Recommended Books on Steinbeck & Other Famous People

Steinbeck, Snowden, and the Future of America

August 17, 2013 by William Ray Leave a Comment

Sinclair Lewis, a Nobel Prize-winning fiction writer admired by John Steinbeck for his dissection of contemporary American life, envisioned a future fascistic America in a novel published the same year J. Edgar Hoover became director of the FBI. Released in 1935, It Can’t Happen Here is a more realistic if less convincing depiction of dictatorial government than George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, published in 1949. Books from John Steinbeck about totalitarianism during this turbulent period consist of a slender play-novelette, The Moon Is Down—and it involves enemy invasion, not domestic dictatorship. But based on FBI files and recent events, I believe government surveillance on an Orwellian scale would attract Steinbeck as a subject if he were writing today. His story might start with Hoover.

Fiction Writer Question: What Would Steinbeck Say?

Also created in 1935, Hoover’s FBI left a blueprint for the kind of American police state imagined by Lewis in It Can’t Happen Here. By blending secrecy, efficiency, and independence from oversight, Hoover built a hidden system of government surveillance years before digital data mining and other tools of the NSA. Hoover’s first speech to the International Association of Chiefs of Police, delivered in 1925, reads like the mission statement for a future NSA security state: “The mighty, irresistible current of world-wide, cosmic forces, have created the necessity and impetus for the inception and growth of an organization which will serve to centralize and crystallize the efforts of those who would meet the exigencies of our changing times by a pooling of all of the wisdom and power of the guardians of civilization, the protectors of Society.”

The differences between Steinbeck and Hoover—in personality, politics, and lifestyle—have already been covered. Richard Powers’ biography, The Life of J. Edgar Hoover: Secrecy and Power, documents Hoover’s deep attachment to moralistic beliefs and dictatorial behavior. Top Secret: The FBI Files on John Steinbeck, edited by Thomas Fensch, demonstrates how easily personal conflicts became public crusades in Hoover’s FBI. If Hoover were still in charge today, Edward Snowden would be caught between deadly opposing forces with identifiably authoritarian faces. Putin or Hoover? Which would be worse for a fugitive like Snowden? Only Richard Nixon rivaled Hoover at creating fear in diissenters, and by 1974 both men had left the stage. Of their odious personality type, only Putin and North Korea’s little caesar remain as players on the international stage.

The mighty, irresistible current of world-wide, cosmic forces, have created the necessity and impetus for the inception and growth of an organization which will serve to centralize and crystallize the efforts of those who would meet the exigencies of our changing times by a pooling of all of the wisdom and power of the guardians of civilization, the protectors of Society.

As noted in Top Secret: The FBI Files on John Steinbeck, America’s foremost fiction writer blew the whistle on Hoover in a private letter to Roosevelt’s attorney general. The immediate consequences to Steinbeck were personal, but they passed. Edward Snowden exposed the NSA’s Orwellian overreach in public, on a global scale, and his consequences are ongoing. Congress is making noise, President Obama says he’ll investigate, and mainstream journalists in America persist in challenging Snowden’s character. To readers of the FBI files on John Steinbeck this all sounds too familiar. It wouldn’t surprise the fiction writer. His experience was similar.

Steinbeck would certainly fear for Snowden’s safety going forward. While he liked Russians, America’s foremost fiction writer hated Stalinism and disliked authoritarians, at home or abroad. He was passionate about democracy but thought the cold war was a political power game threatening human survival. He supported his government in periods of real war but opposed its excesses in times of uneasy peace. Like William Faulkner—another American fiction writer who exalted individual freedom—he gave a Nobel acceptance speech that’s as relevant today as it was it was it was delivered .

For the Answer, Check the FBI Files on the Author

Steinbeck’s speech in 1962 presents an individualist’s answer to authoritarians like Hoover. Steinbeck’s words in his acceptance speech constitute a plausible opening for the anti-totalitarian novel he never wrote: “Fearful and unprepared, we have assumed lordship over the life and death of the whole world of all living things. The danger and the glory and the choice rest finally in man. The test of his perfectibility is at hand.”

