business world operates and how he might begin to take part in it.…