Identity politics aside, quoting John Steinbeck out of context is an act of cultural appropriation calling for correction when the interest being served is one Steinbeck criticized in his writing. Ballantine Ale benefited from his endorsement in this 1953 advertisement, true, but the author of The Grapes of Wrath distrusted big business and condemned consumerism in Travels with Charley and The Winter of Our Discontent. “If I wanted to destroy a nation,” he confided to Adlai Stevenson in 1959, “I would give it too much and I would have it on its knees, miserable, greedy and sick.” Forbes magazine had been defending corporate power and prestige for decades when Steinbeck wrote his letter to Stevenson, and our so-called business president began his career as a serial liar by gaming his score on the magazine’s annual wealthiest-list in the 1980s. Reason enough to object to today’s cultural appropriation of John Steinbeck’s advice to budding writers by the expert who posted “How to Use Targeted Content Marketing to Gain More Customers” at the magazine’s online edition for budding entrepreneurs: “Remember that great outreach is an act of storytelling. As author John Steinbeck wrote, “Forget your generalized audience. In the first place, the nameless, faceless audience will scare you to death and in the second place, unlike the theater, it doesn’t exist. In writing, your audience is one single reader.” If you wanted to destroy a nation in 2018, having Donald Trump for president and Forbes magazine for literary light would be a sobering way to start.

Bedside manner works both ways. When John Steinbeck was hospitalized halfway through 1968, his doctor Denton Cox wrote on his chart, “The patient has sent me to Ecclesiastes,” a biblical book with the stoical view that the ultimate antidote for suffering is surrender. The physician followed the advice and Steinbeck was sent home, where he died in December. “What do I want in a doctor?” he asked in a letter he wrote to Cox at the beginning of their relationship: “Perhaps more than anything else—a friend with special knowledge.” Explaining his disbelief in “a hereafter” in clinical terms of “experience, observation and simple tissue feeling,” he went on to defend euthanasia, insisting “that the chief protagonist should have the right to judge his exit” when the time comes to let go and die. East of Eden, like Ecclesiastes, is a quotable book, and one medical news source says physicians should be more like Cox and pay attention to its message of empathy. A February 28, 2018 editorial in Medical News Report—a proprietary publication of Healthline Media UK Ltd.—quotes East of Eden to help contemporary healthcare professionals understand how empathy differs from sympathy, and why John Steinbeck continues to require medical attention, though of a different sort, today.