John Steinbeck Haunts Malcolm Harris’s Palo Alto

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John Steinbeck shadows the world of Palo Alto like a superannuated ghost. The subtitle of Malcolm Harris’s new nonfiction bestseller—A History of California, Capitalism, and the World—offers the first hint of the haunting, followed by references to the Joads in Harris’s text and criticism of Steinbeck’s support for the Vietnam war in a testy footnote. Although Steinbeck rejected Marxist thinking, Harris doesn’t, and Harris’s critique of what Leland Stanford wrought in starting Steinbeck’s alma mater builds on Steinbeck’s version of the school’s spirit in East of Eden, where Aron, restless and unhappy, drops out of Stanford as Steinbeck did in real life.

Image of John Steinbeck IV, his father the author John Steinbeck, and President Lyndon JohnsonHarris’s note on Steinbeck’s non-pacifism about Vietnam is worth quoting, particularly in the context of Ukraine, where pacifism and progressives have parted ways:

Also presumed progressive based on his earlier work, Steinbeck was rabidly pro-war, and he turned himself into a military pundit. He even sent the White House a letter suggesting the Defense Department develop napalm grenades—American boys were already being trained to throw baseballs. He proposed to name the weapon the “Steinbeck super ball.” His letter was forwarded to the Department of Defense.

Malcolm Harris is young. So was John Steinbeck IV when he was presented by his father at the White House before being shipped out to Vietnam 60 years ago. Later the son slammed the father’s hypocrisy about drugs, on display during a 1966 visit, along with the hankering for high-tech weaponry cited by Harris. Unfair to Palo Alto’s superannuated ghost? When Steinbeck was young he might have made the same observation about the man he became.

A Steinbeck Vade Mecum by Steinbeck’s Great Evangelist

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The November 2022 publication of Steinbeck’s Imaginarium was propitious. Its publisher, the University of New Mexico Press, published Steinbeck and His Critics: A Record of Twenty-Five Years in 1957, when Steinbeck was still in touch with “Skunkfoot Hill,” his boyhood rival from Salinas, who chaired UNM’s department of anthropology. Its author, Robert DeMott, is Professor Emeritus of American literature and creative writing at Ohio University, and a major force in Steinbeck scholarship; Steinbeck’s Imaginarium is his valedictory to the community and field of study he helped create. Chapter subjects indicate the book’s range and variety (“Half a Century with Steinbeck,” the writing of Cannery Row, Steinbeck’s journals, Steinbeck and fly-fishing). But the subtitle (“Essays on Writing, Fishing, and Other Critical Matters”) seriously understates the book’s importance to the future of Steinbeck studies. A deep dive into texts, contexts, and connections, Steinbeck’s Imaginarium is certain to become a vade mecum for serious students of Steinbeck in need of a friendly guide.

John Steinbeck’s Gravitational Pull

DeMott’s preface describes his sense of connection to Steinbeck’s life and writing, and his purpose in pursuing both as the chief work of a 50-year career:

For me, the Matter of Steinbeck—by which I mean not just his writings but the overall body of his work, the allied collection of diverse historical, personal, creative, and intellectual materials that make up his achievement and offered possibilities for sustain investigation into his life and career—was never solely a bloodless investigation into his life and career, nor a way to mark academic time and advancement . . . but an attempt to understand and communicate one writer’s important literary, social, and ecological vision that gathered strength, urgency, and relevance as the years went on. Steinbeck’s gravitational pull got stronger over the decades, not weaker.

steinbecks-imaginariumThe fruits of the author’s passion for the Matter of Steinbeck, in all its forms, have proven to be abundant. They include Steinbeck’s Reading and Steinbeck’s Typewriter, a pair of books that provide helpful lists and important insights into the process of Steinbeck’s reading and writing; After The Grapes of Wrath, a collection of essays with Donald Coers and Paul Ruffin; and critical editions of major works by Steinbeck for Penguin Books and the Library of America: To a God Unknown, Novels and Stories 1932-1937, Novels 1942-1952, The Grapes of Wrath, Sweet Thursday, Travels with Charley and Later Novels 1947-1962 (with Brian Railsback), and Working Days: The Journals of The Grapes of Wrath 1938-1941. Seminars taught and dissertations directed at Ohio University have produced stars like Railsback, founding dean of the honors college at Western Carolina University, and David M. Wrobel, dean of arts and sciences at the University of Oklahoma. DeMott’s directorship of San Jose State University’s Steinbeck Studies Center, early in the center’s development, resulted in the acquisition of one-of-a-kind documents and artifacts, including Steinbeck’s Hermes typewriter. Steinbeck’s Imaginarium builds on this history of scholarly energy, enterprise, and collaboration. But DeMott insists that there is still unfinished Steinbeck business to be done by a new generation. His to-do list for the future includes an unexpurgated edition of Steinbeck’s letters, collected  editions of Steinbeck’s journals and unpublished works, and a volume of Steinbeck iconography and artifacts, like the one on Ernest Hemingway organized by Michael Katakis, Hemingway’s literary executor, in 2018.

