About William Ray

William Ray is a Steinbeck scholar living in Santa Clara, California. He received his PhD in English from the University of North Carolina.

John Steinbeck Haunts Malcolm Harris’s Palo Alto

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John Steinbeck shadows the world of Palo Alto like a superannuated ghost. The subtitle of Malcolm Harris’s new nonfiction bestseller—A History of California, Capitalism, and the World—offers the first hint of the haunting, followed by references to the Joads in Harris’s text and criticism of Steinbeck’s support for the Vietnam war in a testy footnote. Although Steinbeck rejected Marxist thinking, Harris doesn’t, and Harris’s critique of what Leland Stanford wrought in starting Steinbeck’s alma mater builds on Steinbeck’s version of the school’s spirit in East of Eden, where Aron, restless and unhappy, drops out of Stanford as Steinbeck did in real life.

Image of John Steinbeck IV, his father the author John Steinbeck, and President Lyndon JohnsonHarris’s note on Steinbeck’s non-pacifism about Vietnam is worth quoting, particularly in the context of Ukraine, where pacifism and progressives have parted ways:

Also presumed progressive based on his earlier work, Steinbeck was rabidly pro-war, and he turned himself into a military pundit. He even sent the White House a letter suggesting the Defense Department develop napalm grenades—American boys were already being trained to throw baseballs. He proposed to name the weapon the “Steinbeck super ball.” His letter was forwarded to the Department of Defense.

Malcolm Harris is young. So was John Steinbeck IV when he was presented by his father at the White House before being shipped out to Vietnam 60 years ago. Later the son slammed the father’s hypocrisy about drugs, on display during a 1966 visit, along with the hankering for high-tech weaponry cited by Harris. Unfair to Palo Alto’s superannuated ghost? When Steinbeck was young he might have made the same observation about the man he became.

A Steinbeck Vade Mecum by Steinbeck’s Great Evangelist

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The November 2022 publication of Steinbeck’s Imaginarium was propitious. Its publisher, the University of New Mexico Press, published Steinbeck and His Critics: A Record of Twenty-Five Years in 1957, when Steinbeck was still in touch with “Skunkfoot Hill,” his boyhood rival from Salinas, who chaired UNM’s department of anthropology. Its author, Robert DeMott, is Professor Emeritus of American literature and creative writing at Ohio University, and a major force in Steinbeck scholarship; Steinbeck’s Imaginarium is his valedictory to the community and field of study he helped create. Chapter subjects indicate the book’s range and variety (“Half a Century with Steinbeck,” the writing of Cannery Row, Steinbeck’s journals, Steinbeck and fly-fishing). But the subtitle (“Essays on Writing, Fishing, and Other Critical Matters”) seriously understates the book’s importance to the future of Steinbeck studies. A deep dive into texts, contexts, and connections, Steinbeck’s Imaginarium is certain to become a vade mecum for serious students of Steinbeck in need of a friendly guide.

John Steinbeck’s Gravitational Pull

DeMott’s preface describes his sense of connection to Steinbeck’s life and writing, and his purpose in pursuing both as the chief work of a 50-year career:

For me, the Matter of Steinbeck—by which I mean not just his writings but the overall body of his work, the allied collection of diverse historical, personal, creative, and intellectual materials that make up his achievement and offered possibilities for sustain investigation into his life and career—was never solely a bloodless investigation into his life and career, nor a way to mark academic time and advancement . . . but an attempt to understand and communicate one writer’s important literary, social, and ecological vision that gathered strength, urgency, and relevance as the years went on. Steinbeck’s gravitational pull got stronger over the decades, not weaker.

steinbecks-imaginariumThe fruits of the author’s passion for the Matter of Steinbeck, in all its forms, have proven to be abundant. They include Steinbeck’s Reading and Steinbeck’s Typewriter, a pair of books that provide helpful lists and important insights into the process of Steinbeck’s reading and writing; After The Grapes of Wrath, a collection of essays with Donald Coers and Paul Ruffin; and critical editions of major works by Steinbeck for Penguin Books and the Library of America: To a God Unknown, Novels and Stories 1932-1937, Novels 1942-1952, The Grapes of Wrath, Sweet Thursday, Travels with Charley and Later Novels 1947-1962 (with Brian Railsback), and Working Days: The Journals of The Grapes of Wrath 1938-1941. Seminars taught and dissertations directed at Ohio University have produced stars like Railsback, founding dean of the honors college at Western Carolina University, and David M. Wrobel, dean of arts and sciences at the University of Oklahoma. DeMott’s directorship of San Jose State University’s Steinbeck Studies Center, early in the center’s development, resulted in the acquisition of one-of-a-kind documents and artifacts, including Steinbeck’s Hermes typewriter. Steinbeck’s Imaginarium builds on this history of scholarly energy, enterprise, and collaboration. But DeMott insists that there is still unfinished Steinbeck business to be done by a new generation. His to-do list for the future includes an unexpurgated edition of Steinbeck’s letters, collected  editions of Steinbeck’s journals and unpublished works, and a volume of Steinbeck iconography and artifacts, like the one on Ernest Hemingway organized by Michael Katakis, Hemingway’s literary executor, in 2018.

