Up Late Reading Birds of America, a book of “proems” by Robert DeMott, is the latest link connecting John Steinbeck scholars with the life and times of John James Aubudon, the pioneering naturalist and painter whose Birds of America (1827) remains a classic of American ornithology and art history. The author of seminal studies including Working Days: The Journals of The Grapes of Wrath (1990) and Steinbeck’s Typewriter: Essays on His Art (1996), DeMott is the Edwin and Ruth Kennedy Distinguished Professor Emeritus of American Literature at Ohio University, where he taught from 1969 to 2003. Under a Wild Sky: John James Audubon and the Making of The Birds of America (2004), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, was the first biography of a major figure written by William Souder, the journalist whose Mad at the World: A Life of John Steinbeck is scheduled for publication by W.W. Norton in October.

Listen as Bob DeMott reads “proetry” from Birds of America:

The Grapes of Wrath played a part in the monstrous promotional campaign that helped American Dirt become one of this year’s biggest best-sellers.

But John Steinbeck’s classic is no longer part of the controversy that has befallen Jeanine Cummins’s novel about a Mexican mother and her son who illegally cross the border into the United States. American Dirt was exuberantly plugged in January by Oprah Winfrey for her book club and praised by a score of book reviewers as heart-poundingly suspenseful, unforgettable, important and timely, realistic, moving, a future classic, etc. etc. etc. Stephen King and John Grisham raved about it in their blurbs, and a line on the original book cover touted it as a modern-day version of The Grapes of Wrath.

Then, after American Dirt sold upwards of 200,000 copies, it was slammed by a wave of criticism for its political incorrectness and its stereotypical portrayal of Latinos. Oprah took serious heat for plugging the novel. The publisher, Macmillan-owned Flatiron Books, apologized for the excessive promotional campaign and removed the Grapes of Wrath reference from the cover. Citing “specific threats to booksellers and the author,” Flatiron chose to cancel Cummins’s book tour. Laura Miller’s piece on the controversy at Slate sums up the problem pretty well, posing the question “Will the American Dirt Fiasco Change American Publishing?”

Note to Author: “Pendeja, You Ain’t Steinbeck”

A reductive version of the complaints about American Dirt claims that the novel’s detractors believe a white woman shouldn’t write about the experiences of Latino migrants. In truth, nearly all of the considered criticism of the novel points out either inaccuracies or stereotypes which, according to “Pendeja, You Ain’t Steinbeck”—Myriam Gurba’s widely shared review at Tropics of Meta—betray Cummins’s lack of knowledge about her subject matter and her attempt to render a complex situation and culture into “trauma porn” palatable to an American readership envisioned as primarily white. Slate says that American Dirt‘s publisher went wrong by enthusiastically hawking a commercial novel as if it made “a contribution to a vital understanding” of the immigration issue when in fact the migrant experience was merely used “as a backdrop for an entertaining suspense story.”

In other words, when it comes to promoting a serious political message or pushing for sociopolitical change, The Grapes of Wrath it ain’t.

The controversy over American Dirt isn’t over yet. Starting tonight at midnight, Apple TV+ will live-stream a discussion taped last month that features Oprah, Cummins, and three prominent critics of the novel. The show, as The Hollywood Reporter puts it, will be a “debate about the marginalization of Latino voices, the lack of diversity in publishing, and the question of who is best suited to tell a given story.”

Image courtesy Slate magazine.

The spirit of John Steinbeck haunts the world of Mark Arax, the award-winning author and journalist from Fresno, California whose latest work—The Dreamt Land: Chasing Water and Dust Across California—continues the investigation of land abuse and human tragedy in California’s Central Valley that began with The King of California: J.G. Boswell and the Making of a Secret American Empire (2003) and remains, like Steinbeck’s style of dudgeon in The Grapes of Wrath, both detached and intensely personal. A restless son of Fresno’s substantial Armenian community, Arax first reported on Central Valley life for the Los Angeles Times while pursuing the people behind his father’s 1972 murder in the 1996 memoir, In My Father’s Name, that made Fresno feel more like Blue Velvet, the 1986 movie by David Lynch, than The Human Comedy, the 1943 novel by Steinbeck’s contemporary and the Arax family’s neighbor William Saroyan. Like The King of California (co-authored with Times colleague Rick Wartzman), Arax’s third book—West of the West: Dreamers, Builders, and Killers in the Golden State (2009)—followed the founding crimes of overbuilding, exploitation, and genocide from their roots in Gold Rush greed to the case of “The Last Okie in Lamont,” the Central Valley town that stimulated Steinbeck’s spleen in The Grapes of Wrath. A splendid sequel to West of the West, The Dreamt Land is Arax’s longest book to date, and—for fans of Steinbeck’s ghost—his finest.

If a photo had been taken of Ernest Hemingway and John Steinbeck when they met for the first and only time, at Tim Costello’s restaurant in New York in 1944, Michael Katakis would know, and he would have shared it with us in the visual biography that puts a fresh face on an old legend: Ernest Hemingway: Artifacts from a Life, a life story in pictures, with connecting word tissue, drawn from the Hemingway collection at the Kennedy Library, edited with an introduction by Michael, who has served as the executor of Hemingway’s literary estate since 1999. A writer and documentary photographer, he manages to divide his time productively between Paris, Hemingway’s city, and Steinbeck’s Carmel, California, a distance that symbolizes the divide experienced by the two writers in the 1920s, and the difference in attitude each took toward other writers in the decades that followed. Steinbeck, more sympathetic and less assertive, admired Hemingway and showed respect. That Hemingway behaved otherwise is apparent in the account of the 1944 meeting written in 1989 by Jackson Benson, author of the 1984 best-seller, The True Adventures of John Steinbeck, Writer. The achievement of Ernest Hemingway: Artifacts from a Life in using archival material to reframe and restore Hemingway’s reputation in 2018 raises another issue regarding Steinbeck. Libraries at various locations hold an abundance of artifacts—family photographs, private correspondence, personal memorabilia—from Steinbeck’s life. Fifty years after his death, are his executors, editors, and heirs too distant, or too divided, to do the same thing for him?

Mexico was a magnet for John Steinbeck, a frequent visitor and sympathetic observer who explored the threats posed by assumptions he questioned to a culture he admired in fiction (The Pearl), film (The Forgotten Village), and history (the writer’s superbly researched introduction to Viva Zapata!). Fresh evidence that the feeling was mutual can be found in Steinbeck y Mexico: Una Mirada Cinematografica en la Era de la Hegemonia Norteamericana by Adela Pineda, Associate Professor of Spanish at Boston University and Director of Latin American Studies Program at Boston University’s Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies. “Steinbeck’s engagement with the history and the cinematic archive of revolutionary Mexico took place in an embattled field of political and cultural activity on both sides of the Río Grande, hence it could not be but complex and contradictory,” explains Pineda, winner of the Malcolm Lowry Fine Arts Literary Essay Award from the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes for Las Travesías de John Steinbeck Por México, El Cine y Las Vicisitudes Del Progreso. Pineda’s archival research revealed “the many facets of Steinbeck as a novelist, scriptwriter, film collaborator, and public intellectual”; writing a book about “Steinbeck going global from the vantage point of Mexico” is a fitting tribute to an admiring author whose research into a vanishing way of life became material for enduring art.