John steinbeck (1902-1968)

Steinbeck is a model example of the modern American nostalgia for the primitive, the counter-reaction to the triumphant urbanization of American culture which took place in the first half of the twentieth century. He admires everything that is not a material success: the have-nots, the misfits, the racial minorities unjustly deprived of their civil and economic rights, the simple, the poor, and the oppressed. His rural heroes, illiterate and sometimes weak-minded, are nevertheless essentially noble and poetized in the traditional Romantic manner.

Steinbeck was born at Salinas, California. He studied at Stanford University, although he did not finish his degree. His principal interest in college was biology, a preoccupation he retained throughout his life. As a young man he worked on newspapers and held a variety of odd jobs. His first success as a writer was Tortilla Flat. The Grapes of Wrath created a storm of controversy which made him famous overnight. Except for a period of war reporting and for numerous fishing and scientific expeditions, he remained for some years in Monterey or in nearby Los Gatos, where he continued to turn out stories drawn from the life of the region. When he left his home area and moved to New York City, his literary work suffered a decline.

Steinbeck is a Naturalist but in his novels everything is transformed: his creative process simplifies characters and idealizes qualities. His region is the Salinas Valley in central California, populated with Mexican farm workers, Italian fishermen, and assorted artists, bohemian and eccentric. Like most regionalists he considers the life of the country infinitely superior to that of the city. Like many Naturalists he presents scenes of great cruelty and passion on his novels. His The Grapes of Wrath excited a torment of Puritanical indignation almost equal to that which greeted Dreiser’s Sister Carrie. Actually Steinbeck’s characters are seldom deliberately cruel. If they commit a crime it is usually through accident or out of sheer stupidity, and they generally regret such acts. They use profanity because they know no other way of speaking; foul language is as conventional in some social groups as polite formulae are in polite society.

There is a certain poetic quality in his prose. The repetition of “George, are we gonna have rabbits?” is woven into Of Mice and Men like the recurring motif of a sonata. Occasionally Steinbeck consciously creates the classic tragedy; the catastrophe proceeds out of the tragic flaws of the characters. The fiction is based largely on dialogue. The situation and previous history are explained through conversation. For this reason Steinbeck’s novels and stories are easily dramatized; several of them have been successfully converted onto plays and films. His chief works are Tortilla Flat (1935), Dubious Battle (1936), Of Mice and Men (1937), The Red Pony (1938), The Grapes of Wrath (1939), The Winter of Our Discontent (1961).

Dubious Battle is Steinbeck’s bitterest novel and one of his most powerful. The protagonist, Jim Nolan, an employee in a San Francisco store, is beaten by the police while innocently watching a radical demonstration and as a result is fired from his job. Bitter, he joins the Communist Party. His mentor in Party work is Mac, militant Marxism Personified. He welcomes trouble and bloodshed because they will provoke the class hatred he can manipulate for Party purposes. The central action of the novel is the strike of apple-pickers in the fictional Torgas Valley. Before the Party cell interferes they are ready to accept their cut in wages. Mac and his comrades succeed in persuading them to strike. Violence and destruction arise; several men including Jim are shot in a battle with the strikebreakers; the strike fails. But Mac’s purposes have bee served: a strong class feeling is sturred up. The final scene when Mac, speaking to the crowd, tries to use Jim’s murder for propaganda purposes, is especially well done. The attitude of the author, however, is ambiguous. At first glance the novel is Party propaganda but Communist criticism did not approve of the novel seeing too many weaknesses and passions in Party workers.

The Grapes of Wrath is the story of itinerant farmers – the “Oakies” of the Depression period – who are driven from the Oklahoma dustbowl to seek a new prosperity. The Joad family are lured to California by leaflets promising easy and well-paying jobs. The family, headed by Tom Joad, includes the lusty and indecent Grandpa, the suffering and religious Grandma, the hard-working and tenacious Ma, the children Noah and Connie, and Connie’s wife Rose. At the end of their hectic trip, during which Grandma dies and is buried without formality, their arrival in San Joaquin Valley is a bitter disappointment. Jobs are ill-paying and hard to get, and the Oakies that crowd into the valley by the thousands are worse off than they were in the dust bowl. Violence, passion and labour strife break out; Tom Joad is involved in a murder and after a while becomes a fanatic labour union agitator. The most famous scene of the novel is the final one in which Rose, her newborn baby dead, nourishing a dying man with her own milk.

Although the subject matter and dialogue of this novel are occasionally shocking, the total effect on most readers is moving and sympathetic. The Grapes of Wrath, which won Steinbeck the Pulitzer Prize in 1940, is generally considered his most important work. In some respects it is his most Naturalistic novel; its style is objective, it is highly detailed, and it shrinks from no banal or loathsome detail. It has, however, an underlying symbolic current which distinguishes it from American Naturalism of the type of Dreiser. The implied political attitude is similar to that in Dubious Battle; the conclusion is that only through organization can the itinerant fruit tramps and other workers better their condition. If the attitude is generally left-wing, however, the book is not communistic; actually it stands closer to the social liberalism of the New Deal. The political aspects are not the main point here; the interest is centered on the characterizations of the Oakies, the epic quality of the incidents, and the underlying symbolic motifs.

When John Steinbeck was given the Nobel Prize for literature in 1962, the award was not universally acclaimed by critics as the Swedish Committee of the Academy professed to admire his The Winter of Our Discontent, an allegory set on Long Island, unaccustomed territory for Steinbeck, and an inferior novel as compared to his earlier achievements.