In the half-century since Steinbeck delivered his speech, technology and terrorism have intervened in ways that would have horrified the fiction writer. Today the consequences of poking Big Brother in the eye are more serious—and the dimensions of surveillance greater—than he could ever imagine. It required a fiction writer with George Orwell’s direct experience in colonial law enforcement to envision a system of state surveillance anything like today’s NSA. Orwell was supervising an extensive system of domestic surveillance in the British colony of Burma in 1924, the year Hoover became acting director of investigation for the U.S. Department of Justice.

An article in a recent issue of Adbusters magazine speculates that the Orwellian NSA data mining program disclosed by Edward Snowden is only the tip of an iceberg—one that threatens to sink democracy as definitively as the ghastly surveillance system imagined in Nineteen Eighty-Four. Employing the same pastoral image used by Orwell and Steinbeck to portray evil despoiling innocence in fiction, the magazine warns Americans to wake up before escapist slumber becomes actual, existential hell: “America has truly become a nation of sheep . . . . Trust the shepherd. He’ll lead us to pasture.” Overstatement? Only if you think nightmares never come true. If that’s a challenge, try this for size:

Joseph Stalin, the Soviet dictator denounced by John Steinbeck, was an ex-church seminarian who murdered millions of his people. Vladimir Putin, Snowden’s ominous host, formerly ran the KGB, the bloody successor to Stalin’s secret police. Steinbeck’s political hero Roosevelt cooperated with Stalin during World War II. Barack Obama, Snowden’s chief critic and a progressive like Roosevelt, visibly dislikes Putin—but plans to attend Russia’s G-20 conference anyway. Where all this is going is anybody’s guess. John Steinbeck became a hero for exposing economic inequality and injustice in his day. Edward Snowden may become a martyr for revealing massive surveillance in ours. However uncertain the outcome, the connections are clear. Steinbeck’s story suggests history will take Snowden’s side.

William Ray, the editor of five books and former editorial director at New Wedding Planet, is the author of articles on John Steinbeck and the founder of SteinbeckNow.com.

Why John Steinbeck, Novel Writer, Still Rocks

August 17, 2013 by James Ci Leave a Comment

The famous writers of romantic novels still believe in love at first sight. As a visual artist, I have a different perspective from the authors of books of like these. It usually takes at least a second date for me to fall in love with anything, even a novel writer. John Steinbeck was no exception. Three years ago I encountered him for the first time since high school on the shelf of a Goodwill store near my college campus. There it was, a dog-eared copy of East of Eden, waiting for me among castoffs from the authors of books about dating, dieting, and how to use a computer. I remembered reading the novel writer back in high school, so I thought I’d reintroduce myself to the author whose distinctive face presents little challenge for artists who like to paint the famous writers in their particular line of work. I prefer to paint from life, as my self-portrait shown here shows. That’s probably why I fell in love with East of Eden.

The famous writers of autobiographical works like East of Eden really open themselves up for inspection. Even a novel writer like Steinbeck, who disliked public exposure, seems to invite readers into his soul when he writes about his own life. Authors of books like Steinbeck’s The Pearl, the entry point into Steinbeck Land for middle school students, seem like easy enough reading when you’re only 14. Of Mice and Men, where the novel writer is less obvious, was a bit harder to understand when I read it in senior high. My reaction to East of Eden in my twenties was a much better experience. The current college crowd favors Fitzgerald and Palahniuk, authors of books worth reading I agree, but the famous writers of Fight Club and The Great Gatsby just don’t have Steinbeck’s depth. As a novel writer for unconventional readers like me, John Steinbeck still rocks where other authors just roll.

