New Life of John Steinbeck for a New Age: Book Review

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What is there left to say about the complicated life of John Steinbeck? In a blurb for Jackson Benson’s magisterial 1984 biography, The True Adventures of John Steinbeck, Writer, Steinbeck’s friend John Kenneth Galbraith, the Harvard economist who became John Kennedy’s ambassador to India, claimed that “There will never be another book like it”—adding, “nor will we need one.” The first half Galbraith’s prediction proved to be accurate. Benson—now 90 and Professor Emeritus of English at San Diego State University—began his 16-year project of research and writing on Steinbeck’s life eight months before Steinbeck’s demise on December 20, 1968. In the aftermath of the author’s death, Benson had direct personal access to scores of Steinbeck’s friends, colleagues, and acquaintances, many of whom were dead by the time the next full-scale life of Steinbeck—John Steinbeck: A Biography, by the Middlebury College professor and poet Jay Parini—appeared in England in 1994 and in America in 1995. With its massive assemblage of meticulously researched primary material, Benson’s ambitious life of John Steinbeck is still the source no serious student of the author can afford to ignore.

With its massive assemblage of meticulously researched primary material, Benson’s ambitious 1984 life of John Steinbeck is still the source no serious student of the author can afford to ignore.

Given the scope, depth, and durability of Benson’s accomplishment—and the persistence of Galbraith’s doubt that another book like it was needed—the question of what’s left to say about Steinbeck, 36 years after the publication of The True Adventures of John Steinbeck, Writer, is deserving of an answer. Given the complex, controversial, and consequential character of Steinbeck’s life and reputation, the answer to the question is plenty. The reasons for this are both general to biography-writing and specific to Steinbeck studies. In addition to new material not previously available, newly important details may have been slighted or misinterpreted by previous biographers, and the passage of time typically requires a fresh perspective on familiar facts and old assumptions. Even when details of important events and relationships in a subject’s life story are already well-known—as they are with Steinbeck, thanks to Benson—there is the delight of anticipation in recalling them again in a new rendering, much like looking forward to a favorite passage of music when listening to a familiar piece played by a new performer. New biographers, having the advantage of time, can also address the question—especially thorny in the case of a figure like Steinbeck—of how the subject’s critical and popular reputation has fared through the years. Which works have endured and which have lost their relevance for readers?  What are the major reassessments, if any, of an author’s writing? Finally, there is the matter of accessibility and appeal in an age, like ours, of short attention spans. Benson’s biography of Steinbeck exceeds 1,100 pages. Parini’s is less than half as long. William Souder’s Mad at the World: A Life of John Steinbeck totals 446 pages, revealing much that was unknown, or off limits, to Benson and Parini.

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To its credit, Jay Parini’s life of John Steinbeck included information which was unavailable to Benson or which Benson decided—or was advised—to leave out. Most notable, perhaps, was Parini’s revelation that Steinbeck’s first wife, Carol, had an affair, or at least an intense infatuation, with the future mythologist Joseph Campbell. The beginning of the deterioration in the Steinbeck marriage coincided with Campbell’s 1932 move to Monterey, where the young Ivy League graduate became friendly with the Steinbecks, their boon companion Ed Ricketts, and the bohemian circle that gathered regularly at Ricketts’s marine lab on Cannery Row. Parini reports that Carol, at Steinbeck’s insistence, had a botched abortion that required a hysterectomy, further contributing to the breakdown that led to the Steinbecks’ divorce in 1942. Although the biography adds little to our understanding of Steinbeck’s involvement with Lyndon Johnson and Vietnam in the 1960s, Parini reflects the tenor of the 1990s by offering a more critical appraisal (Steinbeck “fell hook, line, and sinker for an old-style patriotism”) than Benson did a decade earlier.

To its credit, Jay Parini’s 1994 life of Steinbeck included information which was unavailable to Benson or which Benson decided—or was advised—to leave out.

In keeping with greater gender-sensitivity, Parini is also less forgiving of Steinbeck’s treatment of women in the novels and stories, pointing, for example, to the stale stereotyping of women intruding upon an Edenic male world and contributing to its destruction, as Curley’s wife does in Of Mice and Men—stereotyping that was raising eyebrows even before Parini wrote. Without disparaging Benson, reviewers were generally positive about Parini’s book when it appeared, pointing out its appeal—especially to non-academic readers—and praising its economy, pacing, and novelistic approach to Steinbeck’s life. Despite Galbraith’s assessment of Americans’ reading stamina, it seems likely that more non-specialists have been introduced to Steinbeck through Parini’s short life than through Benson’s longer one—until now. Disproving Galbraith’s claim that no new life of Steinbeck would ever be needed, 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.