Student Scholars in Search of a Mission

But the data provided in DeMott’s survey of conferences devoted to Steinbeck, starting in 1969, raises a troubling issue: the decline in participation, and thus stature, at Steinbeck events. The first such conference, held at the University of Connecticut, celebrated The Grapes of Wrath and featured literary lights like Malcolm Cowley, Granville Hicks, Hyatt Waggoner, Ted Hayashi, Peter Lisca, and Warren French. The Oregon State University conference of 1970, organized by Richard Astro, got the Steinbeck-ecology ball rolling, with Joel Hedgpeth, Jackson Benson, John Ditsky, Robert Morsberger, and Steinbeck’s pal Toby Street in attendance. “Steinbeck Country,” the 1971 conference at San Jose State University, attracted 800 attendees and spurred DeMott’s “fascination for visiting the physical places that inspire literary and artistic works.” Conferences held at San Jose State in 2013, 2016, and 2019 attracted far fewer, despite some effort to encourage student scholars. Steinbeck’s Imaginarium can help rectify this situation if it is taken to heart by this critical audience: young scholars looking for a mission, like Robert DeMott 50 years ago. His reading of Steinbeck texts and contexts—along with detailed notes, lists, and surveys of people, places, and events—provides the necessary information. His personal way of “being in the world” with John Steinbeck—a fellow fisherman, poet, and evangelist for human understanding—should provide the inspiration.

Why Harry Spared Steinbeck

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J.R. Moehringer was worth the million dollars he reportedly received for ghostwriting Spare, Prince Harry’s account of life in the House of Windsor as this generation’s prodigal son. The Pulitzer Prize-winning American journalist knows all about books, and that’s good because Harry doesn’t. A self-styled non-reader, the 38-year-old royal spare asks, on page 13, “Who the fook is Faulkner? And how’s he related to us Windsors?” Literary allusions abound on the path to page 407, most of them to names or sources—Ecclesiastes, Dame Julian of Norwich, Shakespeare, Alexander Pope, Wordsworth, Tennyson, William Ernest Henley—unlikely to have crossed the prince’s prior consciousness. Reviewing Spare for the January 23, 2023 New Yorker magazine, Rebecca Mead praises this “literary artifice,” and the “coherent narrative” created by Moehringer, who “bestowed upon Harry the legacy that his father was unable to force on him: a felicitous familiarity with the British literary canon.”

Of Mice and Men and Brothers Who Fight

The American canon was another matter, and Harry approves of John Steinbeck. “The one piece of literature I remember enjoying, even savoring,” he recalls on page 49, “was a slender American novel,” Of Mice and Men. “Unlike Shakespeare, Steinbeck didn’t need a translator,” he explains. “He wrote in plain, simple vernacular. Better yet, he kept it tight. Of Mice and Men: a brisk 150 pages.” But brevity isn’t the only reason Harry singles out Steinbeck. Unlike Who-the-fook-is-William-Faulkner, Steinbeck is found to be writing about the Windsor brothers in his classic novella. “A story about friendship, about brotherhood, it was filled with themes I found relatable,” says Harry. “George and Lennie put me in mind of Willy and me. Two pals, two nomads, going through the same things, watching each other’s back.” Steinbeck’s story of “two blokes . . . gadding about California, looking for a place to call their own, trying to overcome their limitations” ends with a bullet in the back of the head, however. Did Harry miss the fratricidal point? For greater clarity, Moehringer might refer him to more Steinbeck: to East of Eden, where Cain almost kills Abel, or to Burning Bright, Steinbeck’s tale of bastardy, murder, and family forgiveness.

