During the thirties members of the peasant and labor groups were the subject of a literary movement which produced the proletarian novel. This type of novel is generally unsatisfactory for the study of group behavior patterns considered here since its emphasis is much more sociological than political. There are some exceptions, however. _The Iron Heel_, _Man’s Fate_, and _In Dubious Battle_ have been called proletarian novels. Other proletarian novels not included in this study were written by Dos Passos, Farrell, Shaw, and Silone. The two novels by Malraux and Steinbeck straddle the line between the political and the proletarian. This is also true of _A Wind Is Rising_, which came after the movement as such had spent itself but which concentrated upon one of its favorite subjects, the southern sharecropper. Some of the proletarian novels have political overtones. Sherwood Anderson’s _Beyond Desire_ (1932), which was meant as his contribution to the proletarian cause, followed the career of Red Oliver as a Communist labor organizer in southern textile mills. Like Jim Nolan, he is shot to death. But this novel does not reveal as fully as Steinbeck’s book the part of the Communist Party’s labor strategy in its overall plan. The men of Liam O’Flaherty’s _The Informer_ are proletarians, members of the Irish Republican Army fighting the British. But in its most common form, the proletarian novel stopped just short of political action. It would present in dramatic fashion the conditions under which the members of this actually diverse group lived. If they took positive action, it was usually to join a union or the Communist Party. Steinbeck’s _The Grapes of Wrath_ shows the broad scale social delineation the proletarian novel permits; it also shows clearly that though its ultimate aim may be political, its primary textual emphasis is not. =The Middle Class=