Road to Recovery for America and Americans Runs Through Alabama

June 19, 2018 by Leave a Comment

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John Steinbeck’s expression of ambivalence about America and Americans in Travels with Charley proved to be prophetic. In the presidential campaign of 1968, the year Steinbeck died, Richard Nixon co-opted Alabama’s segregationist governor, George Wallace—Nixon’s rival for the Southern white vote—and embraced the anger exemplified by the screaming mothers blocking the path of African American girls on the way to school in Steinbeck’s story. Forging Nixon’s path to the White House through the heart of the Confederacy paved the way for Donald Trump, Wallace and Nixon’s political heir, in 2016. The spring issue of the scholarly journal Steinbeck Review suggests that the road to recovery from Trump began in 2017 with the defeat of Trump’s candidate Roy Moore by Democrat Doug Jones in Alabama, and that John Steinbeck first diagnosed the condition of America and Americans in his 1938 novella-play Of Mice and Men.

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Driving Highway 31 Through George Wallace’s Alabama

Barbara Heavilin, the journal’s editor in chief, lives in northern Alabama and wrote a column recounting the race to replace Jeff Sessions, Donald Trump’s masochistic Mini-Me, as the junior U.S. Senator from the state. Moore, a Bible-spouting jurist, has an injudicious past, and opponents calling themselves Highway 31 organized money and volunteers around Jones, the federal attorney who prosecuted perpetrators of the Birmingham church bombing that killed four black girls less than a year after Travels with Charley was published. “They chose a good title for themselves, for Highway 31 is the old North-South route through the state before the advent of U.S. 65,” Heavilin wrote. “It winds through lovely little Gardendale with its neat rows of crepe myrtles down the center of the median, going through the middle of town, where I live and where the local high school is in pitted battle in the courts, demanding independence from Jefferson County [because it] would bring about a return to a type of segregation.”

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Scaling the “Wall of Understanding” in Of Mice and Men

The editor of Steinbeck Review knew her readers would enjoy the Steinbeck symbolism in her true-life story, which has the advantage over John Steinbeck’s fiction of featuring a known outcome with a happy ending. As shown by the ambiguous conclusions of In Dubious Battle and The Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck was dubious about the outcome of political battles in his own day. Doug Jones may have reminded Alabama voters of Atticus Finch, the Alabama lawyer who defends the black man in Harper Lee’s 1960 novel, but heroes and happy endings are sparse in Steinbeck’s fiction, and Of Mice and Men is typical. To the eternal edification of readers with inquiring minds and open hearts, it dramatizes the failings of America—and Americans victimized by poverty, disability, racism, ageism, and misogyny—against the backdrop of fascism, fake science, and the breakdown of world order. Steinbeck described this context as the “wall of understanding,” and the phrase fits perfectly.

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John Steinbeck’s Antidote for Donald Trump’s Toxicity

Conceived with a wall of understanding that encompassed cold war, public corruption, environmental degradation, and anti-immigrant hysteria, the books about America written by John Steinbeck in the 1960s—The Winter of Our Discontent, Travels with Charley, America and Americans—completed the catalog of outrage, abdication, and abuse personified by the cast of characters who animate Of Mice and Men. Our wall of understanding now includes real walls built to bar Mexicans, Canadians, and America’s European allies, adding urgency to our reading of Steinbeck, who saw a dictator when he looked at demagogues like Huey Long during the Depression and despaired when Richard Nixon won in 1968. Donald was around and dodging the draft at the time, but if Steinbeck imagined a disaster like Trump in America’s future before he died he didn’t say so. Instead, he concentrated on symptoms of decline and the curative power of empathy for America and Americans in any age. As Barbara Heavilin reminds us in her encouraging editorial, the road to recovery starts with understanding and runs through Alabama.

We are suspending weekly posts on a temporary basis to pursue a print project requiring our time and attention. We will continue to answer messages, curate comments, and post news of conferences, publications, and opportunities when brought to our attention. Guest-author submissions will be considered in the order they are received once we resume the weekly schedule maintained since SteinbeckNow.com began five years ago. Thank you for your understanding and cooperation.—Ed.

