Word that readers of England’s Guardian newspaper chose Tortilla Flat and Cannery Row as books of the month for April pleased Steinbeck fans in and outside Great Britain. Steinbeck was an on-and-off-again journalist, and England became his temporary home twice—in 1943, when he was an American war correspondent in London, and in 1959, when he and his wife Elaine spent blissful months in a Somerset cottage that dated from Norman times. The Guardian’s current book-of-the-month blog also brings to mind Steinbeck’s critique of American war reporting from London as lazy, unintelligent, and banal. British newspapers vary in quality, but the best are brilliant in a literary way, and it’s hard to imagine an American paper giving Tortilla Flat the sustained, incisive treatment found in the Guardian blog. But American and British newspapers have one thing in common that Steinbeck, who could be cynical, would probably find unsurprising. The bad ones have caught tabloid fever, and the good ones have taken to asking for contributions to help them stay alive. Check out the Guardian newspaper’s blog on Tortilla Flat for evidence of British brilliance—and the lengths to which impecunity is driving intelligent journalism in Great Britain and the United States.
Guardian newspaper photograph of John Steinbeck from Rolls Press/Popperfoto/Getty.
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“Cannery Row” was my Bible: I bought a copy en route to Vietnam in 1968. I still have that copy. Being a (Southern) Californian, a generation once removed from Steinbeck, That author appealed to me in a very gut-level emotional way as no other work, by Steinbeck or anyone else, has done. I guess it was memories of our own Newport beach, before Everyone, and I mean Everyone, came in; that appealed to me in a very far away place like Vietnam.