Gavin Jones: Reclaiming John Steinbeck for Our Time

August 11, 2021 by 1 Comment

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Another new book on John Steinbeck, the second published by a major press in less than a year, promises to turn the heads and hearts of scholars and fans alike by reassessing Steinbeck’s life and work from a radically contemporary point of view. Like Mad at the World, the widely praised life of Steinbeck written by the Minnesota journalist-biographer William Souder and published by W.W. Norton in 2020, Gavin Jones’s Reclaiming John Steinbeck: Writing for the Future of Humanity (Cambridge University Press, 2021) seeks to rescue Steinbeck from canonical boredom by rebooting the controversy around an author who infuriated the establishment of his time by refusing to stay in a box of others’ making. Steinbeck dropped out of Stanford University without a degree in 1925 and frequently expressed impatience with academic critics and reviewers who tried to nail him to a particular philosophy, movement, or style. A popular Stanford University English professor with three previous books to his credit, Gavin Jones puts a deep reading of selected works, from Cup of Gold (1929) to Cannery Row (1945), to rigorous use in exploring Steinbeck’s treatment of such subjects as eugenics, racism, disability, and environmental degradation—issues that challenge the future of humanity in our time.

Image of Gavin Jones courtesy Cambridge University Press.

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Steinbeck Review Connects Life of Steinbeck, COVID-19

July 5, 2021 by Leave a Comment

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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.

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Stanford’s Gavin Jones Urges Publication of Steinbeck’s Mystery Novel

May 31, 2021 by Leave a Comment

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John Steinbeck was a versatile writer whose portfolio includes at least one unpublished novel, Murder at Full Moon, described by the Stanford English professor and Steinbeck scholar Gavin Jones (photo) as a “horror potboiler” that deserves to see the light of day after 90 years because “It’s a whole new Steinbeck—one that predicts Californian noir detective fiction.” According to a May 22 report by Dalya Alberge in The Guardian, Jones has urged Steinbeck’s estate to permit publication of the 1930 manuscript, which Steinbeck submitted under the pen name Peter Pym before achieving success in 1935 with the publication of Tortilla Flat, the work of California fantasy fiction that finally made him famous. “Set in a fictional Californian coastal town [notes Alberge], Murder at Full Moon tells the story of a community gripped by fear after a series of gruesome murders takes place under a full moon. Investigators fear that a supernatural monster has emerged from the nearby marshes. Its characters include a cub reporter, a mysterious man who runs a local gun club and an eccentric amateur sleuth who sets out to solve the crime using techniques based on his obsession with pulp detective fiction.”

Filed Under: Life, Steinbeck's Life

Like John Steinbeck, Nick Taylor Heading for France

May 31, 2021 by 1 Comment

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Nick Taylor, the popular San Jose State University English professor and fiction writer who has served as director of the Martha Heasley Cox Center for Steinbeck Studies since 2011, recently announced that he will be leaving the position to become resident director of the California State University system’s international programs in Paris and Provence, France. On May 17 Taylor sent the following message to members of the International Society of Steinbeck Scholars, the organization which is headquartered at San Jose State:

I am writing to let you know that this summer I will be stepping down as Director of the Martha Heasley Cox Center. In my ten years in this role, I have had the privilege of meeting many of you at our international conferences in 2013, 2016, and 2019, and many more via email and phone. I continue to be impressed by the intelligence, creativity, and passion of Steinbeck scholars. I will miss working day-to-day to advance the mission of this vital institution, but I plan to remain on the Editorial Board of Steinbeck Review and to serve on the Advisory Board of the Center.

Two assistant professors at San Jose State will divide Taylor’s duties, which include management of the Steinbeck studies center—located in San Jose’s Martin Luther King, Jr. Library—and the Steinbeck writers’ fellowship program, which is funded by a bequest from the center’s founder, the late San Jose State English professor Martha Heasley Cox.

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Daniel Lanza Rivers

According to the announcement, Daniel Lanza Rivers will become the center’s director, “handling all scholarly and organizational duties, including Steinbeck Review. Daniel has a PhD in Cultural Studies and English from Claremont, an MA from NYU, and a BA from Sonoma State. He came to Steinbeck through his work in the environmental humanities. His current book project examines California’s ‘settler ecologies,’ with chapters on fire, grizzly bears, and other California touchstones. He also publishes on transnational American studies and gender and sexuality studies.”

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Keenan Norris

Keenan Norris will coordinate the Steinbeck Fellows program, which supports emerging talent through stipends, networking, and opportunities to showcase writing. According to the announcement, “Keenan is a novelist and essayist with a PhD in English from UC Riverside and an MFA from Mills College. His second novel, The Confession of Copeland Cane, will be published in June. Keenan has a strong network in the Bay Area writing community and years of mentorship experience. Both he and Daniel have served on the selection committee for the Steinbeck Fellows, so they are well acquainted with the program and its alumni.”