Student Scholars in Search of a Mission

But the data provided in DeMott’s survey of conferences devoted to Steinbeck, starting in 1969, raises a troubling issue: the decline in participation, and thus stature, at Steinbeck events. The first such conference, held at the University of Connecticut, celebrated The Grapes of Wrath and featured literary lights like Malcolm Cowley, Granville Hicks, Hyatt Waggoner, Ted Hayashi, Peter Lisca, and Warren French. The Oregon State University conference of 1970, organized by Richard Astro, got the Steinbeck-ecology ball rolling, with Joel Hedgpeth, Jackson Benson, John Ditsky, Robert Morsberger, and Steinbeck’s pal Toby Street in attendance. “Steinbeck Country,” the 1971 conference at San Jose State University, attracted 800 attendees and spurred DeMott’s “fascination for visiting the physical places that inspire literary and artistic works.” Conferences held at San Jose State in 2013, 2016, and 2019 attracted far fewer, despite some effort to encourage student scholars. Steinbeck’s Imaginarium can help rectify this situation if it is taken to heart by this critical audience: young scholars looking for a mission, like Robert DeMott 50 years ago. His reading of Steinbeck texts and contexts—along with detailed notes, lists, and surveys of people, places, and events—provides the necessary information. His personal way of “being in the world” with John Steinbeck—a fellow fisherman, poet, and evangelist for human understanding—should provide the inspiration.

Why Harry Spared Steinbeck

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J.R. Moehringer was worth the million dollars he reportedly received for ghostwriting Spare, Prince Harry’s account of life in the House of Windsor as this generation’s prodigal son. The Pulitzer Prize-winning American journalist knows all about books, and that’s good because Harry doesn’t. A self-styled non-reader, the 38-year-old royal spare asks, on page 13, “Who the fook is Faulkner? And how’s he related to us Windsors?” Literary allusions abound on the path to page 407, most of them to names or sources—Ecclesiastes, Dame Julian of Norwich, Shakespeare, Alexander Pope, Wordsworth, Tennyson, William Ernest Henley—unlikely to have crossed the prince’s prior consciousness. Reviewing Spare for the January 23, 2023 New Yorker magazine, Rebecca Mead praises this “literary artifice,” and the “coherent narrative” created by Moehringer, who “bestowed upon Harry the legacy that his father was unable to force on him: a felicitous familiarity with the British literary canon.”

Of Mice and Men and Brothers Who Fight

The American canon was another matter, and Harry approves of John Steinbeck. “The one piece of literature I remember enjoying, even savoring,” he recalls on page 49, “was a slender American novel,” Of Mice and Men. “Unlike Shakespeare, Steinbeck didn’t need a translator,” he explains. “He wrote in plain, simple vernacular. Better yet, he kept it tight. Of Mice and Men: a brisk 150 pages.” But brevity isn’t the only reason Harry singles out Steinbeck. Unlike Who-the-fook-is-William-Faulkner, Steinbeck is found to be writing about the Windsor brothers in his classic novella. “A story about friendship, about brotherhood, it was filled with themes I found relatable,” says Harry. “George and Lennie put me in mind of Willy and me. Two pals, two nomads, going through the same things, watching each other’s back.” Steinbeck’s story of “two blokes . . . gadding about California, looking for a place to call their own, trying to overcome their limitations” ends with a bullet in the back of the head, however. Did Harry miss the fratricidal point? For greater clarity, Moehringer might refer him to more Steinbeck: to East of Eden, where Cain almost kills Abel, or to Burning Bright, Steinbeck’s tale of bastardy, murder, and family forgiveness.

(Page numbers are given because Spare has no index. I owe the tip for this post to a literary-minded friend who left Florida about the same time I did, almost 20 years ago. Like Harry, we prefer gadding about California.)

Season of Praise for William Souder’s Mad at the World

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Of the four gospels, Steinbeck’s favorite was the one written by John. He paraphrased it loftily in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, and he was partial to its name. Mining the books of the Bible for material was standard procedure for writers of his generation, but the Gospel According to St. John had special meaning for Steinbeck. Written some time after the so-called synoptic gospels of Mark, Matthew, and Luke, John’s version is distinctive because it put Jesus’s life story in a new light, building on the narrative contained in the earlier accounts while differing in style of writing, selection of events, and point of view about Jesus’s nature and purpose on earth, adding value to the picture by looking at Jesus in a new way.