Despite Galbraith’s assessment, it seems likely that more non-specialists have been introduced to Steinbeck through Parini’s short life than through Benson’s longer one—until now.

pulitzer-prize-finalist-william-souderA 71-year-old resident of rural Minnesota who began his career as a journalist reporting on science for the Minnesota Daily, Souder later wrote for major publications including The Washington Post, the New York Times, Smithsonian, and Harper’s. He is the author of three previous books that reflect his interest in science and its intersection with social justice, art, and culture: A Plague of Frogs (2000), Under a Wild Sky: John James Audubon and the Making of The Birds of America (2004—one of only two Pulitzer Prize finalists for biography that year), and On a Farther Shore: The Life and Legacy of Rachel Carson, Author of Silent Spring (2012).

In a 2015 interview with Steinbeck Now Souder explained that he was conducting research on Ed Ricketts for his book about Rachel Carson when John Steinbeck “found” him while he was reading about the 1940 “voyage of discovery” made by Steinbeck and Ricketts to the Sea of Cortez. As he became more familiar with Steinbeck’s life, he was fascinated by the way Steinbeck’s career “cuts right across the headlong march of 20th century American history. . . . [He was] born just after the close of the Victorian era—and he dies a few months before Neil Armstrong steps onto the moon. So that was his material. I was hooked.” Steinbeck was personally attractive as a subject, says Souder, because he was “far from perfect—as a man, a husband, a writer, he had issues. . . .  He had a permanent chip on his shoulder. Some of his work is brilliant and some of it is awful. That’s what you want in a subject—a hero with flaws.” When asked “What does your biography bring to the table?” Souder responded, “My way of telling a story.”

When asked ‘What does your biography bring to the table?’ Souder responded, ‘My way of telling a story.’

a-plague-of-frogsLooking for what was causing grotesque deformities in frogs across areas of the northern United States and southern Canada in the mid-1990s, the investigators in A Plague of Frogs confront not only the challenges of ambiguous and contradictory scientific data, but also the roadblocks thrown up by government agencies fearful of the potential economic impact of their inquiry. As in a Steinbeck novel, the investigators are forced to deal with personal and professional conflicts that further complicate their relationship with power. Souder guides the reader through a maze of technical and scientific detail, evoking landscapes and bureaucratic imbroglios with equal drama and transforming what might have become a tedious head-scratcher into a page-turning “what dunnit.”

under-a-wild-skyIn Under a Wild Sky Souder gives contemporary readers a vivid sense of the pristine beauty of the late 18th and early 19th century American countryside—a world that was already vanishing during Audubon’s lifetime—along with a sense of the challenges of travel and communication in the vast and largely undeveloped American wilderness. Describing the distances between far-flung settlements like Louisville, and the effect of isolation on the domestic lives and the intellectual development of families like the Audubons, Souder helps us understand the lengthy, and to modern minds inexplicable, family separations that characterized the era.

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Souder’s attention to Audubon’s rival—a less accomplished artist whose well-connected friends protected his reputation at Audubon’s expense—serves to fill out Souder’s portrait of a rugged artistic genius determined (like Steinbeck) to do things his way and insisting, despite publishers and other doubters, on doing expensive life-sized color images for his magnum opus, Birds of America. Souder captures the contradictions and conflicts of a man who loved animals but shot them, often dozens at a time; who had no qualms about subjecting his dog Dash to an experiment he knew might prove fatal; who, despite his commitment to scientific inquiry, voiced dubious theories and made absurd claims to a prestigious and surprisingly credulous Scottish scientific society. The most ridiculous was a story about a rattlesnake chasing a squirrel up a tree, keeping pace with it as it leapt frantically from branch to branch, and finally catching and swallowing the exhausted critter.

on-a-farther-shoreOn a Farther Shore: The Life and Legacy of Rachel Carson displays the same gift for psychological insight and dramatic presentation, in this case involving the challenges faced by a doggedly determined yet extremely sensitive scientist working for the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries during a time of gender inequality, social conformity, and widespread disregard for the dangers of industrial chemicals like DDT applied indiscriminately as pesticides. Rachel Carson was blessed, like John Steinbeck, with a talent for lucid scientific observation rendered in the language of poetry. A woman working in a field dominated by men, she encountered problems peculiar to her situation as an unmarried and unaffiliated agent of social and political change. Like Audubon and like Steinbeck, she was assertive and convincing enough to get her way. In her fashion she defied convention as dramatically as they did, spending the happiest days of her adult life in a long-lasting love affair with a married woman. A masterful blend of empathy and objectivity, Souder’s portrait of Carson foreshadows his psychologically astute treatment of Steinbeck—as an American individualist opposed to those in authority who abuse nature or other people in the name of power or greed.      

