The late, great Christopher Hitchens was both advocate and critic when it came to America. A self-styled Anglo-American best known for his robust defense of USA action in Iraq after 9/11—and for his decidedly un-American defense of atheism as an alternative to any and all religion—the British-born writer and speaker was an astute reader of poetry, politics, history, and fiction, and a powerful voice in defense of authors who combined two or more in their writing, like Orwell, Auden, and Nabokov. References to Steinbeck are relatively rare in the books for which Hitchens, who died in 2011, is best remembered. A passage from “The Ballad of Route 66,” an essay written in Steinbeck’s centennial year of 2002, shows why that’s a shame. Crediting Steinbeck for being the first to call Route 66 “the mother road,” Hitchens makes cross-cultural connections (Marx, Wordsworth) often missed when explaining why The Grapes of Wrath still resonates with readers, 80 years Steinbeck after wrote his fictional (and political) masterpiece:
The title of his 1939 classic—and just try imaging the novel under a different name—comes from the nation’s best-loved Civil War anthem. (It was Steinbeck’s wife Carol who came up with the refulgent idea.) When first published it carried both the verses of Julia Ward Howe and the sheet music on the end-papers in order to fend off accusations of unpatriotic Marxism. But really it succeeded because it contrived to pick up the strain of what Wordsworth called “the still, sad music of humanity.”
First published in the November 2002 issue of Vanity Fair magazine, “The Ballad of Route 66” can be found in Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays, a collection of lesser-known Hitchens pieces published by Nation Books in 2004.
Photograph of Christopher Hitchens by Christian Witkin courtesy of Basic Books.
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