(Page numbers are given because Spare has no index. I owe the tip for this post to a literary-minded friend who left Florida about the same time I did, almost 20 years ago. Like Harry, we prefer gadding about California.)

Gavin Jones: Reclaiming John Steinbeck for Our Time

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Another new book on John Steinbeck, the second published by a major press in less than a year, promises to turn the heads and hearts of scholars and fans alike by reassessing Steinbeck’s life and work from a radically contemporary point of view. Like Mad at the World, the widely praised life of Steinbeck written by the Minnesota journalist-biographer William Souder and published by W.W. Norton in 2020, Gavin Jones’s Reclaiming John Steinbeck: Writing for the Future of Humanity (Cambridge University Press, 2021) seeks to rescue Steinbeck from canonical boredom by rebooting the controversy around an author who infuriated the establishment of his time by refusing to stay in a box of others’ making. Steinbeck dropped out of Stanford University without a degree in 1925 and frequently expressed impatience with academic critics and reviewers who tried to nail him to a particular philosophy, movement, or style. A popular Stanford University English professor with three previous books to his credit, Gavin Jones puts a deep reading of selected works, from Cup of Gold (1929) to Cannery Row (1945), to rigorous use in exploring Steinbeck’s treatment of such subjects as eugenics, racism, disability, and environmental degradation—issues that challenge the future of humanity in our time.

Image of Gavin Jones courtesy Cambridge University Press.

Season of Praise for William Souder’s Mad at the World

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Of the four gospels, Steinbeck’s favorite was the one written by John. He paraphrased it loftily in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, and he was partial to its name. Mining the books of the Bible for material was standard procedure for writers of his generation, but the Gospel According to St. John had special meaning for Steinbeck. Written some time after the so-called synoptic gospels of Mark, Matthew, and Luke, John’s version is distinctive because it put Jesus’s life story in a new light, building on the narrative contained in the earlier accounts while differing in style of writing, selection of events, and point of view about Jesus’s nature and purpose on earth, adding value to the picture by looking at Jesus in a new way.

William Souder’s Mad at the World (2020), the first commercially published life of John Steinbeck in a generation, has a similar relationship to the comprehensive biographies of Steinbeck written by Jackson Benson—The True Adventures of John Steinbeck, Writer (1984)—and Jay Parini John Steinbeck: A Biography (1994). In biblical terms, Benson is the St. Mark of Steinbeck biography—the first to tell the subject’s life story so fully—and Parini is like Matthew or Luke, making minor adjustments without changing basic facts or challenging basic beliefs.  Like St. John’s gospel, Souder’s life of Steinbeck represents a departure, written in an informal style for a contemporary audience. Free from the high-level interference that inhibited Benson and touched Parini, it adds dramatic new detail and depth to our understanding of Steinbeck’s nature, psychology, and relationships. Reviewer response since the book’s publication in October shows why it needed to be written, and why anger was the right rubric for a 21st century study of Steinbeck’s life, work, and continued relevance.

The Wrath of John Steinbeck

The first published reference to anger as Steinbeck’s governing principle appears to have been The Wrath of John Steinbeck, or St. John Goes to Church, a pamphlet privately printed in 1939 by the young friend from Berkeley with whom Steinbeck stayed over Christmas in 1920, when he worked at a department store in Oakland instead of going home to Salinas. The first published review of William Souder’s Mad at the World appears to have been the September 14 review by Donald Coers here at Steinbeck Now. Coers—a veteran educator and the author of a pioneering 1991 study, John Steinbeck as Propagandist—celebrates Souder’s contribution to the edifice of understanding begun by Benson, now 90, more than 50 years ago. To put the connection in perspective, he quotes the blur for Benson’s book written by John Kenneth Galbraith. “Disproving Galbraith’s claim that no new life of Steinbeck would ever be needed,” says Coers, “Mad at the World seems certain to join existing biographies on the bookshelves of present and future Steinbeck fans, especially in America, a country whose history pervades William Souder’s writing, as it did Steinbeck’s.”

Writing for the October issue of BookPage, Henry L. Carrigan made the case for Steinbeck’s continued relevance in layman’s language designed, like Souder’s, to appeal to readers who are less familiar with footnotes than Facebook, and less likely to buy a 1,116-page book weighing four pounds than one that is half as long and half as heavy. “Steinbeck was a born storyteller who was a bit out of step with his times,” said Carrigan, because “many of his social realist novels appeared during the innovations of modernism.” But we live in an age of March madness and post-modernism, and “Steinbeck remains widely read and relevant today, as vibrantly illuminated by Mad at the World.” When The True Adventures of John Steinbeck, Writer was written, Steinbeck needed defending from academics and the critical mafia in New York. Four decades later, Souder is defending against a different kind of disregard: the neglect that results when new readers lose interest in what an old writer has to say.