A Life-Sized Portrait of a Flawed Hero

salinas-valleyMad at the World opens with a lyrical description of the 90-mile-long coastal California valley between the Gabilan and Santa Lucia mountains where, on February 27, 1902, Steinbeck was born to children of Scots-Irish and English-German immigrants in Salinas, the agricultural town he called home until he left for Stanford in 1919. It is a region remarkable for its sere, rolling hills, rugged mountain vistas, endless fields of lettuce, and pervasive morning fog—in the winter “so dense that you cannot see your feet on the ground,” in the summer a “sea-born fog [that] does not lie still on the land, but seeps over the folded hillsides, rising and falling along the river bottom.” It is country with a storied past, where nomadic Indians ranged for millennia before Spanish explorers arrived, early in the 17th century, in the name of their Christ and their King. When they reached the Salinas Valley they were unimpressed, reporting that its soil was “poor,” its pastures “scant,” and its footing “treacherous.” This proved to be a serious misapprehension about a land where later settlers said “almost anything would grow”—and where generations of agricultural wealth created the power structure Steinbeck complained about, often bitterly, in his writing.

Mad at the World opens with a lyrical description of the 90-mile-long coastal California valley between the Gabilan and Santa Lucia mountains.

Many of the details of Steinbeck’s childhood are unusual, and Souder parses them carefully, peeling away layers of appearance to reveal how misleading mere facts can be. In his senior year of high school Steinbeck acted in a school play, served as associate editor of the yearbook, ran track, made the basketball team, and became class president. Despite the image of a popular all-American boy suggested by the official record, Steinbeck’s friends from that time remember him as shy, reclusive, and withdrawn. As Souder notes, his election as class president “astonished everyone,” and he never actually played in a basketball game. In fact, he “didn’t like going to ballgames.”

Many of the details of Steinbeck’s childhood are unusual, and Souder parses them carefully.

In his judicious selection of telling details, Souder benefits not only from his own research but also from Steinbeck scholarship in the quarter-century since Parini’s biography. Two books published in the last decade—Susan Shillinglaw’s insightful Carol and John Steinbeck: Portrait of a Marriage (2013) and former investigative reporter Bill Steigerwald’s incendiary Dogging Steinbeck: Discovering America and Exposing the Truth about Travels with Charley (2012)—have special bearing on Souder’s reassessment of Steinbeck’s character. Shillinglaw’s study suggests that Carol and John’s lives were even more transgressive and untraditional than previously thought—a view that also emerges in Souder’s portrait. Biographers are allowed to judge, and Souder seems at times to admit being disturbed by Steinbeck’s behavior. He reports “disconcertingly” on the sexual braggadocio regarding Steinbeck’s relations with Carol that Steinbeck employed in his letters to Kate Beswick, a friend and lover from Stanford days. Souder’s response to Steinbeck’s writing to Beswick that his looks were getting worse, but that “my body just now is nearly perfect” is—uncharacteristically—to throw up his hands. “Why Steinbeck kept telling Beswick things like this can’t be explained in any way that makes sense,” writes Souder. “It was simply in his nature.” One thing that can be explained by “things like this” is why Steinbeck didn’t want biographers “mucking around” in his personal life.

Biographers are allowed to judge, and Souder seems at times to admit being disturbed by Steinbeck’s behavior.

It is unlikely that some of the personal details revealed here could have been published earlier—certainly not by Benson and probably not by Parini—even if they were known. Mad at the World is the first major Steinbeck biography published since the death of two surviving members of the Steinbeck family: Steinbeck’s widow Elaine, who died in 2003, and his son Thomas, who died in 2016. Among other disturbing particulars, Souder reports that “Steinbeck forced [Steinbeck’s second wife, Gwyn] to have a number of abortions and had not wanted her to have John IV,” his other son; that John IV at age five got so drunk on champagne at a New Year’s Eve party that he blacked out and woke up the next day “in a little ring of vomit”; and that in his mid-teens John IV “loaded his .22 rifle and held it to the head of one of Gwyn’s boyfriends as they lay drunkenly asleep.” These are the kind of sordid and potentially hurtful details that Jackson Benson removed from the manuscript of his 16-years-in-the making biography, publication of which stalled while lawyers wrangled over objections and possible grounds for litigation raised with Viking Press, which in turn pressured Benson, who vented in his 1988 book Looking for Steinbeck’s Ghost, an account of the interference he encountered in the process of writing the biography that others—not he—claimed was “authorized” by Steinbeck’s family. Benson was understandably embittered by last-minute objections to events which were both true in the telling and, he believed, essential to a full understanding of just how low a point Steinbeck’s life had reached when they occurred.

It is unlikely that some of the personal details revealed here could have been published earlier—certainly not by Benson and probably not by Parini—even if they were known.

