Critics such as Marian Galik have stressed importance of drawing literary parallels between literatures either of same or different epochs, and sometimes traditionally and spatially very distant from each other (Lin 65). According to Galik, such study is necessary and productive because it not only provides us with new knowledge and allows for deeper understanding in various areas of literature, its history, theory, and criticism, but it also enables more comprehensive insight into study of related literary facts across cultural boundaries (Galik 99). In light of this view, my essay offers comparative analysis of John Steinbeck's accounts of paisanos--as American 1962 Nobel Prize winner refers to mixed-blood inhabitants of California in novel Tortilla Flat (1935)--and collection of anecdotes about Australian battler, The Great Australian Lover and Other Stories (1967) by Australian novelist and story-teller, Frank Hardy. (1) By focusing on similarities between writers' characterization in these works, which differs significantly from positive portrayals in their central novels in that both of them stress protagonists' laziness, stupidity, parasitism and even promiscuity, I attempt to ascertain grounds for reconciliation of these two different sides of Steinbeck and Hardy. In this sense, this discussion aims to provide additional evidence that reading literature comparatively leads to new insights and recognitions. Perhaps because it was published during depths of Depression, when readers were eager to learn about people happy with even less than had, Tortilla Flat was success and first book to bring Steinbeck public and critical acclaim (French 53). It has to be recalled that it depicts all kinds of unusual and amusing adventures of group of misfits living on margins of society. Today, and although Steinbeck is renowned for his siding with downtrodden and deprived, this novel is frequently pointed out by those who concur that reading Steinbeck may provoke essential dialogue about ethnicity (Shillinglaw 49). Reinaldo Silva, for example, has noticed Steinbeck's jaundiced portrayals of Portuguese American, referring to passages featuring Big Joe Portagee and Rosa Martin (both of them Portuguese Americans) as filthy, lazy and sexually promiscuous (101). Mary Theresa Silvia Vermette has gone so far in her questioning of Stein beck's sensitivity to otherness in Tortilla Flat as to claim that Portuguese in California responded to Steinbeck's problematic attitude to their ethnic group with erection of statue of Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo, Portuguese navigator who in 1542 discovered California (Silva 95). Several other critics (e.g. Michael Hansen, Karen Brodkin, Noel Ignatiev, Mathew Frye Jacobson, etc.) have taken pains to prove that Steinbeck's stereotyping of fictional Portuguese Americans in Tortilla Flat shows his patronizing and ethnocentric attitude toward minority groups. Similarly, and although Hardy was the scourge of capitalism, whose pen had to be suppressed at all costs, Borker stories, as his The Yarns of Billy Borker and The Great Australian Lover and Other Stories are frequently called, were well received and publicized (Beasley 73). After all, observes Jack Beasley, one of Hardy's harshest critics, they are often, when aren't artificial, sort of yarn men tell in fond remembrance leaning against bar (73). However, this is not to deny that have not aroused resentment. On contrary, Hardy's fellow communists, in particular, who would have preferred he continue to produce works with social necessity and documentary integrity of Power without Glory (1950), reprimanded him that some of his stories were not only distasteful, but anti-working class in conception and execution (Beasley 74). Understandably, peopled with all kinds of fraudulent bums who live on other people's labor and shun work, stories could not be picture of working class, but rather--as Beasley denounced them--of a social stratum historically known as lumpen proletariat (90). …