William Souder’s Mad at the World (2020), the first commercially published life of John Steinbeck in a generation, has a similar relationship to the comprehensive biographies of Steinbeck written by Jackson Benson—The True Adventures of John Steinbeck, Writer (1984)—and Jay Parini John Steinbeck: A Biography (1994). In biblical terms, Benson is the St. Mark of Steinbeck biography—the first to tell the subject’s life story so fully—and Parini is like Matthew or Luke, making minor adjustments without changing basic facts or challenging basic beliefs.  Like St. John’s gospel, Souder’s life of Steinbeck represents a departure, written in an informal style for a contemporary audience. Free from the high-level interference that inhibited Benson and touched Parini, it adds dramatic new detail and depth to our understanding of Steinbeck’s nature, psychology, and relationships. Reviewer response since the book’s publication in October shows why it needed to be written, and why anger was the right rubric for a 21st century study of Steinbeck’s life, work, and continued relevance.

The Wrath of John Steinbeck

The first published reference to anger as Steinbeck’s governing principle appears to have been The Wrath of John Steinbeck, or St. John Goes to Church, a pamphlet privately printed in 1939 by the young friend from Berkeley with whom Steinbeck stayed over Christmas in 1920, when he worked at a department store in Oakland instead of going home to Salinas. The first published review of William Souder’s Mad at the World appears to have been the September 14 review by Donald Coers here at Steinbeck Now. Coers—a veteran educator and the author of a pioneering 1991 study, John Steinbeck as Propagandist—celebrates Souder’s contribution to the edifice of understanding begun by Benson, now 90, more than 50 years ago. To put the connection in perspective, he quotes the blur for Benson’s book written by John Kenneth Galbraith. “Disproving Galbraith’s claim that no new life of Steinbeck would ever be needed,” says Coers, “Mad at the World seems certain to join existing biographies on the bookshelves of present and future Steinbeck fans, especially in America, a country whose history pervades William Souder’s writing, as it did Steinbeck’s.”

Writing for the October issue of BookPage, Henry L. Carrigan made the case for Steinbeck’s continued relevance in layman’s language designed, like Souder’s, to appeal to readers who are less familiar with footnotes than Facebook, and less likely to buy a 1,116-page book weighing four pounds than one that is half as long and half as heavy. “Steinbeck was a born storyteller who was a bit out of step with his times,” said Carrigan, because “many of his social realist novels appeared during the innovations of modernism.” But we live in an age of March madness and post-modernism, and “Steinbeck remains widely read and relevant today, as vibrantly illuminated by Mad at the World.” When The True Adventures of John Steinbeck, Writer was written, Steinbeck needed defending from academics and the critical mafia in New York. Four decades later, Souder is defending against a different kind of disregard: the neglect that results when new readers lose interest in what an old writer has to say.

The problem of reader ignorance and indifference occupied Steinbeck, who insisted that his readers would get out of his writing only as much as they were willing (or able) to put in. Souder is an investigative reporter with experience helping newspaper readers understand science, and he leaves little to chance in this regard, providing fact-filled mini-histories of the individuals and events that influenced Steinbeck’s life and thought. These include names already familiar to Steinbeck fans—the Wagner brothers and the sisters Kashevaroff, Carlton Sheffield and Carl Wilhemson, Toby Street and Edith Mirrielees, Carol Henning and Gwyn Congers, Ed Ricketts and Joseph Campbell, Elizabeth Otis and Annie Laurie Williams, Ben Abramson and Pascal Covici—along with less familiar figures from Steinbeck’s unsteady orbit: his Stanford girlfriend Katherine Bestwick, the Albee brothers of Los Angeles, and three critics—Edmund Wilson, Orville Prescott, and Mary McCarthy—who resisted his gravitational pull. Particularly helpful for readers who are new to Steinbeck, or unfamiliar with modern history, are the profiles of movements and men who shaped the context and content of Steinbeck’s writing, from Cup of Gold (1929: Lost Generation, stock market crash, rise and fall of Herbert Hoover) to The Grapes of Wrath (1939: Great Depression, Dust Bowl, rise of Roosevelt, Hitler, and Edward R. Murrow), The Moon Is Down (1942: fall of Norway, rise of Japan), and Travels with Charley (1962: John Kennedy, Cold War, and the Cuban missile crisis).

Souder’s commentary on these books, and others, is equally enlightening. Like the attention to movements and events, Souder’s reliance on Steinbeck’s letters and journals rather than literary theory or jargon to explain Steinbeck’s meaning seems perfectly appropriate for a thematic biography like Mad at the World—or The True Adventures of John Steinbeck, Writer, which Benson intended as a critical biography, until he realized he had too much material to do both. Reviewers recognized the virtues of this approach in Souder’s book, expressing renewed faith in Steinbeck’s relevance to our time and renewed appreciation for Steinbeck’s courage in confronting the demons faced by a high-functioning neurotic with anger-management issues and fear of success. Steinbeck’s literary reputation needed shoring up, and Benson delivered. Steinbeck’s personal suffering is the greater concern for readers today, and Souder handles the subject with care, charting the dark side of Steinbeck’s empathy and suggesting that, like Jesus, he suffered for our sins more than his own.