Souder devotes two full pages to facts about the writing of Travels with Charley discovered by Bill Steigerwald and revealed in Dogging Steinbeck. In the course of retracing Steinbeck’s 1960 road trip “In Search of America,” Steigerwald demonstrates pretty convincingly that at the very least Travels with Charley is not the nonfictional travel journal that it originally claimed to be. For example, he concludes that in fact Steinbeck “rarely camped in Rocinante, preferring comfortable motels, cozy country inns, and the occasional five-star hotel.” Moreover, he says that for 45 of Steinbeck’s 75 days on the road his wife Elaine accompanied him—decidedly not the impression a reader is left with by Travels with Charley. More troubling for Souder are Steigerwald’s suspicions, mostly buttressed by evidence, that conversations Steinbeck claimed he had with people he supposedly met at key points in the narrative were created from whole cloth—nicely woven, but fabricated from Steinbeck’s imagination.

Souder devotes two full pages to facts about the writing of Travels with Charley discovered by Bill Steigerwald and revealed in Dogging Steinbeck.

Perhaps with Steigerwald’s findings in mind, Souder gives more emphasis than Benson to the claim made by Steinbeck in another work of nonfiction, Sea of Cortez, that, while aboard their research vessel The Western Flyer, Ed Ricketts delivered a monologue on Easter morning which Steinbeck later inserted into Sea of Cortez as the “Easter Sermon.” Benson’s account of the “sermon” quotes a letter Steinbeck and Ricketts sent to Viking to explain the nature of their collaboration on the book they were co-authoring. The letter mentions matter-of-factly that “in one case [in Sea of Cortez] a large section was lifted verbatim from another unpublished work [an essay by Ricketts on nonteleological thinking].” Benson explains that the reference being made is to the “Easter Sermon.” Souder is blunter, calling Steinbeck out for making up facts to suit a fiction by noting that “there was no Easter Sunday Sermon. . . . Steinbeck invented this session, inspired by an unpublished essay by Ricketts on the subject of nonteleological thinking.” He questions other Steinbeck “inventions” as well, though usually in a spirit of sympathy for the creative types who do such things, and with the understanding that Steinbeck naturally inclined toward tall-tale prevarication and embroidery, often but not always in jest.  Writers of fiction do, of course “invent things,” but Souder defends Steigerwald, a fellow journalist, by insisting that the author of Dogging Steinbeck “could be forgiven for applying the rules of journalism to a work that purported to be journalism. First among those rules is that facts matter.” His vindication of Steigerwald’s work notes that it mattered enough to Viking’s parent company, Penguin Group, to call for a caveat in Jay Parini’s introduction to the 50th anniversary edition of Travels with Charley: Steinbeck “took liberties with the facts,” admitted Parini, and his book of nonfiction was “’true’ only in the way that a well-crafted novel is true.”

Perhaps with Steigerwald’s findings in mind, Souder gives more emphasis than Benson to a claim made by Steinbeck in another work of nonfiction, Sea of Cortez.

The economy of Souder’s biography in comparison with the books of Benson and Parini has another advantage: dramatic details of character and behavior stand in starker relief when they aren’t crowded by a plethora of other data, however engaging to specialists or essential to scholars of Steinbeck’s life and times. This is not to suggest that Souder is less than scholarly, or that his research was less than thorough. The helpful notes he provides for the 16 chapters in his book span 48 pages, and his index takes up another 15. His acknowledgement of sources is meticulous, his skepticism about received wisdom is healthy, and his interpretations and assessments of Steinbeck’s writings, where given, are sound. Unlike Benson and Parini, he includes a list of works cited—a scholarly desideratum inexplicably missing from their biographies of John Steinbeck.

Dramatic details of character and behavior stand in starker relief when they aren’t crowded by a plethora of other data, however engaging to specialists.

Souder’s treatment of Steinbeck’s character and conduct is sympathetic but not sugar-coated; admiring, but assuredly not adulatory. The portrait that emerges is that of a young boy raised in a proper post-Victorian household, a young church-going Episcopalian who loved his home but remained stubbornly unconventional, even when he behaved. A boy who loved nature and animals but remained aloof from his peers, few of whom could claim to have known him very well. A boy who, in the parlance of the day, would have been called peculiar; a self-styled outcast who preferred the company of other outsiders. A boy with an inner intensity betrayed by a “piercing gaze . . . [which] set him apart even more.” (In a 1981 interview with this reviewer, Steinbeck’s friend Bo Beskow, the renowned Swedish artist who painted three portraits of Steinbeck between 1937 and 1957, recalled his eyes as his most arresting feature.) The well-behaved albeit strange boy with the bright blue eyes developed into a young man whose bohemianism would put the Sixties to shame—a highly successful yet deeply troubled writer whose personal life was frequently in disarray; a deeply sensitive man who could be highly insensitive to others, including family and friends, beset with debilitating self-doubt and afflicted by celebrity which, like Kino’s pearl, proved both a blessing and a curse.

Souder’s treatment of Steinbeck’s character and conduct is sympathetic but not sugar-coated; admiring, but assuredly not adulatory.

