Edited sentence: His work was intended to confront the same middle-class complacency that Dylan is challenging.Steinbeck was a journalist who was one of the only haves who actually got down and dirty to experience first hand what it was like to be a have not.Steinbeck's influence and ideas on social justice for the economic underclass of American society can be clearly seen in the works of Dylan and others (Woody Guthrie, Billy Brag, Bruce Springsteen and many others).Steinbeck's motivation derives from his experiences during the Great Depression and later when tens of millions of Americans became impoverished and suffered great hardship while the rest of American society who still had something did their best to ignore them