John Steinbeck in The Grapes of Wrath (1939) tapped a long tradition of biblical symbolism or biblical typology in American literature. As early as 1651 in his history of Plymouth Plantation, William Bradford implicitly compared himself with Moses viewing the Promised Land from the crest of Mount Pisgah. Nathaniel Hawthorne reimagined the Fall in Puritan New England in The Scarlet Letter (1850), casting Hester Prynne in the role of Eve, Arthur Dimmesdale as Adam, and Roger Chillingworth as Satan. Both James Fenimore Cooper in The Prairie (1827) and Herman Melville in Moby-Dick depicted wanderers named Ishmael. Abraham Lincoln described Americans in a February 1861 speech as an “almost chosen people.” Stephen Crane portrayed a Christ-figure named Jim Conklin (J.C.) in The Red Badge of Courage (1895). And so on.
Similarly, as Peter Lisca observes, Steinbeck stages in his novel the captivity of the oppressed in Egypt, their exodus, and arrival...