Still, Souder’s emphasis on the virtues that attracted him to Steinbeck goes far in explaining why this “hero with flaws” remains more relevant than ever for audiences familiar with the vocabulary and values of environmentalism, equality, and the other causes espoused by Steinbeck in his life and writing. Among those virtues is the sheer variety of Steinbeck’s interests. More than any other major writer of fiction in English in the middle third of the 20th century, Steinbeck made science a pursuit and a cause—one that closely aligned with his phalanx theory of human behavior, developed by analogy with the behavior that he and Ed Ricketts observed in the intertidal organisms they collected and celebrated in the course of their collaboration. Their proto-ecology was prescient, anticipating by two decades the courageous pioneer who gave birth to the modern environmental movement—Rachel Carson. Thanks to their biographer, William Souder, Steinbeck and Carson can be seen as reverse images of one another: Steinbeck the professional writer with a serious interest in science, Carson the professional scientist with a gift for writing that made her a model of graceful style for generations of students versed in the profound simplicity of Silent Spring and Of Mice and Men.

Souder’s emphasis on the virtues that attracted him to Steinbeck goes far in explaining why this ‘hero with flaws’ remains more relevant than ever.

Steinbeck’s anger at social, environmental, and economic injustice resonates with fresh force in the age of COVID-19. As Souder notes in his splendid concluding chapter, a number of Steinbeck’s works are still very much alive today, thanks to their relevance and readability. The creation of memorable characters may be the single most important legacy any storyteller can leave. Whether Steinbeck deserves to be ranked in the company of Dickens, Twain, and Faulkner is a question of individual taste and perception. But like Pickwick, Tom Sawyer, and the Compson clan, Steinbeck’s characters have had a life of their own, beyond the pages of Cannery Row or The Grapes of Wrath. They have survived for the better part of a century and their health remains robust.

Steinbeck’s anger at social, environmental, and economic injustice resonates with fresh force in the age of COVID-19.

Mad at the World is a more than an addendum to the Steinbeck story, challenging Galbraith’s claim that nothing need be written or read after Benson with regard to the life and adventures of John Steinbeck, writer. A brisk and engaging account by a highly-regarded biographer whose estimation of Steinbeck’s importance a half-century after his death is itself testimony to his durability as a writer of fiction and critic of our world. Readers unfamiliar with Steinbeck’s story will come away from Souder’s rendering with a forceful first impression. Those who feel they already know the story well enough can anticipate the pleasure of traveling down a newly-opened road through one’s home town: the general landscape is familiar, but the perspective is novel and the trip its own reward.

Mad at the World: A Life of John Steinbeck will be released by W.W. Norton and Company on October 13.—Ed.

The Truth Behind Travels with Charley: “It’s More Like a Painting” Than a Snapshot

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Did John Steinbeck foreshadow the genre-bending literary movements now known as New Journalism and creative nonfiction when he wrote Travels with Charley, his semi-fictional account of the road trip he and his dog Charley took “In Search of America” in the fall of 1960? Published in 1962 as a book of travel, Steinbeck’s carefully crafted narrative resonated with mid-century readers who may or may not have felt differently if they had known Steinbeck was manipulating chronology and making up characters and conversations, like a novelist, to move his audience and fit his message.

When I first read Travels with Charley I had my doubts about several episodes in the book.

When I first read Travels with Charley, half a century after it was written, I had my doubts about several episodes in the book—encounters with Sunday preachers, Shakespearean actors, straight fathers and gay sons, Southerners with neatly divided views on race—that seemed uncharacteristically wooden for Steinbeck, too conveniently timed and too clearly contrived to prove the author’s point about the moral condition of America at the tail end of the Eisenhower era. By this time I was a frequent user of Jackson Benson’s magisterial biography, The Adventures of John Steinbeck, Writer, but I hadn’t read Bill Steigerwald’s exposé, Dogging Steinbeck, and I didn’t become concerned with the choices Steinbeck made in Travels with Charley until I started my own research into the choices he confronted when he undertook the subject of religion in his writing.

Having failed to find the John Knox church in Vermont that Steinbeck says he attended, I turned for help to Dogging Steinbeck.

In 2014, having failed to find the John Knox church in Vermont that Steinbeck says he attended in Travels with Charley, I turned for help to Dogging Steinbeck and learned that, like other scenes, the churchgoing episode with the fire-and-brimstone preacher was a likely fabrication designed to further the persona and purpose Steinbeck set out to advance in his book. Steigerwald, a veteran Pittsburgh journalist, had retraced Steinbeck’s 10,000-mile road trip as faithfully as possible in 2010 for an online newspaper series and discovered proof that Travels with Charley was heavily fictionalized. Though the New York Times praised Steigerwald on its editorial page for blowing the literary whistle on Steinbeck’s iconic road book, he caught grief from scholars and fans alike when Dogging Steinbeck came out in 2012. But as the journalist and author William Souder notes in Mad at the World, the new life of Steinbeck scheduled for publication in October, “Steigerwald could be forgiven for applying the rules of journalism to a work that purported to be journalism. First among those rules is that facts matter.”