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Elaine Brown Was Singing John Steinbeck’s Song

March 16, 2018 by 19 Comments

Image of Marian Anderson and Elaine Brown with Singing City

If you haven’t heard of Elaine Brown and Singing City, chances are you will beyond this article. Their message of justice and equality is more urgent than ever, and if Brown—not to be confused with Elaine Brown of the Black Panthers, who was also musically inclined—and John Steinbeck never met in the 1940s or 50s, they should have. Both believed in the rights of the individual and the power of art to break down racial and religious barriers. Steinbeck—a lover of music in many forms—made his argument with words. Brown—a music professor at Temple University who formed the interfaith, mixed-race choral group called Singing City in 1948—made hers in song.

If Elaine Brown and John Steinbeck never met, they should have. Both believed in the rights of the individual and the power of art.

Brown and her singers were fearless, touring the Middle East and the Deep South in the waning era of Jim Crow. If a Southern official insisted Singing City’s artists of color had to stay in a “colored” hotel, the white singers would stay there, too. The great African American contralto Marian Anderson (in photo with Brown and Singing City) honored Brown for her work in promoting “diversity and understanding among all people of religious, economic and racial differences.” Other voices joined the chorus of praise as Singing City broke barriers and set a new standard for music in the service of the social vision Steinbeck proclaimed in his writing.

If a Southern official insisted Singing City’s artists of color had to stay in a ‘colored’ hotel, the white singers would stay there, too.

The lives of Marian Anderson and Elaine Brown were examined in a film on Anderson and a talk on Brown presented under the title of “Marian Anderson and Elaine Brown—Breaking Barriers Through Song” at a meeting of the Monterey Peace and Justice Center in Seaside, California on March 11. The PowerPoint presentation on Elaine Brown was given by Lisa Ledin (pronounced Ledeen), Brown’s niece and a public radio voice who has long been involved in civil rights issues, especially in the music world. “My Aunt Elaine’s favorite quote was, ‘Music’s a great glue. It holds us all together,’” said Ledin, who produced two black history radio documentaries that resulted in the book Nelson Burton, My Life in Jazz.

The lives of Marian Anderson and Elaine Brown were examined at a meeting of the Monterey Peace and Justice Center on March 11.

Elaine Brown died in 1997 at the age of 87, having retired from leading Singing City a decade earlier. She knew Martin Luther King, Sidney Poitier, Robert Kennedy, and the legendary Philadelphia Orchestra conductor Eugene Ormandy, and she was influenced by the music educator Herbert Haslam, the composition teacher Nadia Boulanger, and William Sloan Coffin Jr., the CIA case officer-turned-peace-activist who inspired the Doonesbury character Reverend Scott Sloane. Brown subscribed to some of Coffin’s beliefs and lived by two of his most memorable maxims: “I love the recklessness of faith—first you leap and then you grow wings,” and “The world is too dangerous for anything but truth and too small for anything but love.”

Brown also knew Martin Luther King, Sidney Poitier, Robert Kennedy, and the legendary Philadelphia Orchestra conductor Eugene Ormandy.

Boulanger’s observation on the power of music (“Nothing is better than music; when it takes us out of time, it has done more for us than we have the right to hope for: it has broadened the limits of our sorrowful life, it has lit up the sweetness of our hours of happiness by effacing the pettinesses that diminish us, bringing us back pure and new to what was, what will be, what music has created for us”) fitted Brown perfectly. The recent publication of Lighting a Candle—The Writings and Wisdom of Elaine Brown serves as a reminder that Brown was quotable, too:  “Feel—not just talk. See—not just look. Listen—not just hear. Possess—not just profess.” Passion for justice and music sustained Brown when her husband Hugh was murdered in a Philadelphia parking lot and their daughter died of cancer, and her legacy endures. Singing City has survived and flourished, fielding mixed-race and children’s choral groups in the spirit of its founder.

Lisa Ledin Finds Inspiration in Her Famous Aunt

Image of Lisa Ledin at Monterey Peace Center

Lisa Ledin (photo right) grew up in Marin County, California and on the Monterey Peninsula, where her parents moved when she was 14. She earned a bachelor’s degree in journalism at UC Berkeley and worked at radio station KSNO in Aspen before taking the job that she says gave her true satisfaction: announcing and broadcasting classical and black music at WGUC in Cincinnati. Her father died, and when her mother Verna was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease she returned to the Monterey Peninsula to become a caregiver. Like Elaine, Verna was musical. Lisa remembers that although afflicted with dementia, her mother could still sit at the piano and play beautifully. When the two sisters were children, a piano teacher listened to them play and said, “She (Verna) has the talent but she (Elaine) has the discipline and focus.”

