![]() Not much else seemed to do that, except maybe booze.īorn in Salinas, Calif., in 1902, to supportive middle-class parents, Steinbeck entered Stanford in 1919, where his favorite teacher, Edith Mirrielees, herself a published author, advised him to head to Paris if he wanted to write. ![]() ![]() “I work because I know it gives me pleasure to work,” Steinbeck once said. Yet 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. To Souder, the author of a fine biography of John James Audubon, Steinbeck was “simply being his angry, contrarian self.” As he frames it, anger was the novelist’s full-throated response to injustice, and it “had driven him to greatness.” When asked if he deserved the Nobel Prize he was awarded in 1962, Steinbeck modestly replied, “Frankly, no.” Hailing him as a “major figure in American literature,” Souder further claims Steinbeck has “given the world several books that would last forever.” Of course, forever is a very long time, more than Steinbeck himself thought he merited. 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.Ĭertainly William Souder, in “Mad at the World,” his admiring new biography, believes Steinbeck should get another, sympathetic look. John Steinbeck (1902-68) might well be one of those once-popular authors whose names we recognize but whom no one reads beyond junior high. MAD AT THE WORLD A Life of John Steinbeck By William Souder
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