Recently I caught grief of my own from a conscientious reader for appropriating the term creative nonfiction in a post about the sequel, Chasing Steinbeck’s Ghost.

Recently I caught grief of my own from a conscientious reader for appropriating the term creative nonfiction in a post about Steigerwald’s new e-book sequel, Chasing Steinbeck’s Ghost. I turned to Steigerwald and Souder for their advice on the subject, and both replied.

Bill Souder and Bill Steigerwald on a Sensitive Subject

Explained Souder, a literary expert whose 2004 biography of John James Audubon was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize: “The term ‘creative nonfiction’ has been muddied up in recent years, mainly, I think, by memoirists. But being the old school stick-in-the-mud that I am, I prefer the original definition: Creative nonfiction = The truth, well told. By that light, ‘creative’ does not nullify ‘nonfiction.’ It’s not a license to invent.

Creative nonfiction has roots in the New Journalism of the 1960s and 1970s.

“Creative nonfiction has roots in the New Journalism of the 1960s and 1970s, when writers like Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion, Truman Capote, Hunter Thompson, Norman Mailer, et al made their reporting more dynamic and engaging by using the narrative and descriptive techniques of fiction writing . . . including, in many cases, becoming their own first-person narrators. But they didn’t make up what happened. They only made it more interesting. One of the archetypes of the genre is Capote’s In Cold Blood, a true story that reads like a thriller.

Travels with Charley is an inventive, incisive essay on America that, because Steinbeck made some of it up, can’t really be called a snapshot.

“I don’t think your readers will mind the term as you deploy it here, but if it were my call I’d use something different. Travels with Charley is an inventive, incisive essay on America that, because Steinbeck made some of it up, can’t really be called a snapshot. It’s more like a painting.”

I agree about creative fiction being ‘truth, well told.’ It’s really how I used to think of newspaper/magazine journalism.

Adds Steigerwald, a contrarian reporter with a libertarian perspective on Steinbeck’s politics: “I agree about creative nonfiction being ‘truth, well told.’ It’s really what I used to think was the purpose of newspaper/magazine journalism—presenting/deploying important or interesting facts in an entertaining, informative, fair-and-balanced narrative way without distorting the truth. The difficulty is/was that too many newspaper proles in my era—at the Los Angeles Times and two Pittsburgh dailies from 1977 to 2009—were better at gathering facts than presenting them in an interesting way on paper. Or the writers/reporters were too politically or culturally biased, deliberately or without even knowing it, to be able to stick to the ‘truth’ and balance of their story while they performed their creative tricks.”

Email your idea for a post of your own about the truth or falsity of creative nonfiction. It’s a surprisingly sensitive subject.

I can’t improve on either summary, but you’re invited to try. If you’re a protective fan of Steinbeck’s writing with something to say about the foreshadowing of New Journalism in Travels with Charley, please leave a comment on this post. Or email your idea for a post of your own about the truth or falsity of creative nonfiction. It’s a surprisingly sensitive subject.

New Kindle Book Traces Steinbeck’s Steps, and Fibs, In Travels with Charley

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Chasing Steinbeck’s Ghost—a new Kindle book by the author of Dogging Steinbeck—details the actual and speculative timelines of Travels with Charley, John Steinbeck’s 1962 account of his 1960 road trip with his wife Elaine’s poodle. According to Bill Steigerwald—an investigative reporter with a journalist’s skepticism about the claims of creative nonfiction—Steinbeck fabricated characters, conversations, and events to make points while covering his tracks when facts conflicted with the purpose or the persona of his 10,000-mile odyssey “In Search of America.” After Steigerwald set out to retrace Steinbeck’s journey in 2010, he discovered that Steinbeck’s dates and places frequently failed to compute, particularly at points where Elaine flew in to rough it with her husband and had to be edited out of the story. Like Steigerwald’s Truth about Charley website, the Kindle book is written in lively, contrarian language that makes for informative and entertaining reading. Scholars and specialists who defended Steinbeck’s creative nonfiction when Dogging Steinbeck appeared are unlikely to be swayed by the sequel. Fans outside the academy will find it engaging and eye-opening—further evidence of John Steinbeck’s continued popularity with regular readers, and of the relevance of Travels with Charley to issues of fake news and America’s unresolved search for itself.

Like Steinbeck, Short Stories By Michael Katakis Show How Dangerous Men Can Be

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John Steinbeck said Montana was the state he’d pick to live in if he hadn’t been born in California, or become a citizen of the world who now called Manhattan home. In the early short stories of The Pastures of Heaven (1932) and The Long Valley (1938), the author of The Grapes of Wrath and East of Eden showed how vast spaces, violent events, and the struggles of victims and villains conspire to make good men dangerous and dangerous men deadly, stripping the veneer off civilization to expose the coarseness, and the fineness, of the essential human grain. Like Steinbeck, the American writer Michael Katakis can claim global citizenship (Carmel, Paris, London), international connections (as a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and executor for Hemingway’s literary estate), and—as demonstrated in his latest book, Dangerous Men—an ability to transpose personal loss (the tragic death of his young wife, the anthropologist Kris L. Hardin) into a particularized locale (rural Montana) as remote from most readers’ experience as Hemingway’s Pamplona or Steinbeck’s Big Sur.