Lisa’s two older sisters died while she was caring for her mother, and when Verna passed away the tribute Lisa paid was quoted in a print publication: “With her death comes my rebirth with no regrets. What I have really learned is about my own depth and capacity to love. I’ve become more sensitive to my own mortality and to what matters in the end. Truly loving someone, being aware of beauty and keeping the senses alive helps you appreciate each breath. Some people get that from studying Zen or reading books. I learned it from taking care of my mother.” Lisa adopted a black infant named Erika and resumed her radio career, first at KBOQ in Monterey and now at the NPR affiliate KAZU, where she hosts Morning Edition on Fridays and Weekend Edition on Saturdays. Her melodious voice is a powerful presence for KAZU’s underwriting announcements, and her schedule leaves plenty of time for Erika, a high school student who is continuing the family tradition by singing and dancing.

Ledin went to school in Pacific Grove, and reading Steinbeck was her introduction to the Monterey Peninsula when she was her daughter’s age.

Ledin went to a public school in Pacific Grove, where Steinbeck did much of his writing, and reading Steinbeck was her introduction to the Monterey Peninsula when she was Erika’s age. “My way of acclimating myself to the area was by getting close to Steinbeck,” she recalls. “I read almost everything he wrote, all the novels and stories. I roamed Cannery Row and all the places he wrote about. When my parents drove on the highways and I looked out at the fields and workers, his words came to me—the true character of the region.”

“Steinbeck was a protector of each person’s humanity, like my aunt,” says Ledin. “Elaine felt that regardless of race, religion, rich or poor, laborer or professor, people can come together through music. And I feel Steinbeck believed that about literature”—adding “They were a lot alike that way, Aunt Elaine and John Steinbeck.”

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A Pilgrim’s Progress for Students of John Steinbeck

March 9, 2018 by 3 Comments

Image of Jay Parini

John Steinbeck studied Pilgrim’s Progress at his mother’s knee. Literally. John Bunyon’s allegory of sin and salvation was still family reading when Olive Steinbeck taught her pre-school son the alphabet 100 years ago and home libraries like the Steinbecks’ had books like Pilgrim’s Progress, so essential to Christian living that they were read aloud at family gatherings like the Bible. Like his father, John Steinbeck was often depressed about life, and Bunyon’s Slough of Despond colored his dark view of home town Salinas, a place of sloughs in both senses of Bunyon’s word—“swampy” and “characterized by lack of progress.” Like his mother, he had conflicting views about religion, “a curious mixture [for her, he said] of Irish fairies and an Old Testament Jehovah.” Her parents were frontier Calvinists, but she sent her son to the Episcopal church, where he stayed, nominally, until he died. He told his physician that he didn’t believe in an afterlife, but he wanted an Episcopal church funeral anyway and his fiction is full of religion gleaned from books he read in childhood—the Bible, Pilgrim’s Progress—and mined for material in books still read today. Fortunately for readers without grounding in Steinbeck’s religion, Steinbeck’s biographer Jay Parini (in photo) has provided a Pilgrim’s Progress for the post-Christian century in The Way of Jesus, a spiritual autobiography by a gifted writer that also serves as a reader’s guide to Christianity in the spirit of Steinbeck’s fiction—progressive, companionable, and inviting participation.

The Way of Jesus: A Better Way to Understand Belief

the-way-of-jesusLike John Steinbeck, Jay Parini found refuge in the Episcopal church from the fundamentalism of puritanical forebears. Like William Faulkner and Gore Vidal, authors whose lives he chronicled after writing about Steinbeck, Parini is a working novelist with a foot in the film world and—like Robert Frost, another subject—a people’s poet with a Vermonter’s view of America. He teaches creative writing at Middlebury College, and The Way of Jesus is a teaching book with all the traits of a well-taught course. A second-semester sequel to Parini’s life of Jesus with a literary approach to scripture and belief, it explores the poetry of T.S. Eliot and the aggregation of writings we call the Bible with equal agility. Designed for readers without special knowledge, its explanation of esoteric topics like Christian liturgy, Calvinist theology, and the church year—features of Steinbeck’s fiction from Tortilla Flat to The Winter of Our Discontent—is abundantly clear and courteous to newcomers. The ease and efficiency will appeal to students, and the extra equipment, including source documentation, will please their professors. Happiest of all will be fans of literature (if not religion) who love somebody else’s story when it involves them and invites action, like Steinbeck at this best.