The problem of reader ignorance and indifference occupied Steinbeck, who insisted that his readers would get out of his writing only as much as they were willing (or able) to put in. Souder is an investigative reporter with experience helping newspaper readers understand science, and he leaves little to chance in this regard, providing fact-filled mini-histories of the individuals and events that influenced Steinbeck’s life and thought. These include names already familiar to Steinbeck fans—the Wagner brothers and the sisters Kashevaroff, Carlton Sheffield and Carl Wilhemson, Toby Street and Edith Mirrielees, Carol Henning and Gwyn Congers, Ed Ricketts and Joseph Campbell, Elizabeth Otis and Annie Laurie Williams, Ben Abramson and Pascal Covici—along with less familiar figures from Steinbeck’s unsteady orbit: his Stanford girlfriend Katherine Bestwick, the Albee brothers of Los Angeles, and three critics—Edmund Wilson, Orville Prescott, and Mary McCarthy—who resisted his gravitational pull. Particularly helpful for readers who are new to Steinbeck, or unfamiliar with modern history, are the profiles of movements and men who shaped the context and content of Steinbeck’s writing, from Cup of Gold (1929: Lost Generation, stock market crash, rise and fall of Herbert Hoover) to The Grapes of Wrath (1939: Great Depression, Dust Bowl, rise of Roosevelt, Hitler, and Edward R. Murrow), The Moon Is Down (1942: fall of Norway, rise of Japan), and Travels with Charley (1962: John Kennedy, Cold War, and the Cuban missile crisis).

Souder’s commentary on these books, and others, is equally enlightening. Like the attention to movements and events, Souder’s reliance on Steinbeck’s letters and journals rather than literary theory or jargon to explain Steinbeck’s meaning seems perfectly appropriate for a thematic biography like Mad at the World—or The True Adventures of John Steinbeck, Writer, which Benson intended as a critical biography, until he realized he had too much material to do both. Reviewers recognized the virtues of this approach in Souder’s book, expressing renewed faith in Steinbeck’s relevance to our time and renewed appreciation for Steinbeck’s courage in confronting the demons faced by a high-functioning neurotic with anger-management issues and fear of success. Steinbeck’s literary reputation needed shoring up, and Benson delivered. Steinbeck’s personal suffering is the greater concern for readers today, and Souder handles the subject with care, charting the dark side of Steinbeck’s empathy and suggesting that, like Jesus, he suffered for our sins more than his own.

Reviewers at major dailies made this point in reviews published during the first half of October. Describing Mad at the World as “smart, soulful and panoramic,” Alexander C. Kafka’s review for the Washington Post heaped praise on Souder for having “chosen a subject on the same continuum” as his two previous books, Under a Wild Sky, his biography of John James Audubon, and his life of Rachel Carson, On a Farther Shore, pointing out that Steinbeck was “another loner who, like Audubon and Carson, refined his craft through mature, dogged, self-punishing industry.” Describing Steinbeck as “one of America’s few bona fide literary celebrities,” Sam Sacks of the Wall Street Journal  noted “Two clashing impulses [which] provide the tension in Mr. Souder’s book: Steinbeck’s deep-seated distrust of success and the unyielding creative passion that brought his success about.”

Brenda Wineapple’s New York Times review of October 6 took a similar approach in evaluating Steinbeck’s (and Souder’s) achievement. On thee question of Steinbeck’s quality and character, however, she became a doubting Thomas. Steinbeck “might well be one of those once-popular authors whose names we recognize but whom no one reads beyond junior high. Still, his affecting novels about besieged migrant workers and itinerant day laborers may come back into vogue now that the country, if not the world, faces an economic crisis whose proportions have already been compared to, and may far outdistance, those of the Great Depression.” Unconvinced that suffering equals greatness, Wineapple suggests that “to the reader Steinbeck seems less angry than shy, driven and occasionally cruel — an insecure, talented and largely uninteresting man who blunted those insecurities by writing.” (Non-Times subscribers can read Wineapple’s review at the History News Network.)

