William Souder’s Mad at the World: A Life of John Steinbeck has won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in biography. The announcement was made at a virtual ceremony on April 16, 2021. Also nominated for the annual award were biographies of Sylvia Plath, Malcolm X, Andy Warhol, and Eleanor Roosevelt, John Steinbeck’s champion in the controversy surrounding the publication of The Grapes of Wrath 82 years ago. Mad at the World: A Life of John Steinbeck received widespread praise when it was published by W.W. Norton & Co., starting with a September 14, 2020 pre-publication review by Donald Coers at SteinbeckNow.com.
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Well deserved, Steinbeck being the third of of Souder’s also lauded biographies of Rachel Carson and John James Audubon. Which, by the way, reminds me – the artist Charles Bradford Hudson, who lived in Pacific Grove. Caliornia – from 1900 untvil his death in 1931 – where Steinbeck wrote ‘Of Mice and Men’ – was sometimes referred to as `The Audubon of Fish.’ The Smithsonian holds much of his work and did a catapgue on him seven or eight years ago. I often wonder, did Hudson know Steinbeck and/or Ed Ricketts? It seems he must at least have known Rcketts, both having a passion for the sea. Hudson’s work is valued even more these days, his renditions of sea life not only beautiful but accurate in detail.