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Library in The Public Recalls Steinbeck’s Greatest Book

February 5, 2018 by Leave a Comment

Image of 2018 Santa Barbara Film Festival opening night poster

Cain and Abel. Charles and Adam. Cal and Aron. The actor Emilio Estevez and his brother, the actor Charlie Sheen, have the kind of sibling rivalry that John Steinbeck rendered as a curse and an example in East of Eden. So it’s fitting that Emilio Estevez—the Abel in the Sheen family picture—drew inspiration from The Grapes of Wrath when he wrote and directed The Public, the socially conscious feature film in which he also performs, along with Christian Slater, Jena Malone, and Alec Baldwin, another actor with a brother who can be difficult. Set in Cincinnati and released in time for the gala opening of the Santa Barbara Film Festival last week, The Public is about a group of homeless patrons who refuse to leave the library when a cold front fills emergency shelters and makes returning to the streets a deadly proposition. An appreciative review of the movie at Edhat Santa Barbara notes that The Grapes of Wrath “figures prominently as a thematic and quotation reference” and that “the library in itself becomes a character—it disperses information, yet also is full of great works of literature that [ask] us to ponder life, morality, and meaning.” Like food and shelter, keeping the public in public library is a life-and-death matter for such book-minded observers of events as Emilio Estevez—Abel-types who view policemen beating up protestors in cities like Cincinnati as the spiritual sons of Cain-types from places like Salinas and Bakersfield, the bullies with badges who brutalized migrants living in boxes on the outskirts of town and burned The Grapes of Wrath in front of the library when John Steinbeck protested their actions in his greatest book.

 

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Steinbeck Review Invites Papers from Non-Specialists

December 18, 2017 by Leave a Comment

Image of John Steinbeck at home in Pacific Grove

The new issue of Steinbeck Review, the biannual journal focusing on John Steinbeck’s life and work, includes literary criticism, book reviews, and a change in editorial policy of interest to fans of Steinbeck’s fiction. A Penn State University Press publication, Steinbeck Review was limited in the past to literary criticism, history, and news about Steinbeck from and for teachers and scholars. Acknowledging events in Charlottesville and Alabama and online writing about Steinbeck, the editors invite contributions from non-specialists applying their understanding of Steinbeck to political developments, constitutional rights, and social justice, as well as personal essays about Steinbeck’s impact outside the classroom. Articles of literary criticism in the current issue address formal and thematic aspects of Steinbeck’s writing in To a God Unknown, Of Mice and Men, The Grapes of Wrath, and The Winter of Our Discontent. Literary history and biography are represented by a piece on Steinbeck’s screenplay for the 1944 movie Lifeboat, directed by Alfred Hitchcock, and a 2001 letter from Steinbeck’s son Thom about his father’s relationship with the portrait artist William Ward Beecher. Book reviews include a summary and opinion on Linda Wagner-Martin’s 2017 biography, John Steinbeck: A Literary Life.

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Why The Grapes of Wrath Still Matters in Oklahoma

November 28, 2017 by Leave a Comment

Image of Ma Joad from Grapes of Wrath movie

“Legislature may be working toward ‘Grapes of Wrath’ revision,” a November 16 editorial in the Enid, Oklahoma News & Eagle, used this image of Ma Joad from John Ford’s film adaptation of John Steinbeck’s novel to remind readers that Steinbeck’s angry portrayal of preventable poverty in the Dust Bowl still resonates for residents of a state where education spending cuts have forced some communities to reduce the school week to four days in a region dominated by the wants and needs of the billionaire Koch brothers. The state’s Republican governor recently vetoed the budget delivered to her desk by the anti-tax Republican legislature, which included $60 million more in cuts to health and human services, and the three-term Republican mayor of Oklahoma City has made education an issue in his campaign to succeed her. Like the author of The Grapes of Wrath, the editors in Enid employed dark irony to highlight the human cost of poor public policy, particularly when motivated by willful ignorance and corporate greed: “Perhaps the Legislature is hoping that a modern revision of the John Steinbeck classic ‘Grapes of Wrath’ will be the secret to our state’s future success. Only this time instead of impoverished Dust Bowl-era farmers moving out of state during the Great Depression, it will be school teachers and health care providers leading the exodus.”