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Reviewing for the October 9 Boston Globe, Wendy Smith seemed to disagree, describing The Grapes of Wrath as “a lodestar for a new generation of writers seeking to make fiction a vehicle for furious protest and a catalyst for change.” But “Souder’s appreciative yet clear-eyed assessment concludes that Steinbeck’s goal was more modest: ‘He brought people to life who were otherwise invisible and voiceless — because he could, and because he liked them better than the characters who lived in other writers’ work.’” Writing in the October 9 Minneapolis Star Tribune, Mary Ann Gwin praised Souder’s “vivid portrait of a complicated man,” noting that “the best biographers balance empathy for their subjects with an unblinking accounting of their shortcomings” and concluding that “Souder succeeds at this tricky business” in a way that “John Steinbeck, who prized realism above all things, might have approved.”

Most reviewers followed Souder’s lead in evangelizing for Steinbeck. A second exception to the rule was Vivian Gornick, the 85-year-old feminist who reviewed Mad at the World for the October 9 issue of New Republic. Presented as a minority report on Steinbeck by the same left-leaning publication that disparaged him when he was alive and under right-wing attack, Gornick’s diatribe negatively demonstrated the need for Souder’s book: to save Steinbeck’s reputation with readers from political puritanism and neglect. “The amount of print that has been spilled on Steinbeck would fill an ocean,” complained Gornick, a confirmed agnostic on the subject of Steinbeck’s literary divinity: “memoirs, social histories, dissertations, biographies by the yard. Surely by now the cases for and against him as a significant American writer have been sufficiently made.” To the question “Do we need another Steinbeck biography?,” her answer is no.

An anonymous National Book Review post on October 12 rebutted the charge of obsolescence: “Today, the 1962 Nobel Prize winner may be mostly read by high school students, but Souder presents him as a ‘major figure in American literature’ who deserves to be appreciated for his empathy and compassion for the powerless in an inhumane world. Despite his unmistakable admiration, Souder fairly relates Steinbeck’s misogyny, cruelty to his own family, and personal demons of doubt — and the crucially important role his first wife played in his success.” An equally effective counter-argument could be found on the Library of America website a day or two later: “As biographer William Souder shows in his engrossing new book Mad at the World: A Life of John Steinbeck, this long apprenticeship in failure and frustration was the crucible in which Steinbeck’s extraordinary capacity for empathy was forged. Honesty, understanding, and feeling would become the hallmarks of his work, constants even as he experimented with a wide range of forms, styles, and emotional registers. They enabled him, in his greatest work, to give voice to the voiceless, exposing the corrosiveness of power and the perils of social injustice and ecological collapse. At the same time, they did not prevent him from being heedless and sometimes cruel to those closest to him.”

Regional papers also did their part for Steinbeck’s name and Souder’s book. Interviewing Souder for the October 10 St. Paul Pioneer Press, Mary Ann Grossman led with kudos for her fellow Minnesotan. “’Mad at the World’ is the first biography of Steinbeck in 25 years and critics and scholars are loving it,” she wrote. “One of the most enjoyable aspects of William Souder’s biography lies in reading the stories behind the stories,” enthused Hugh Gilmore in the November 18 Chesnut Hill (Pa.) Local: “Souder presents engaging summaries of each book and describes how Steinbeck worked on them, how they were received, and the torments and challenges of their compositions. This is all done with ease and grace and is incorporated into Steinbeck’s life as seamlessly as the stories of his three marriages, two sons, many dogs, raging, dysfunctional family life, and sweet and amusing details.”

Newspapers at both ends of Steinbeck’s America found room for reader responses which, like letters to the editor, veered toward the personal. Woody Woodburn exclaimed in the December 18 Ventura County (Ca.) Star that “biographies do not get any better than Mad at the World: A Life of John Steinbeck.” Reminiscing about Steinbeck’s Sag Harbor in a review for the December 23 East Hampton (N.Y.) Star, Lou Ann Walker recalled that “Years ago on a splendid June afternoon, Elaine Steinbeck invited my husband and me to her Sag Harbor home for tea. Gracious, full of good humor, she took us on a tour of the simple one-story wood-frame house, filled with memorabilia. Her husband had been gone for two decades.” An October 16 post by the poet Stephen Kuusisto at Planet of the Blind said that Souder’s life of Steinbeck is “quite frankly one of the best biographies I’ve read in years, ranking alongside Richard Ellmann’s ‘Oscar Wilde’”—“a nonfiction bildungsroman about a man who was richly alive with all the triumphs and tragedies inherent in a writing life” like Steinbeck’s. “Souder gives us Steinbeck’s blemishes with the light and space to take them in,” wrote Kuusisto. “For my money this is one hell of a compelling book about a writer’s life, the lived life of the unaffiliated places inside.”