Reviewers at major dailies made this point in reviews published during the first half of October. Describing Mad at the World as “smart, soulful and panoramic,” Alexander C. Kafka’s review for the Washington Post heaped praise on Souder for having “chosen a subject on the same continuum” as his two previous books, Under a Wild Sky, his biography of John James Audubon, and his life of Rachel Carson, On a Farther Shore, pointing out that Steinbeck was “another loner who, like Audubon and Carson, refined his craft through mature, dogged, self-punishing industry.” Describing Steinbeck as “one of America’s few bona fide literary celebrities,” Sam Sacks of the Wall Street Journal  noted “Two clashing impulses [which] provide the tension in Mr. Souder’s book: Steinbeck’s deep-seated distrust of success and the unyielding creative passion that brought his success about.”

Brenda Wineapple’s New York Times review of October 6 took a similar approach in evaluating Steinbeck’s (and Souder’s) achievement. On thee question of Steinbeck’s quality and character, however, she became a doubting Thomas. Steinbeck “might well be one of those once-popular authors whose names we recognize but whom no one reads beyond junior high. Still, his affecting novels about besieged migrant workers and itinerant day laborers may come back into vogue now that the country, if not the world, faces an economic crisis whose proportions have already been compared to, and may far outdistance, those of the Great Depression.” Unconvinced that suffering equals greatness, Wineapple suggests that “to the reader Steinbeck seems less angry than shy, driven and occasionally cruel — an insecure, talented and largely uninteresting man who blunted those insecurities by writing.” (Non-Times subscribers can read Wineapple’s review at the History News Network.)

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Reviewing for the October 9 Boston Globe, Wendy Smith seemed to disagree, describing The Grapes of Wrath as “a lodestar for a new generation of writers seeking to make fiction a vehicle for furious protest and a catalyst for change.” But “Souder’s appreciative yet clear-eyed assessment concludes that Steinbeck’s goal was more modest: ‘He brought people to life who were otherwise invisible and voiceless — because he could, and because he liked them better than the characters who lived in other writers’ work.’” Writing in the October 9 Minneapolis Star Tribune, Mary Ann Gwin praised Souder’s “vivid portrait of a complicated man,” noting that “the best biographers balance empathy for their subjects with an unblinking accounting of their shortcomings” and concluding that “Souder succeeds at this tricky business” in a way that “John Steinbeck, who prized realism above all things, might have approved.”

Most reviewers followed Souder’s lead in evangelizing for Steinbeck. A second exception to the rule was Vivian Gornick, the 85-year-old feminist who reviewed Mad at the World for the October 9 issue of New Republic. Presented as a minority report on Steinbeck by the same left-leaning publication that disparaged him when he was alive and under right-wing attack, Gornick’s diatribe negatively demonstrated the need for Souder’s book: to save Steinbeck’s reputation with readers from political puritanism and neglect. “The amount of print that has been spilled on Steinbeck would fill an ocean,” complained Gornick, a confirmed agnostic on the subject of Steinbeck’s literary divinity: “memoirs, social histories, dissertations, biographies by the yard. Surely by now the cases for and against him as a significant American writer have been sufficiently made.” To the question “Do we need another Steinbeck biography?,” her answer is no.

An anonymous National Book Review post on October 12 rebutted the charge of obsolescence: “Today, the 1962 Nobel Prize winner may be mostly read by high school students, but Souder presents him as a ‘major figure in American literature’ who deserves to be appreciated for his empathy and compassion for the powerless in an inhumane world. Despite his unmistakable admiration, Souder fairly relates Steinbeck’s misogyny, cruelty to his own family, and personal demons of doubt — and the crucially important role his first wife played in his success.” An equally effective counter-argument could be found on the Library of America website a day or two later: “As biographer William Souder shows in his engrossing new book Mad at the World: A Life of John Steinbeck, this long apprenticeship in failure and frustration was the crucible in which Steinbeck’s extraordinary capacity for empathy was forged. Honesty, understanding, and feeling would become the hallmarks of his work, constants even as he experimented with a wide range of forms, styles, and emotional registers. They enabled him, in his greatest work, to give voice to the voiceless, exposing the corrosiveness of power and the perils of social injustice and ecological collapse. At the same time, they did not prevent him from being heedless and sometimes cruel to those closest to him.”