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Donald Trump and Ajit Pai’s Plan to End Net Neutrality

November 21, 2017 by 1 Comment

Image of Ajit Pai, Donald Trump's pick for FCC chairman

Ajit Pai, the former attorney for Verizon who was appointed by Donald Trump to chair the Federal Communications Commission, recently announced that the administration’s plan to deregulate internet providers and end the policy of net neutrality are on the agenda of the next FCC meeting. Pai, a Republican lawyer-lobbyist of Indian heritage who has long advocated the idea, is likely to have his way when the board meets on December 14. Deregulation is a Republican mantra, and Republicans are a majority on the five-person commission, created in 1934 to insure fairness in interstate communications through regulations such as net neutrality, which prohibits internet carriers from making accessibility to some websites faster than others.

Net neutrality prohibits internet carriers from making accessibility to some websites faster than others.

If you’ve ever exceeded the monthly minutes on your iPhone, you already know what ending net neutrality will mean when you sit down at your computer and type SteinbeckNow.com or CommonCause.org into the search box. Once Verizon and other internet providers get the go-ahead to reserve the digital fast lane for commercial sites with cash for the gate keeper, or the right political views, accessing nonprofit websites and those with opposing opinions will be like calling your grandmother back in the old country when pay phones and long-distance operators prevailed: slow, frustrating, and conducive to the infrequency and ignorance that isolates families and cultures. Without net neutrality the online interstate open to all will become a toll road with a fast-lane fee.

 Without net neutrality the online interstate open to all will become a toll road with a fast-lane fee.

Who stands to benefit? Verizon, Comcast, AT&T, and other internet providers with the power to charge websites a premium for access, like minutes on your iPhone, plus corporate-friendly politicians like our current president, who is delivering on his promise to reverse the policies of his predecessor, including net neutrality. The surge in online pay-for-placement ads supporting internet deregulation since the 2016 election is unsurprising to close observers. So is the volume of computer-generated bot traffic timed to overwhelm the FCC’s inbox and block complaints about the proposal from actual Americans. Pay-for-play politics produced Ajit Pai, whose chairmanship of the FCC ends in five years, and Russian bot traffic helped elect Donald Trump, whose time as president seems certain to end sooner. But their joint legacy—FCC deregulation and pay-to-play internet access—has lasting potential to harm the free flow of information and ideas along the digital highway. It will certainly hurt this website.

Photograph of Ajit Pai courtesy of The Washington Post.

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John Steinbeck’s Warning in Playboy about Donald Trump

October 23, 2017 by 7 Comments

Image of Donald Trump with Playboy magazine

The long relationship between Playboy magazine and Donald Trump, America’s playboy-in-chief, is old news. But the recent death of Hugh Hefner unearthed some surprising Playboy connections, including a list of major authors—among them John Steinbeck—who wrote for the serious men’s magazine that paid well and reached readers otherwise untouched by serious literature. In light of our president’s tweets and threats to bomb America’s enemies back to the Stone Age, Steinbeck’s satirical “Short Short Story of Mankind,” first published in the April 1957 issue of Playboy, has a message as relevant today as it was 60 years ago, when the golf-loving Dwight Eisenhower was president and the Cold War was on in earnest.

Image of John Steinbeck's Short Short Story of Mankind in Adam magazine

An allegory in the style of Mark Twain, Steinbeck’s account of human progress from savagery to civilization has a cartoon quality picked up by the illustrator for Adam, which republished Steinbeck’s Playboy piece in 1966 (images above and below). But like the “poisoned cream puff” of Steinbeck’s Cannery Row fiction, the mirth of “A Short Short Story of Mankind” is meant to be sobering. At every step, Steinbeck suggests, our progress as a species has faced resistance from a constant and terrifying tribal stupidity which, unchallenged, would lead to our extinction. “It’d be kind of silly if we killed our selves off after all this time,” he concludes. “If we do, we’re stupider than the cave people and I don’t think we are. I think we’re just exactly as stupid and that’s pretty bright in the long run.”