Scott Bradfield’s November 28 review for The Spectator was less uncritical. A 65-year-old American who lives and writes in London, Bradfield taught college English and knows his Steinbeck and his literary lives. “William Souder’s Mad at the World is the first significant biography of Steinbeck since Jackson L. Benson’s much longer 1984 volume, The True Adventures of John Steinbeck, Writer,” he observed: “It is readable, admiring and compact, and provides a narratively energetic look at a man who suffered many of the same weaknesses as his characters — for booze, benzedrine, depression and bad marriages. But also like his characters, Steinbeck got up every day to test himself all over again, by writing a new book or embarking on a new adventure.” Souder “writes well,” he continued, “and this is a good place to start reading (or rereading) about Steinbeck,” though “Mad at the World sometimes feels a bit too terse and cursory, especially in the last 50 pages, and falls short of communicating a strong sense of the complicated, emotional life of a very complicated, emotional writer.” Bradfield’s example of excessive brevity is the 1944 incident involving Hemingway, O’Hara, and Steinbeck’s walking stick to which Benson devoted two pages and Souder a single sentence. Kuusisto would remind Bradfield that any good bildungsroman, especially that of a figure like Steinbeck, will emphasize the early years, when experience, character, and neurosis are being forged from the materials of daily life.

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Looking for Steinbeck’s Ghost

In 1988, Jackson Benson published Looking for Steinbeck’s Ghost, a collection of essays, sketches, and anecdotes about his 15-year struggle to write the 1984 life of John Steinbeck that has become the bible of Steinbeck studies. In it, Benson describes the obstacles to full disclosure put in his path by members of the Steinbeck family and their lawyers, and he admits that childhood is the hardest thing to get right when writing anyone’s biography. The author or editor of books about Hemingway, Benson became John Steinbeck’s official biographer without ever asking for the job. A few years later, Jay Parini—author of a life of Theodore Roethke—received Elaine Steinbeck’s approval and help in writing the second “authorized” life of her husband. Forty years after Benson, and 25 years after Parini, William Souder had the benefit of their labor, along with the pioneering work of Richard Astro (on Steinbeck and Ricketts), Robert DeMott (on Steinbeck’s reading and journal-writing), and Susan Shillinglaw (on Carol Henning and her marriage to John Steinbeck). By 2016, when Souder started his research on Steinbeck’s life, Steinbeck’s widow, sons, and sisters were gone. This was a lucky break for someone who came to biography from the newsroom, where the truth is everything, and from writing critically acclaimed lives of two Americans—Carson and Audubon—who achieved greatness in fields where truth always trumps fiction.

A Bible reader since Sunday school in Salinas, Steinbeck was attracted to the author of the fourth gospel for literary reasons. Like a good novelist, St. John balances description with dialogue in his gospel, and he starts with an idea about his subject—Jesus is Christ—that guides the narrative, coloring its language and guiding the selection of events to prove its point. Compelled by what Souder characterizes as a pathological urge for privacy, Steinbeck would have preferred the anonymity of the biblical John, whose origin and identity are unknown. John’s alternate version of Jesus’s birth, ministry, and death appealed to Steinbeck; when he was 60 and world-famous, John’s gospel inspired the language of his 1962 Nobel Prize acceptance speech, just as it did the title of the spurious pamphlet about Steinbeck’s righteous wrath at the age 18, published by a friend when Steinbeck was under attack for writing social-protest fiction in 1939.

It’s unclear that St. John read Mark or the others before writing his own gospel. But it’s certain he was writing for a different audience—a contemporary audience with different concerns—just as William Souder has done in writing the life of Steinbeck for a new generation of readers unfamiliar with Benson and unlikely to pick up The True Adventures of John Steinbeck, Writer. We still revere Mark even if, like Steinbeck, we prefer John’s prose style and plot line. If early reviews of Mad at the World are predictive, Souder’s life won’t replace Benson’s on the shelf of essential books about Steinbeck. But Benson will have to move over, as he modestly predicted in 1988, in Looking for Steinbeck’s Ghost: “I had to force myself to realize that there would be many biographies of John Steinbeck and that my work would ultimately be only part of a process. There would be biographers after me who would use what I had discovered, add material of their own, and, indeed, find mistakes or omissions in my account, and they would come up with different, perhaps even more perceptive and valid, accounts of the life and work than mine.”

