While modern reviews of the book are generally glowing, early reviews were decidedly mixed. It is estimated to have sold 30 million copies and is a beloved piece of American literature. Mockingbird was reprinted by Reader’s Digest and earned a vast readership from the start. She was warned that it was unlikely to sell. It explores questions of race, class, gender roles, and the loss of innocence in a way that has resonated with readers since it was published in 1960. To Kill a Mockingbird is the story of how an innocent man is defended in both the courts of law and public opinion by a particularly virtuous lawyer, Atticus Finch, in depression-era Alabama, as seen through the eyes of his daughter, Scout. It won the Pulitzer Prize and was cited as a factor in awarding Steinbeck’s Nobel Prize. While the occasional negative review still pops up, the book is now considered a classic of American literature.

One sitting congressman argued that the book “exposes nothing but the total depravity, vulgarity, and degraded mentality of the author.” Steinbeck was particularly troubled by critics that claimed he had written an overly sentimental novel or that he was lying about the conditions facing families like the Joads. Many libraries refused to carry the book. Copies were burned by those denouncing Steinbeck as a socialist. Reactions to the book were extremely divided. Its popularity led it to be made into a film the next year directed by John Ford and starring Henry Fonda. The book was the best-selling novel of 1939.

However, they find only new problems upon arriving. With their farm devastated by the Dust Bowl, they join thousands of people like them west to California, an alleged land of milk and honey. The Grapes of Wrath follows the Joad family in Oklahoma during the Great Depression. One Hundred Years of Solitude is now considered a classic of Latin American literature and one of the best examples of magical realism. One review dismissed it as a “comic masterpiece.” Nobel Prize winner Octavio Paz deemed it “watery poetry.” Anthony Burgess argued that it was not to be “compared with the genuinely literary explorations of Borges and Nabokov.” While the book helped Márquez earn a Nobel Prize for Literature and praise as “ The greatest Colombian who ever lived,” much of the initial critical reception to his masterpiece was negative.

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