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William Souder’s Life of John Steinbeck Wins Los Angeles Times Biography Book-Prize

April 17, 2021 by 1 Comment

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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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The Marriage that Gave The Grapes of Wrath Its Midwife

April 14, 2021 by Leave a Comment

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Published 82 years ago today, the classic 1939 novel The Grapes of Wrath may have been birthed by John Steinbeck over nine months of intense daily labor in the mountain home he shared with his first spouse, near Los Gatos, California. But the book’s true midwife was Carol Henning Steinbeck, the partner, amanuensis, and editor who helped guard her husband’s privacy, gave the book its title, and typed fair copy, translating Steinbeck’s micrographic scribble into readable pages mailed by the batch to his nervous publisher in New York. The expert on this pregnant subject is Susan Shillinglaw, Pacific Grove resident and author of the 2013 biography Carol and John Steinbeck: Portrait of a Marriage, and the person local reporter Lisa Crawford Watson turned to for yesterday’s Monterey County Herald piece marking the anniversary of The Grapes of Wrath‘s publication—and the partnership without which it would have had neither the title, nor the readability, that insured its survival. There were no children and “Carol did creative things,” says Shillinglaw, “but her voice was muted,” and the marriage—unlike the masterpiece she helped birth—didn’t last. Fortunately for her memory attention is finally being paid, as amply demonstrated in Watson’s thoughtful article.

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Christopher Hitchens Recalls John Steinbeck on Route 66

March 5, 2021 by Leave a Comment

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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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William Souder’s Life of John Steinbeck Finalist for Los Angeles Times Book Prize

March 5, 2021 by 2 Comments

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Since its founding 140 years ago in December, the Los Angeles Times—the largest-circulation U.S. daily published west of the Mississippi—developed a reputation for in-depth reporting and colorful editorializing on local subjects of national interest, such as immigration and labor unrest, which preoccupied John Steinbeck from 1935, when the paper’s book critic, Wilbur Needham, became a personal friend and much-needed ally. This history makes the March 3, 2021 announcement that William Souder’s Mad at the World: A Life of John Steinbeck is a Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist welcome news for fans of Steinbeck’s fiction and Souder’s biography. Other nominees in the same category are recently published lives of Eleanor Roosevelt, Sylvia Plath, Andy Warhol, and Malcom X—welcome company for a book about an author who was defended by Mrs. Roosevelt (for The Grapes of Wrath) and known (like the others) for the slightly mad emotion expressed in the title of Souder’s superbly written work.

 

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Exploring Cannery Row Along the Pacific Crest Trail

February 22, 2021 by 2 Comments

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John Steinbeck preferred coasts to mountains, but the opposite is true of Joshua Powell, the artist-author of an artful new book, The Pacific Crest Trail: A Visual Compendium. Quoted in a February 20, 2021 Spokesman-Review profile by Stephanie Hammett, the Washington State resident said that he picked up a copy of Steinbeck’s 1945 novel Cannery Row while staying overnight with friends in Belton, California (pop. 22) in 2012. He kept the copy his hosts gave him in his knapsack, working his way along the 2,653-mile Pacific Crest Trail—and having an unexpected experience of discovery. “’I would pull it out and read it from time to time, maybe 10 minutes before going to sleep, but it ended up having a huge effect on my experience,’” Powell told Hammett, who added that Powell “started seeing connections between his hike and the plot surrounding the character of Doc in Cannery Row, an early thru-hiker of sorts himself.” John Steinbeck continues to sustain the young artist-author. “’That was kind of shocking to me, that this book I just randomly happened to find, by a very famous writer, actually had this direct connection to what I was doing,’ he said, explaining how he went from casually reading Cannery Row to tracking down every bit of Steinbeck he could find.”

Photo of Joshua Powell by Laura Goff courtesy of the Spokane, Washington Spokesman-Review.

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John Steinbeck’s Sag Harbor Home on Sale for $18 Million

February 21, 2021 by 1 Comment

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According to a February 19, 2021 New York Times real estate item that quickly caught the attention of Travels with Charley fans, the modest home in Sag Harbor, New York from which John Steinbeck and his poodle started their 1960 road trip can be yours for just under $18 million—more than Steinbeck and his wife Elaine paid in 1955, but less than the price of comparable waterfront properties for sale in tonier Long Island communities like the Hamptons. Steinbeck’s lifelong attachment to small, secluded spaces extended to the tiny writing cabin that he built on the 1.8-acre site and named Joyous Garde, after the Arthurian legend he learned to love as a boy. The online version of the Times real estate story included this comment from Bill Steigerwald, the Pittsburgh journalist who visited Sag Harbor (the venue for Steinbeck’s last novel, The Winter of Our Discontent) before setting out to discover the actual the driving route—and expose the narrative liberties—taken by John Steinbeck on his unsentimental journey “in search of America.”

bill-steigerwald“In 2010, exactly 50 years after Steinbeck and dog Charley left on the road trip around the USA that became Travels with Charley, I left his Sag Harbor house and retraced his route for my 100 percent nonfiction road book/expose, Dogging Steinbeck. I was kindly allowed to trespass on the property by the man who took care of it and I shot some video. I’ve never been confused with Steven Spielberg, and Peter Coyote was otherwise engaged, and I had no sound man . . . .”

Photo of John Steinbeck’s Sag Harbor property, by Gavin Zeigler for Sotheby’s International Realty, courtesy of the New York Times. Photo of Bill Steigerwald courtesy of truthaboutcharley.com.

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