Photograph of William Souder, with Sasha, by Liz Souder.

John Steinbeck’s Anglo-Americanism Explained

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In 1853, the chief book critic for The Spectator wrote an unfavorable review of Charles Dickens’s novel Bleak House that reflected the high-minded tone of the weekly magazine, founded in 1828 by the Scottish reformer Robert Stephen Rintoul. An admirer of Addison and Steele who also believed that publishers should be editors, Rintoul sold The Spectator in 1858 to a pair of American investors with less interest in Augustan style than in preserving Anglo-American relations in the run-up to our civil war. During Steinbeck’s lifetime, The Spectator opposed capital punishment, supported decriminalizing homosexuality, and criticized American involvement in Vietnam, providing a semi-safe perch for literary- and libertarian-minded Tories like Boris Johnson, who became its editor in 1999. The history of the magazine’s “special relationship” with Steinbeck’s America is helpful when reading the November 28, 2020 review of William Souder’s life of John Steinbeck—“No writer was better suited to chronicle the Depression than John Steinbeck”—by the current book critic, Scott Bradfield. A novelist-essayist and California native, Bradfield lives in London, where John Steinbeck spent time in 1943 observing their war without meeting George Orwell, “the British writer he most resembles.” Like Orwell, “John Steinbeck didn’t believe in God—but he didn’t believe much in humanity either.” Like Orwell, “he never stopped sending himself on expeditions to better understand the world he wrote about.” By providing “a narratively energetic look at a man who suffered many of the same weaknesses as his characters — for booze, benzedrine, depression and bad marriages,” Mad at the World shows how Steinbeck’s depression and Depression became a form of continuity, motivating his work and connecting him with the world. Like Orwell’s black lung, Churchill’s Black Dog, or the spirit of Anglo-American solidarity enabled and enshrined by The Spectator, Steinbeck’s depression was more than a metaphor.

mad-at-the-worldMad at the World: A Life of John Steinbeck was released by W.W. Norton on October 13, 2020.

 

Praise for Mad at the World from the Boston Globe and the New York Times: Reviews

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Major newspaper reviews of Mad at the World, released by W.W. Norton and Company this week, continued the process of recalibrating public perception of the life of John Steinbeck begun by William Souder in his long-awaited biography of a writer who cared more about the public, and principle, than the critics. “John Steinbeck, Bard of the American Worker,” the October 6 New York Times review by Brenda Wineapple, praised Souder’s candid but admiring portrait of a sometimes unsympathetic artist whose anger proved prophetic. “Yet to the reader,” added Wineapple, “Steinbeck seems less angry than shy, driven and occasionally cruel—an insecure, talented and largely uninteresting man who blunted those insecurities by writing.” “Reconsidering John Steinbeck in ‘Mad at the World’”—the October 9 Boston Globe review by Wendy Smith—praised the “appreciative yet clear-eyed assessment of Steinbeck” by a seasoned biographer who “argues persuasively that the writer’s politics consisted primarily of a hatred for bullies.” “Of Souder and Steinbeck,” the October 10 Twin Cities Pioneer Press profile of Souder—a principled Minnesotan with deep roots in prairie populism—further complimented Souder, and this website, by quoting Donald Coers’s review of Mad at the World at SteinbeckNow.com.

Wall Street Journal Review by Sam Sacks Draws Deeply on Life of John Steinbeck

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“Poison Cup of Gold”—the October 1, 2020 Wall Street Journal review of William Souder’s new life of John Steinbeck, by Sam Sacks—further escalated pre-publication enthusiasm for Mad at the World, the first full-length life of John Steinbeck since the biography by Jay Parini 25 years ago. Like other reviews of Souder’s book, Sacks’s Wall Street Journal essay heaps praise on its readable style, copious research, and psychological insight into a born writer at war with himself. “Some writers are content to write nothing until they have something they need to say,” says Sacks, who writes with wit in both senses of the term: “Steinbeck was the opposite.” Unlike other large-circulation reviews, Sacks’s extraordinarily perceptive account of Steinbeck’s career and Souder’s treatment draws on the work of literary scholars like Susan Shillinglaw and Jackson Benson. “Mr. Benson’s monumental 1984 biography, written across 15 years and nearing 1,200 pages, hangs over Mr. Souder’s endeavor,” notes Sacks, who also describes Steinbeck as “a world-class listener” and Travels with Charley as “a collection of stories masquerading as fiction.” The entire essay is worth reading, but a sample must suffice:

