William Souder—the Minnesota journalist whose book-length lives of John James Audubon and Rachel Carson established his reputation as an ecology-minded biographer with a nose for the human back story—will discuss the art of biography, and his upcoming life of John Steinbeck, as featured speaker for the 2019 International Steinbeck Conference, May 1-3, at San Jose State University. “The Subject is Steinbeck: Thoughts on the Theory and Practice of Biography” may sound academic as a title for the talk, but Souder as a speaker rarely does—as demonstrated by this 2016 interview, in which he explains how writing about Audubon, Carson, and a plague of frogs led him to undertake the first major life of Steinbeck in 25 years. Scheduled for publication in the summer of 2020, when environmental collapse and humanitarian crisis are destined to dominate the most divisive presidential election news cycle since 1968, Souder’s biography of an author who stayed “angry at the world” for most of his life is likely to make literature newsworthy again by connecting books, as Steinbeck did, to burning issues.