Regional papers also did their part for Steinbeck’s name and Souder’s book. Interviewing Souder for the October 10 St. Paul Pioneer Press, Mary Ann Grossman led with kudos for her fellow Minnesotan. “’Mad at the World’ is the first biography of Steinbeck in 25 years and critics and scholars are loving it,” she wrote. “One of the most enjoyable aspects of William Souder’s biography lies in reading the stories behind the stories,” enthused Hugh Gilmore in the November 18 Chesnut Hill (Pa.) Local: “Souder presents engaging summaries of each book and describes how Steinbeck worked on them, how they were received, and the torments and challenges of their compositions. This is all done with ease and grace and is incorporated into Steinbeck’s life as seamlessly as the stories of his three marriages, two sons, many dogs, raging, dysfunctional family life, and sweet and amusing details.”

Newspapers at both ends of Steinbeck’s America found room for reader responses which, like letters to the editor, veered toward the personal. Woody Woodburn exclaimed in the December 18 Ventura County (Ca.) Star that “biographies do not get any better than Mad at the World: A Life of John Steinbeck.” Reminiscing about Steinbeck’s Sag Harbor in a review for the December 23 East Hampton (N.Y.) Star, Lou Ann Walker recalled that “Years ago on a splendid June afternoon, Elaine Steinbeck invited my husband and me to her Sag Harbor home for tea. Gracious, full of good humor, she took us on a tour of the simple one-story wood-frame house, filled with memorabilia. Her husband had been gone for two decades.” An October 16 post by the poet Stephen Kuusisto at Planet of the Blind said that Souder’s life of Steinbeck is “quite frankly one of the best biographies I’ve read in years, ranking alongside Richard Ellmann’s ‘Oscar Wilde’”—“a nonfiction bildungsroman about a man who was richly alive with all the triumphs and tragedies inherent in a writing life” like Steinbeck’s. “Souder gives us Steinbeck’s blemishes with the light and space to take them in,” wrote Kuusisto. “For my money this is one hell of a compelling book about a writer’s life, the lived life of the unaffiliated places inside.”

Scott Bradfield’s November 28 review for The Spectator was less uncritical. A 65-year-old American who lives and writes in London, Bradfield taught college English and knows his Steinbeck and his literary lives. “William Souder’s Mad at the World is the first significant biography of Steinbeck since Jackson L. Benson’s much longer 1984 volume, The True Adventures of John Steinbeck, Writer,” he observed: “It is readable, admiring and compact, and provides a narratively energetic look at a man who suffered many of the same weaknesses as his characters — for booze, benzedrine, depression and bad marriages. But also like his characters, Steinbeck got up every day to test himself all over again, by writing a new book or embarking on a new adventure.” Souder “writes well,” he continued, “and this is a good place to start reading (or rereading) about Steinbeck,” though “Mad at the World sometimes feels a bit too terse and cursory, especially in the last 50 pages, and falls short of communicating a strong sense of the complicated, emotional life of a very complicated, emotional writer.” Bradfield’s example of excessive brevity is the 1944 incident involving Hemingway, O’Hara, and Steinbeck’s walking stick to which Benson devoted two pages and Souder a single sentence. Kuusisto would remind Bradfield that any good bildungsroman, especially that of a figure like Steinbeck, will emphasize the early years, when experience, character, and neurosis are being forged from the materials of daily life.

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Looking for Steinbeck’s Ghost

In 1988, Jackson Benson published Looking for Steinbeck’s Ghost, a collection of essays, sketches, and anecdotes about his 15-year struggle to write the 1984 life of John Steinbeck that has become the bible of Steinbeck studies. In it, Benson describes the obstacles to full disclosure put in his path by members of the Steinbeck family and their lawyers, and he admits that childhood is the hardest thing to get right when writing anyone’s biography. The author or editor of books about Hemingway, Benson became John Steinbeck’s official biographer without ever asking for the job. A few years later, Jay Parini—author of a life of Theodore Roethke—received Elaine Steinbeck’s approval and help in writing the second “authorized” life of her husband. Forty years after Benson, and 25 years after Parini, William Souder had the benefit of their labor, along with the pioneering work of Richard Astro (on Steinbeck and Ricketts), Robert DeMott (on Steinbeck’s reading and journal-writing), and Susan Shillinglaw (on Carol Henning and her marriage to John Steinbeck). By 2016, when Souder started his research on Steinbeck’s life, Steinbeck’s widow, sons, and sisters were gone. This was a lucky break for someone who came to biography from the newsroom, where the truth is everything, and from writing critically acclaimed lives of two Americans—Carson and Audubon—who achieved greatness in fields where truth always trumps fiction.