East of Eden grabbed me by the hair and shook me from page one. The story of Adam Trask is true fiction—specific to a man who never existed in history, yet symbolic of every sensitive person’s journey through the realities of life. Steinbeck’s unflinching portrayal of Adam’s loneliness and pain is, to me, a portrait of the artist as young man who grows old before my eyes. Adam may not be a hero in the classical sense, but he comes as close as a real human being can. Other authors of books about loss and sacrifice like Adam’s just aren’t as convincing. Real people struggle with daily failure, and Adam fails repeatedly, up until his final utterance—“timshel”—to his surviving son Caleb. After becoming so attached to East of Eden, I picked other books by the novel writer I’d now learned to love. To a God Unknown is probably my favorite, displacing placing Dostoyevsky’s The Devils as an existential portrayal of man at his most spiritual core. Joseph Wayne dies on a rock. Dostoyevsky’s Devils just roll.

Filed Under: Featured, Your Life Tagged With: Book Reviews

The Literary Music of The Grapes of Wrath

August 17, 2013 by James Welch 1 Comment

As I was writing my book about the life of Richard Purvis—a California contemporary of John Steinbeck who composed literary music for the organ with a colorful, cinematic character—I was reminded how hard the task faced by writers of books really is. It certainly was for Steinbeck, one of my favorite writers of books on any subject. Steinbeck’s language has always sounded like literary music to my ears, but I wasn’t sure why that was before reading about the background of The Grapes of Wrath. I knew Steinbeck wrote the novel in Los Gatos, not far from Palo Alto, where I live. Recently I learned that he listened to Bach’s Art of the Fugue as he wrote. No wonder the literary music of Steinbeck’s masterpiece conveys such convincing counterpoint. He had Bach’s masterpiece in his head as he was wove the literary music of the Joads, California, and Depression-era America into his great verbal fugue.

As a concert organist, I’m used to practicing my art long hours each day. Most writers of books do as well, but Steinbeck wrote The Grapes of Wrath at an incredible pace. Two- to three-thousand words at a sitting is extraordinary, a fact I came to appreciate when I was writing my biography of Purvis. I couldn’t help speculating that certain subjects of Purvis’s literary music, particularly his “Night in Monterey” for organ, would have appealed to the author of The Grapes of Wrath. After all, the literary music of Julia Ward Howe’s “Battle Hymn of the Republic” inspired Steinbeck’s title and was reproduced on the endpapers when the book was published. How many other writers of books ever paid similar homage to a specific piece of music?

I read about how Steinbeck liked listening to Bach in Working Days, the collection of daily journal entries Steinbeck made to warm up before resuming work on The Grapes of Wrath. It occurred to me that, for writers of books, this process is like organists running through scales and arpeggios at the piano before beginning daily organ practice. To make music on the organ—or create literary music at a desk—requires limberness, dexterity, and well-developed skill. So I wasn’t surprised to hear from the organist at Steinbeck’s Episcopal church in Salinas that the author of The Grapes of Wrath took piano lessons as a boy and sang in the children’s choir. Though he attended Stanford University 50 years before I did, Steinbeck and I have much in common. We both like science, enjoy travel, and love Bach and the beach. We’re both from California, a state that has produced distinctive literary music, from Richard Purvis to the Beach Boys, over the years. Other writers of books hailed from sunny California, but for me, none was a literary music maker quite like the author of The Grapes of Wrath.

Filed Under: Featured, Steinbeck's Music Tagged With: Musicians

John Steinbeck Publication, Steinbeck Website Reboot

August 16, 2013 by Administrative Team 3 Comments

The John Steinbeck publication Steinbeck Review and the Steinbeck website you’re viewing have a new look and new content. Steinbeck Review is now published by The Pennsylvania State University Press in cooperation with the Martha Heasley Cox Center for Steinbeck Studies at San Jose State University. The Spring 2013 issue, edited by Barbara A. Heavilin and Mary M. Brown, features articles about The Wayward Bus, the metaphor of barbed wire in literature, the influence of UCLA philosopher John Elof Boodin on Steinbeck, the 1942 war treatise by Steinbeck’s friend Ed Ricketts, Steinbeck’s Stanford writing teachers Margery Bailey and Edith Mirrielees, the author’s wife Carol Henning, and the banning and celebration of Steinbeck’s works around the world. Effective immediately, searches for johnsteinbeckepiscopalian.org will take viewers to SteinbeckNow.com, a site designed to appeal to readers looking for content relevant to their lives.