It’s common enough to read about authors whose lives are at odds with their work, but has there ever been one so profoundly in conflict with his own personality? Steinbeck is one of America’s few bona fide literary celebrities—perhaps only Twain and Hemingway enjoyed more international renown—yet he was horrified by public exposure and detested his fame, taking every opportunity to undermine it. Two clashing impulses provide the tension in Mr. Souder’s book: Steinbeck’s deep-seated distrust of success and the unyielding creative passion that brought his success about.

Sam Sacks is a literary critic and editor in New York. His literary criticism has appeared in Harper’s, London Review of Books, New Republic, Commentary, Weekly Standard, Prospect, Music and Literature, and The New Yorker. He has written the Fiction Chronicle column for the Wall Street Journal since 2010.

Illustration by Greg Newbold courtesy of the Wall Street Journal.

Praise for William Souder’s New Life of John Steinbeck from the Washington Post

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Mad at the World, the new life of John Steinbeck by biographer William Souder, continues to attract pre-publication praise, most recently in an October 1 Washington Post review by Alexander J. Kafka, senior editor at The Chronicle of Higher Education. Describing Souder’s work as “painstakingly researched, psychologically nuanced, unshowy, lucid,” and perfectly fitted in style to its psychologically challenged subject, Kafka speculates that, while “Ernest Hemingway loomed large as a figure of comparison” with John Steinbeck when both writers were alive, “Steinbeck might be considered a more American-centered version of Hemingway” today, almost six decades later. Noting that Steinbeck’s “charming and bogus” 1962 travel book Travels with Charley “masqueraded as reporting but was mostly another reach of [Steinbeck’s] imagination,” the Washington Post review concludes that “Souder, in his own humble style, has brought a deeply human Steinbeck forth in all his flawed, melancholy, brilliant complication.”

nick-taylor-double-switchMad at the World: A Life of John Steinbeck will be released by W.W. Norton and Company on October 13. Steinbeck Review subscribers are invited to register for an October 19 reading and conversation with William Souder led by Nicholas Taylor (left), professor of creative writing and director of the Martha Heasley Cox Center for Steinbeck Studies at San Jose State University.

New York Times Preview Praises Mad at the World; Bookpage.com Agrees

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Although Mad at the World: A Life of John Steinbeck won’t be released until October 13, a pair of publications with literary reach have picked William Souder’s scholarly new Steinbeck biography out of their fall lineup in previews that bode well for the book’s reception by readers. Writing in the September 24 New York Times, Joumana Khatib praised the balance, scope, and timeliness of the first full-length life of John Steinbeck to appear in a generation:

A comprehensive new biography of America’s best-known novelist of the Great Depression arrives at a timely moment. Though Steinbeck’s books remain his most significant literary output, Souder also dives into Steinbeck’s life as a journalist, including overseas postings during World War II and the Vietnam War, and how they shaped his worldview. And he doesn’t shy away from Steinbeck’s vices — philandering, heavy drinking — along with the feelings of inferiority that haunted him throughout his career.

A Life for Our Time of “the Novelist for Our Time”

In an October 2020 Bookpage.com feature post, reviewer Harry L. Carrigan agreed with Khatib’s assessment. “John Steinbeck just might be the novelist for our time,” Carrigan concluded, and “as vibrantly illuminated by Mad at the World,” Steinbeck’s reputation for relevance is rooted in a pair of works he said he felt compelled to write as a warning to his sons and country:

In his sprawling epic The Grapes of Wrath, he captured Americans’ peculiar yearning for a life not their own, the promise of wealth beyond the veil of desolation and the wretched impossibility of such a promise. Steinbeck’s other epic, East of Eden, illustrates the ragged desperation of human nature, wreaking destruction rather than carrying hope. William Souder’s bracing Mad at the World: A Life of John Steinbeck vividly portrays the brooding and moody writer who could never stop writing and who never fit comfortably into the society in which he lived.