A Bible reader since Sunday school in Salinas, Steinbeck was attracted to the author of the fourth gospel for literary reasons. Like a good novelist, St. John balances description with dialogue in his gospel, and he starts with an idea about his subject—Jesus is Christ—that guides the narrative, coloring its language and guiding the selection of events to prove its point. Compelled by what Souder characterizes as a pathological urge for privacy, Steinbeck would have preferred the anonymity of the biblical John, whose origin and identity are unknown. John’s alternate version of Jesus’s birth, ministry, and death appealed to Steinbeck; when he was 60 and world-famous, John’s gospel inspired the language of his 1962 Nobel Prize acceptance speech, just as it did the title of the spurious pamphlet about Steinbeck’s righteous wrath at the age 18, published by a friend when Steinbeck was under attack for writing social-protest fiction in 1939.

It’s unclear that St. John read Mark or the others before writing his own gospel. But it’s certain he was writing for a different audience—a contemporary audience with different concerns—just as William Souder has done in writing the life of Steinbeck for a new generation of readers unfamiliar with Benson and unlikely to pick up The True Adventures of John Steinbeck, Writer. We still revere Mark even if, like Steinbeck, we prefer John’s prose style and plot line. If early reviews of Mad at the World are predictive, Souder’s life won’t replace Benson’s on the shelf of essential books about Steinbeck. But Benson will have to move over, as he modestly predicted in 1988, in Looking for Steinbeck’s Ghost: “I had to force myself to realize that there would be many biographies of John Steinbeck and that my work would ultimately be only part of a process. There would be biographers after me who would use what I had discovered, add material of their own, and, indeed, find mistakes or omissions in my account, and they would come up with different, perhaps even more perceptive and valid, accounts of the life and work than mine.”

Photograph of William Souder, with Sasha, by Liz Souder.

John Steinbeck’s Anglo-Americanism Explained

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In 1853, the chief book critic for The Spectator wrote an unfavorable review of Charles Dickens’s novel Bleak House that reflected the high-minded tone of the weekly magazine, founded in 1828 by the Scottish reformer Robert Stephen Rintoul. An admirer of Addison and Steele who also believed that publishers should be editors, Rintoul sold The Spectator in 1858 to a pair of American investors with less interest in Augustan style than in preserving Anglo-American relations in the run-up to our civil war. During Steinbeck’s lifetime, The Spectator opposed capital punishment, supported decriminalizing homosexuality, and criticized American involvement in Vietnam, providing a semi-safe perch for literary- and libertarian-minded Tories like Boris Johnson, who became its editor in 1999. The history of the magazine’s “special relationship” with Steinbeck’s America is helpful when reading the November 28, 2020 review of William Souder’s life of John Steinbeck—“No writer was better suited to chronicle the Depression than John Steinbeck”—by the current book critic, Scott Bradfield. A novelist-essayist and California native, Bradfield lives in London, where John Steinbeck spent time in 1943 observing their war without meeting George Orwell, “the British writer he most resembles.” Like Orwell, “John Steinbeck didn’t believe in God—but he didn’t believe much in humanity either.” Like Orwell, “he never stopped sending himself on expeditions to better understand the world he wrote about.” By providing “a narratively energetic look at a man who suffered many of the same weaknesses as his characters — for booze, benzedrine, depression and bad marriages,” Mad at the World shows how Steinbeck’s depression and Depression became a form of continuity, motivating his work and connecting him with the world. Like Orwell’s black lung, Churchill’s Black Dog, or the spirit of Anglo-American solidarity enabled and enshrined by The Spectator, Steinbeck’s depression was more than a metaphor.

mad-at-the-worldMad at the World: A Life of John Steinbeck was released by W.W. Norton on October 13, 2020.

 

Praise for Mad at the World from the Boston Globe and the New York Times: Reviews

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Major newspaper reviews of Mad at the World, released by W.W. Norton and Company this week, continued the process of recalibrating public perception of the life of John Steinbeck begun by William Souder in his long-awaited biography of a writer who cared more about the public, and principle, than the critics. “John Steinbeck, Bard of the American Worker,” the October 6 New York Times review by Brenda Wineapple, praised Souder’s candid but admiring portrait of a sometimes unsympathetic artist whose anger proved prophetic. “Yet to the reader,” added Wineapple, “Steinbeck seems less angry than shy, driven and occasionally cruel—an insecure, talented and largely uninteresting man who blunted those insecurities by writing.” “Reconsidering John Steinbeck in ‘Mad at the World’”—the October 9 Boston Globe review by Wendy Smith—praised the “appreciative yet clear-eyed assessment of Steinbeck” by a seasoned biographer who “argues persuasively that the writer’s politics consisted primarily of a hatred for bullies.” “Of Souder and Steinbeck,” the October 10 Twin Cities Pioneer Press profile of Souder—a principled Minnesotan with deep roots in prairie populism—further complimented Souder, and this website, by quoting Donald Coers’s review of Mad at the World at SteinbeckNow.com.

