In the United States of the 1930s the meeting between literature and sociology can be partly evaluated by a comparison of John Steinbeck's social realism, exemplified in his novel The Grapes of Wrath, with the methodological developments of Herbert Blumer's symbolic interactionism, which was intended as a continuation of the Chicago School's empirical studies. This meeting, which provides the possibility of studying social expression in its "natural" context and deploys a "naturalist" methodology in sociological analysis relying largely on concepts inherited from pragmatism, is in fact infused by the idea of the possibility of "immediate" communication of social life. One can critically examine what was expressed in that context within the critical framework of current sociological analysis pertaining to the modalities of analysis and expression of the "lived world" as well as the possible links to be established in this perspective between literature and sociology.