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Dangerous Men is Michael’s first work of fiction, and “Hunter’s Moon”—the most nakedly autobiographical of the interconnected short stories in the collection—was written in Montana 16 years ago, long before Kris died from a brain tumor. Much of the rest of the writing was done over coffee or an appertif at a Paris-boulevard café, in a process of self-recovery that one doubts is finished, or ever will be. The result is a work whose dark tone and deadly theme are announced in the epigraph from The Pastures of Heaven that opens “The Fence,” the first story; the second, “Home for Christmas,” ends with a bitter reversal worthy of O’Henry, or the occasional Steinbeck. The remaining stories recount the revenge odyssey of a wandering hero with the wonderful name of Walter Lesser, a latter-day cowboy and Gary Cooper lookalike who ends up, like Tom Joad, as a larger-than-life legend. Raja Shehadeh, the author of Palestinian Walks: Notes on a Vanishing Landscape (2008), has described Dangerous Men as “a work of great sensitivity and lyrical beauty.” For fans of John Steinbeck, the Montana short stories of Michael Katakis are also a form of continuing communion with the spirit of The Pastures of Heaven—a place where violent events play out against vast spaces under the sign of the Hunter’s Moon. Highly recommended for Steinbeck readers and others safe-sheltering from the dangerous men in Washington, D.C.

Hunter’s Moon photograph courtesy of the Daily Express.

Mad at the World Will Make Headlines and Happiness

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An advance copy of Mad at the World: A Life of John Steinbeck in the hands of Steinbeck Now shows why the new biography of America’s greatest writer by William Souder is certain to make media headlines—and readers happy—when it is released by W.W. Norton & Company in October. Five years in the making, it is the first full-length life of Steinbeck in a generation and differs from earlier biographies by focusing on inner psychology as well as external events, illuminating the personal conflicts, crises, and contexts that made Steinbeck’s career so hard for critics to accept when he was alive. Written in clear English with impeccable but unobtrusive scholarship, it resolves old mysteries, dispels accrued nonsense, and reveals hidden motivations in the history of a writer whose life, told here, reads like a novel. A full review will appear in this space in September, but don’t wait until then. Pre-order your copy today.

“Proems” by Robert DeMott Inspired by Birds of America

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Up Late Reading Birds of America, a book of “proems” by Robert DeMott, is the latest link connecting John Steinbeck scholars with the life and times of John James Aubudon, the pioneering naturalist and painter whose Birds of America (1827) remains a classic of American ornithology and art history. The author of seminal studies including Working Days: The Journals of The Grapes of Wrath (1990) and Steinbeck’s Typewriter: Essays on His Art (1996), DeMott is the Edwin and Ruth Kennedy Distinguished Professor Emeritus of American Literature at Ohio University, where he taught from 1969 to 2003. Under a Wild Sky: John James Audubon and the Making of The Birds of America (2004), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, was the first biography of a major figure written by William Souder, the journalist whose Mad at the World: A Life of John Steinbeck is scheduled for publication by W.W. Norton in October.

Listen as Bob DeMott reads “proetry” from Birds of America:

 

Why The Grapes of Wrath Disappeared from Jeanine Cummins’s American Dirt

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The Grapes of Wrath played a part in the monstrous promotional campaign that helped American Dirt become one of this year’s biggest best-sellers.

But John Steinbeck’s classic is no longer part of the controversy that has befallen Jeanine Cummins’s novel about a Mexican mother and her son who illegally cross the border into the United States. American Dirt was exuberantly plugged in January by Oprah Winfrey for her book club and praised by a score of book reviewers as heart-poundingly suspenseful, unforgettable, important and timely, realistic, moving, a future classic, etc. etc. etc. Stephen King and John Grisham raved about it in their blurbs, and a line on the original book cover touted it as a modern-day version of The Grapes of Wrath.

Then, after American Dirt sold upwards of 200,000 copies, it was slammed by a wave of criticism for its political incorrectness and its stereotypical portrayal of Latinos. Oprah took serious heat for plugging the novel. The publisher, Macmillan-owned Flatiron Books, apologized for the excessive promotional campaign and removed the Grapes of Wrath reference from the cover. Citing “specific threats to booksellers and the author,” Flatiron chose to cancel Cummins’s book tour. Laura Miller’s piece on the controversy at Slate sums up the problem pretty well, posing the question “Will the American Dirt Fiasco Change American Publishing?”