Zoom into Monterey Library’s “Cannery Row Days” Party

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William Souder, John Steinbeck Biographer

susan-shillinglaw-john-steinbeckThe author of Mad at the World: A Life of John Steinbeck (William Souder, above) joins an all-star speaker lineup for the Monterey Library’s 75th anniversary publication party for Cannery Row, the “poisoned cream puff” of a novel resented by locals when it appeared but revered by readers ever since for its humorous depiction of human society—high and low—along Monterey’s historic waterfront. The six-week-long celebration kicked off on September 16 with a Zoom webinar led by veteran Steinbeck scholars Robert DeMott and Susan Shillinglaw (in photo left) and by Gerry Low-Sabado, a fifth generation Monterey native and well-known Chinese-American community preservationist. The six-week-long celebration includes lectures, films, and special events and ends on November 7 with public readings, virtual tours of Cannery Row, Monterey Bay Aquarium, and Ed Ricketts’s Pacific Biological Laboratories—the latter led by Shillinglaw and Mike Guardino of the Cannery Row Foundation—and a panel discussion of “Why We Read Cannery Row in 2020” that includes Souder; Donald Kohrs, librarian and archivist of the nearby Hopkins Marine Station; and Katie Rodgers, the pioneering editor of Ricketts’s letters, Renaissance Man of Cannery Row, and of Breaking Through: Essays, Journals, and Travelogues of Edward F. Ricketts. Registration for California’s “Cannery Row Days: A Novel Celebration” is free and open to the public (thanks to Zoom) wherever in the world COVID-19 days may have you cornered. Sessions in the series will be recorded and available for viewing at the Monterey Library website.

The Truth Behind Travels with Charley: “It’s More Like a Painting” Than a Snapshot

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Did John Steinbeck foreshadow the genre-bending literary movements now known as New Journalism and creative nonfiction when he wrote Travels with Charley, his semi-fictional account of the road trip he and his dog Charley took “In Search of America” in the fall of 1960? Published in 1962 as a book of travel, Steinbeck’s carefully crafted narrative resonated with mid-century readers who may or may not have felt differently if they had known Steinbeck was manipulating chronology and making up characters and conversations, like a novelist, to move his audience and fit his message.

When I first read Travels with Charley I had my doubts about several episodes in the book.

When I first read Travels with Charley, half a century after it was written, I had my doubts about several episodes in the book—encounters with Sunday preachers, Shakespearean actors, straight fathers and gay sons, Southerners with neatly divided views on race—that seemed uncharacteristically wooden for Steinbeck, too conveniently timed and too clearly contrived to prove the author’s point about the moral condition of America at the tail end of the Eisenhower era. By this time I was a frequent user of Jackson Benson’s magisterial biography, The Adventures of John Steinbeck, Writer, but I hadn’t read Bill Steigerwald’s exposé, Dogging Steinbeck, and I didn’t become concerned with the choices Steinbeck made in Travels with Charley until I started my own research into the choices he confronted when he undertook the subject of religion in his writing.

Having failed to find the John Knox church in Vermont that Steinbeck says he attended, I turned for help to Dogging Steinbeck.

In 2014, having failed to find the John Knox church in Vermont that Steinbeck says he attended in Travels with Charley, I turned for help to Dogging Steinbeck and learned that, like other scenes, the churchgoing episode with the fire-and-brimstone preacher was a likely fabrication designed to further the persona and purpose Steinbeck set out to advance in his book. Steigerwald, a veteran Pittsburgh journalist, had retraced Steinbeck’s 10,000-mile road trip as faithfully as possible in 2010 for an online newspaper series and discovered proof that Travels with Charley was heavily fictionalized. Though the New York Times praised Steigerwald on its editorial page for blowing the literary whistle on Steinbeck’s iconic road book, he caught grief from scholars and fans alike when Dogging Steinbeck came out in 2012. But as the journalist and author William Souder notes in Mad at the World, the new life of Steinbeck scheduled for publication in October, “Steigerwald could be forgiven for applying the rules of journalism to a work that purported to be journalism. First among those rules is that facts matter.”

Recently I caught grief of my own from a conscientious reader for appropriating the term creative nonfiction in a post about the sequel, Chasing Steinbeck’s Ghost.

Recently I caught grief of my own from a conscientious reader for appropriating the term creative nonfiction in a post about Steigerwald’s new e-book sequel, Chasing Steinbeck’s Ghost. I turned to Steigerwald and Souder for their advice on the subject, and both replied.

Bill Souder and Bill Steigerwald on a Sensitive Subject

Explained Souder, a literary expert whose 2004 biography of John James Audubon was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize: “The term ‘creative nonfiction’ has been muddied up in recent years, mainly, I think, by memoirists. But being the old school stick-in-the-mud that I am, I prefer the original definition: Creative nonfiction = The truth, well told. By that light, ‘creative’ does not nullify ‘nonfiction.’ It’s not a license to invent.

