Articles by several writers in the Spring 2021 issue of Steinbeck Review, the journal of the International Society of Steinbeck Scholars, reconsider the life of Steinbeck from the point of view of a variety of contemporary concerns, including COVID-19. Stanford professor Gavin Jones headlines the issue with “Steinbeck in a Pandemic,” a survey of Steinbeck’s “biopolitical imagination” as seen in three very different works of fiction: The Grapes of Wrath, To a God Unknown, and The Pearl. Debra Cumberland compares “the themes of borders, migration, and displacement” in The Grapes of Wrath with Gehen, Ging, Gegangen, a novel by the 54-year-old German author Jenny Erpenbeck, while Fredrik Tydal “examines the appearance of The Grapes of Wrath in the Armed Services Editions, the book series that provided the American military with reading material during World War II.” Steinbeck’s World War II novella-play The Moon Is Down gets a fresh look from a textual-critical perspective in Tom Barden’s review of Bibliographia Dystopia, Volume I: John Steinbeck’s The Moon Is Down, by Anthony Amelio, and Steinbeck’s “positive impact on Algerian culture” is traced in a timely piece co-authored by Chaker Mohamed Ben Ali and Cecelia Donahue. Other contributors include Susan Shillinglaw, Christopher Seiji Berardino, and Scott Pugh, whose review of William Souder’s life of Steinbeck, Mad at the World, challenges the conclusions of William Ray’s review of Souder’s book in an earlier issue of the journal.
Photo of John Steinbeck courtesy New York Public Library.