Image of John Steinbeck's Short Short Story of Mankind in Adam magazine

To my knowledge “A Short Short Story of Mankind” has never been anthologized, but it’s time it was. Living in the daily shadow of Donald Trump’s presidency, we need its dark warning and its ray of hope, the somber and uplifting counterpoint that echoes Steinbeck’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech and later writing. Today, six decades after Playboy magazine published John Steinbeck for the first and only time, it’s useful to remember that the author died a month after the election of Richard Nixon, whose dishonesty and demagoguery he deeply distrusted. It’s easy enough to imagine what he’d have to say about Donald Trump if he were still alive. The warning he’d have for a nation under Trump is implicit in the imagery and tone of his Cold War admonition to America under Eisenhower—an incurious president who also preferred golf but, unlike Trump, read the occasional book and avoided Stone Age rhetoric. Read the piece and judge for yourself.

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Grammar-Check Your Blog Post About John Steinbeck

May 9, 2017 by 2 Comments

Image of John Steinbeck with dog Charley

Though he occasionally misused or misspelled words, John Steinbeck wrote to be understood, often revising sentences, paragraphs, and whole chapters before publishing. Unfortunately, blog posts written about Steinbeck for online magazines, ostensibly with grammar-checking editors, frequently confuse readers with sentences so ill-considered that their meaning is unclear or absent. Recent examples of both errors in online writing about Steinbeck’s greatest fiction can be found in a pair of blog posts published by two online magazines that, except for sectarianism and under-editing, couldn’t be less alike.

How Did The Forward Get John Steinbeck So Wrong?

The first post in question is by Aviya Kushner, the so-called language columnist of The Forward, a respected Jewish publication started in New York five years before Steinbeck was born. The “news flash from the distant land of real news” on offer in Kushner’s May 8 blog post—“How Did John Steinbeck and an Obama Staffer Get the Bible So Wrong?”—is the misspelling of timshol in East of Eden, old news to Steinbeck fans of all faiths or no faith at all. Kushner’s charge—that Steinbeck’s spelling error was an offense against language, culture, and morality—is undermined by her syntax. “It comes down to caring about language,” she writes in conclusion, “and insisting that words have meaning, which is, frankly, a hot contemporary topic that is not just political but also moral.” Ouch and double ouch.

Faith Is No Excuse When Blog Posts Make No Sense

The second example of online magazines writing badly about John Steinbeck comes from Pantheon, a site that bills itself as “a home for godly good writing,” apparently without irony. “Dreaming of Steinbeck’s Country”—the May 6 blog post by a self-identified minister named James Ford—means well but also proves that sententious praise, like captious criticism, collapses when style fails subject in sentences describing Steinbeck. “I consider the Grapes of Wrath [sic] one of the great novels of our American heritage,” writes Ford. “Currents of spirituality and spiritual quest together with a progressive if increasingly that agnostic form of Christianity feature prominently in Steinbeck’s writings. And no doubt it informs his masterwork the Grapes of Wrath.” [Sic] and [sic] again.

Is Your Piece Ready to Publish, or Does It Escape?

The lesson to be learned from this week’s examples of bad online writing? When blogging about John Steinbeck, take time to spell- and syntax- and grammar-check before posting. Online magazines have editors, but contributed posts are like the morning newspaper in Florida whose editor I once overheard describe this way: “Our paper isn’t published. It escapes.” Websites with a sectarian purpose, like The Forward and Pantheon, often make the mistake of allowing sentiment to overwhelm sense when publishing blog posts by sincere writers with a pro or con ax to grind. Steinbeck agonized over The Grapes of Wrath. East of Eden took years to write. Travels with Charley didn’t, and it shows. Is taking time to self-edit when writing about John Steinbeck for any website, secular or religious, asking too much?

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Cracker Barrel Wisdom on John Steinbeck’s Birthday

March 13, 2017 by Leave a Comment

Image of Craig Nagel, Minnesota newspaperman

Craig Nagel, author of the biweekly “Cracker Barrel” column in the Echo Journal, a community newspaper near Brainerd, Minnesota, celebrated John Steinbeck’s birthday with a memorable March 3 column written (as Nagel says of Steinbeck) “so simply and cleanly that his sentences seem effortless.” A Midwestern mensch in the style of Garrison Keillor, Nagel praises Steinbeck for displaying personal bravery in the face of public criticism, and for having a Twain-like sense of humor that “often masked the depth of his outrage, gentling the hatred he felt toward those who used and manipulated others.” Pequot Lakes, the Minnesota town where Nagel lives and writes his “Cracker Barrel” column, has a population of 2,200—about the size of Salinas, California when Steinbeck was born there 115 years ago. Like Salinas, it’s a small place harboring a big heart.

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