The meaning of the term novelist

I've always disliked Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath.  When you understand how it was written it is understandable.  But from my perspective, the novel is about as horrible as the trash that went to literature with the muckrakers - for example like McTeague (Frank Norris' unrelenting tale of the horror of late 19th century industrial society).


The Grapes of Wrath was written as a prequil to a movie of the same name (which is also pretty dreadful).   It tells the story of a family called the Joads that experiences a continuous process of decline starting in the dustbowl and then moving to California to pick crops.   I first read the book in high school and even then thought it was a caricature of the real issues faced by people who were part of one of America's most interesting migrations.  Times were tough.  But there are much better pictures of that time in our history.    


In the April 2011 edition of Reason, the libertarian magazine, Bill Steigerwald makes a good case that one of Steinbeck's other novels, Travels with Charley, which was written in the early 1960s  and supposedly a diary of a trip he took late in life to see America by car (or trailer) with his dog Charley.   Almost immediately some Steinbeck scholars wrote defense of the book - after all it is by a novelist.  Bill Barich, a novelist who now lives in Ireland (lucky stiff!) takes a fairly balanced view of the book.  He suggests that there are a lot of reasons why Steinbeck would have used the literary device of making some of his "travels" up.   The viability of any of these kinds of inventions is whether they weather well. From my point of view The Grapes of Wrath, which I re-read about four years ago, does not meet the test.   Not sure I have the energy to retest with travels with Charley - but I sure do with Barich's book - written in 2008 Long Way Home: On the Trail of Steinbeck's America in where he took a 5400 mile trip to retrace Steinbeck's original (somewhat fanciful) journey.