http://www.angelfire.com/nd2/english...W_effects.html

Steinbeck also motivated another well-known writer, Stephen King, even though they belong to very different genres. King reflected: As a high school kid struggling to write fiction, some books meant more than others, and some burst upon me with the power of a thunderbolt. John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath was one of those. The humanity of the story lifted me as a reader, but as an apprentice in the craft of writing, I was excited--almost breathless, really--with the audacity of Steinbeck's technique. He shifts, especially in the early going, from the wide focus (as the Okies stream west toward California) to the narrow with the aplomb of an acrobat. Probably the best example of Steinbeck working in tight focus is the turtle-crossing-the-road segment in Grapes...I was moved by his ability to indicate the eternal by delineating the prosaic (“The Grapes of Wrath (Penguin Great Books of the 20th Century)”)
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So, I just finished the Grapes of Wrath for the first time, and was surprised by how similar it was/is to a King book. (King is probably my favorite writer...well, one of several.) GoW, in my opinion, moves firmly into "horror genre" a few times. They get effectively and creepily surreal in similar ways.

I was surprised to find that Orwell never reviewed the book (or mentioned Steinbeck at all, as far as I can tell). All I can guess is that the Okie dialect was too hard for a Brit to understand in the 30's and 40's, before mass US TV went global?
Or maybe there's another reason?