Creative nonfiction has roots in the New Journalism of the 1960s and 1970s.

“Creative nonfiction has roots in the New Journalism of the 1960s and 1970s, when writers like Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion, Truman Capote, Hunter Thompson, Norman Mailer, et al made their reporting more dynamic and engaging by using the narrative and descriptive techniques of fiction writing . . . including, in many cases, becoming their own first-person narrators. But they didn’t make up what happened. They only made it more interesting. One of the archetypes of the genre is Capote’s In Cold Blood, a true story that reads like a thriller.

Travels with Charley is an inventive, incisive essay on America that, because Steinbeck made some of it up, can’t really be called a snapshot.

“I don’t think your readers will mind the term as you deploy it here, but if it were my call I’d use something different. Travels with Charley is an inventive, incisive essay on America that, because Steinbeck made some of it up, can’t really be called a snapshot. It’s more like a painting.”

I agree about creative fiction being ‘truth, well told.’ It’s really how I used to think of newspaper/magazine journalism.

Adds Steigerwald, a contrarian reporter with a libertarian perspective on Steinbeck’s politics: “I agree about creative nonfiction being ‘truth, well told.’ It’s really what I used to think was the purpose of newspaper/magazine journalism—presenting/deploying important or interesting facts in an entertaining, informative, fair-and-balanced narrative way without distorting the truth. The difficulty is/was that too many newspaper proles in my era—at the Los Angeles Times and two Pittsburgh dailies from 1977 to 2009—were better at gathering facts than presenting them in an interesting way on paper. Or the writers/reporters were too politically or culturally biased, deliberately or without even knowing it, to be able to stick to the ‘truth’ and balance of their story while they performed their creative tricks.”

Email your idea for a post of your own about the truth or falsity of creative nonfiction. It’s a surprisingly sensitive subject.

I can’t improve on either summary, but you’re invited to try. If you’re a protective fan of Steinbeck’s writing with something to say about the foreshadowing of New Journalism in Travels with Charley, please leave a comment on this post. Or email your idea for a post of your own about the truth or falsity of creative nonfiction. It’s a surprisingly sensitive subject.

New Kindle Book Traces Steinbeck’s Steps, and Fibs, In Travels with Charley

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Chasing Steinbeck’s Ghost—a new Kindle book by the author of Dogging Steinbeck—details the actual and speculative timelines of Travels with Charley, John Steinbeck’s 1962 account of his 1960 road trip with his wife Elaine’s poodle. According to Bill Steigerwald—an investigative reporter with a journalist’s skepticism about the claims of creative nonfiction—Steinbeck fabricated characters, conversations, and events to make points while covering his tracks when facts conflicted with the purpose or the persona of his 10,000-mile odyssey “In Search of America.” After Steigerwald set out to retrace Steinbeck’s journey in 2010, he discovered that Steinbeck’s dates and places frequently failed to compute, particularly at points where Elaine flew in to rough it with her husband and had to be edited out of the story. Like Steigerwald’s Truth about Charley website, the Kindle book is written in lively, contrarian language that makes for informative and entertaining reading. Scholars and specialists who defended Steinbeck’s creative nonfiction when Dogging Steinbeck appeared are unlikely to be swayed by the sequel. Fans outside the academy will find it engaging and eye-opening—further evidence of John Steinbeck’s continued popularity with regular readers, and of the relevance of Travels with Charley to issues of fake news and America’s unresolved search for itself.

Decision to Close Steinbeck House Bad News for Salinas

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In a July 24, 2020 San Jose Mercury News report that was picked up by wire services, plans were announced by the Steinbeck House in Salinas, California, to cease restaurant and catering operations indefinitely due to COVID-19. John Steinbeck was born in the handsome Queen Anne Victorian on Central Avenue near downtown Salinas in 1902; 70 years later a group of Salinas citizens created a nonprofit organization to purchase and preserve the home as an educational enterprise, supported by earned revenue from the restaurant and catering service run by volunteers on the first floor. Open five days a week to diners, many of them visitors from other states and countries, the restaurant quickly became a point of local pride, providing fine food at popular prices and feeding traffic to other local venues, including the National Steinbeck Center on Main Street. Says Dale Bartoletti—the retired Salinas educator and long-time Steinbeck House docent who has hands-on experience with the 122-year-old building—the decision to shutter the restaurant indefinitely was difficult but inevitable. “We donated several hundred dollars worth of food to a local church that provides daily meals to the homeless. Since then, we’ve served take-out dinner three nights a week and bought enough to see us through August 7, which will be our last Friday Night Dinner,” a popular feature of life in John Steinbeck’s home town before COVID-19 made dining out dangerous.