Note to Author: “Pendeja, You Ain’t Steinbeck”

A reductive version of the complaints about American Dirt claims that the novel’s detractors believe a white woman shouldn’t write about the experiences of Latino migrants. In truth, nearly all of the considered criticism of the novel points out either inaccuracies or stereotypes which, according to “Pendeja, You Ain’t Steinbeck”—Myriam Gurba’s widely shared review at Tropics of Meta—betray Cummins’s lack of knowledge about her subject matter and her attempt to render a complex situation and culture into “trauma porn” palatable to an American readership envisioned as primarily white. Slate says that American Dirt‘s publisher went wrong by enthusiastically hawking a commercial novel as if it made “a contribution to a vital understanding” of the immigration issue when in fact the migrant experience was merely used “as a backdrop for an entertaining suspense story.”

In other words, when it comes to promoting a serious political message or pushing for sociopolitical change, The Grapes of Wrath it ain’t.

The controversy over American Dirt isn’t over yet. Starting tonight at midnight, Apple TV+ will live-stream a discussion taped last month that features Oprah, Cummins, and three prominent critics of the novel. The show, as The Hollywood Reporter puts it, will be a “debate about the marginalization of Latino voices, the lack of diversity in publishing, and the question of who is best suited to tell a given story.”

Image courtesy Slate magazine.

The Ghost of John Steinbeck Inhabits The Dreamt Land

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The spirit of John Steinbeck haunts the world of Mark Arax, the award-winning author and journalist from Fresno, California whose latest work—The Dreamt Land: Chasing Water and Dust Across California—continues the investigation of land abuse and human tragedy in California’s Central Valley that began with The King of California: J.G. Boswell and the Making of a Secret American Empire (2003) and remains, like Steinbeck’s style of dudgeon in The Grapes of Wrath, both detached and intensely personal. A restless son of Fresno’s substantial Armenian community, Arax first reported on Central Valley life for the Los Angeles Times while pursuing the people behind his father’s 1972 murder in the 1996 memoir, In My Father’s Name, that made Fresno feel more like Blue Velvet, the 1986 movie by David Lynch, than The Human Comedy, the 1943 novel by Steinbeck’s contemporary and the Arax family’s neighbor William Saroyan. Like The King of California (co-authored with Times colleague Rick Wartzman), Arax’s third book—West of the West: Dreamers, Builders, and Killers in the Golden State (2009)—followed the founding crimes of overbuilding, exploitation, and genocide from their roots in Gold Rush greed to the case of “The Last Okie in Lamont,” the Central Valley town that stimulated Steinbeck’s spleen in The Grapes of Wrath. A splendid sequel to West of the West, The Dreamt Land is Arax’s longest book to date, and—for fans of Steinbeck’s ghost—his finest.

Hemingway Book Prompts Steinbeck Question: Opinion

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If a photo had been taken of Ernest Hemingway and John Steinbeck when they met for the first and only time, at Tim Costello’s restaurant in New York in 1944, Michael Katakis would know, and he would have shared it with us in the visual biography that puts a fresh face on an old legend: Ernest Hemingway: Artifacts from a Life, a life story in pictures, with connecting word tissue, drawn from the Hemingway collection at the Kennedy Library, edited with an introduction by Michael, who has served as the executor of Hemingway’s literary estate since 1999. A writer and documentary photographer, he manages to divide his time productively between Paris, Hemingway’s city, and Steinbeck’s Carmel, California, a distance that symbolizes the divide experienced by the two writers in the 1920s, and the difference in attitude each took toward other writers in the decades that followed. Steinbeck, more sympathetic and less assertive, admired Hemingway and showed respect. That Hemingway behaved otherwise is apparent in the account of the 1944 meeting written in 1989 by Jackson Benson, author of the 1984 best-seller, The True Adventures of John Steinbeck, Writer. The achievement of Ernest Hemingway: Artifacts from a Life in using archival material to reframe and restore Hemingway’s reputation in 2018 raises another issue regarding Steinbeck. Libraries at various locations hold an abundance of artifacts—family photographs, private correspondence, personal memorabilia—from Steinbeck’s life. Fifty years after his death, are his executors, editors, and heirs too distant, or too divided, to do the same thing for him?

Review of Short Stories Pairs Steinbeck and Nietzsche

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Steinbeck: The Untold Stories, short stories about John Steinbeck by Steve Hauk, were plumbed and praised in a recent review, written by Stephen Cooper, connecting Steinbeck’s concept of “collective mind” to the writing of Friedrich Nietzsche. First published by the print journal Steinbeck Review, the article has been turning up at various online outlets, including the Los Angeles Post-Examiner, thanks to Cooper’s reputation as a writer, like John Steinbeck, whose words reward reading whatever the format. “Glimpsing Steinbeck’s ‘Collective Mind’ Through Steve Hauk’s Stories” is worth savoring, even if Nietzsche isn’t your cup of tea.