John Steinbeck (1902-1968)

Lecture Outline

I. Brief look at Steinbeck’s works and film adaptations of his works

II. Steinbeck’s career and his place in the American literary canon

a. His biographer Jay Parini (Middlebury College)

b. Pierre Bourdieu, cultural capital, and the literary canon

III. Historical Context for Steinbeck’s masterpiece The Grapes of Wrath

a. The Dust Bowl and Timothy Egan’s The Worst Hard Time

b. Zanuck’s film adaptation of The Grapes of Wrath (short clip)

IV. Steinbeck and Cannery Row (1945)

a. Passages and Pictures

b. Themes and Reception

V. Dorothea Lange’s Photographs and Linda Gordon, Dorothea Lange

The Wayward Bus (1947)

The Pearl (1947)

A Russian Journal (1948)

Burning Bright (1950)

The Log from the Sea of Cortez (1951)

East of Eden (1952)

Sweet Thursday (1954)

The Short Reign of Pippin IV: A Fabrication (1957)

Once There Was A War (1958)

The Winter of Our Discontent (1961)

Travels with Charley: In Search of America (1962)

America and Americans (1966)

Journal of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters (1969)

Viva Zapata! (1975)

The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights (1976)

Working Days: The Journals of The Grapes of Wrath (1989)

Steinbeck in Vietnam: Dispatches from the War (2012)

Film Adaptations and Screenplays

Of Mice and Men (1939, directed by Lewis Milestone, featuring Burgess Meredith, Lon Chaney, Jr., and Betty Field)

The Grapes of Wrath (1940, directed by John Ford, featuring Henry Fonda, Jane Darwell and John Carradine)

The Forgotten Village (1941, directed by Alexander Hammid and Herbert Kline, narrated by Burgess Meredith)

Tortilla Flat (1942, directed by Victor Fleming, featuring Spencer Tracy, Hedy Lamarr and John Garfield)

The Moon is Down (1943, directed by Irving Pichel, featuring Lee J. Cobb and Sir Cedric Hardwicke)

Lifeboat (1944, directed by Alfred Hitchcock, featuring Tallulah Bankhead, Hume Cronyn, and John Hodiak)

A Medal for Benny (1944, directed by Irving Pichel, featuring Dorothy Lamour and Arturo de Cordova)

Film Adaptations and Screenplays

La Perla (1947, Mexico, directed by Emilio Fernández, featuring Pedro Armendáriz and María Elena Marqués)

The Red Pony (1949, directed by Lewis Milestone, featuring Myrna Loy, Robert Mitchum, and Louis Calhern)

Viva Zapata! (1952, directed by Elia Kazan, featuring Marlon Brando, Anthony Quinn and Jean Peters)

East of Eden (1955, directed by Elia Kazan, featuring James Dean, Julie Harris, Jo Van Fleet, and Raymond Massey)

The Wayward Bus (1957, directed by Victor Vicas, featuring Rick Jason, Jayne Mansfield, and Joan Collins)

Cannery Row (1982, directed by David S. Ward, featuring Nick Nolte and Debra Winger)

Of Mice and Men (1992, directed by Gary Sinise, featuring John Malkovich and Gary Sinise)

“John Steinbeck was the last of that generation of American writers which included F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner. When he died, in 1968, having won the Nobel Prize for Literature only a few years before, his fame was worldwide, though the future of his reputation as a novelist was by no means certain. A number of influential critics felt that his writing had declined since the publication of The Grapes of Wrath, in 1939, and they banished Steinbeck to the swollen ranks of the second-rate and half-forgotten. Blissfully unaware of these critics, readers from Cairo to Beijing continued to seek out his books in translation, while legions of American and British adolescents cut their literary teeth on books like Of Mice and Men, The Pearl, and The Red Pony. In the United States alone, some fifty thousand copies of The Grapes of Wrath are sold each year, while fresh adaptations of Steinbeck’s more popular work frequently grace the stage and screen” (1).

Jay Parini, John Steinbeck: A Biography (London: Heinemann, 1994)

“When he received the Nobel Prize in 1962, the decision of the Swedish Academy was ridiculed in America by narrow academic critics and a handful of haughty journalists, who refused to believe that a writer with a popular following could be any good. This sad, rather pathetic, episode in Steinbeck’s life is described in the final chapters of this biography, yet in his acceptance speech in Stockholm, he demonstrated his own quiet greatness, reflecting with a simple nobility of expression on his mission as a writer. Literature in his opinion was not written by the few for the few. … Instead, he suggested that the proper goal of the writer has always been to speak broadly, to a wide audience, on issues of deep concern. Steinbeck said: ‘The ancient commission of the writer has not changed. He is charged with exposing our many grievous faults and failures, with dredging up to the light our dark and dangerous dreams for the purpose of improvement’” (8).

Jay Parini, John Steinbeck: A Biography (London: Heinemann, 1994)

“The sociology of art and literature has to take as its object not only the material production but also the symbolic production of the work, i.e. the production of the value of the work or, which amounts to the same thing, of belief in the value of the work. It therefore has to consider as contributing to production not only the direct producers of the work in its materiality (artist, writer, etc.) but also the producers of the meaning and value of the work—critics, publishers, gallery directors and the whole set of agents whose combined efforts produce consumers capable of knowing and recognizing the work of art as such. … Thus, at least in the most perfectly autonomous sector of the field of cultural production, where the only audience aimed at is other producers (as with Symbolist poetry), the economy of practices is based, as in a generalized game of ‘loser wins,’ on a systematic inversion of the fundamental principles of all ordinary economies” (37, 39).

Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993.

“Two great historical and social phenomena converged in the thirties to make The Grapes of Wrath possible for John Steinbeck. The first of these was a new class consciousness that had been growing in America since the turn of the century, with a pronounced interest by American intellectuals in Marxism, socialism, or communism, as a means of helping the oppressed worker. The second, and for Steinbeck by far the more important phenomenon, was the ecological terror that blew across fifty million acres of the Midwest and Southwest in the form of the Dust Bowl, which eventually sent between three and four hundred thousand Americans in search of new lives in California” (1).

Louis Owen, The Grapes of Wrath: Trouble in the Promised Land. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1989.

“In 1929, the start of the Great Depression, … the land had been overturned in a great speculative frenzy to make money in an unsustainable what market. After a big run-up, prices crashed. The rains disappeared—not just for a season but for years on end. With no sod to hold the earth in place, the soil calcified and started to blow. Dust clouds boiled up, ten thousand feet or more in the sky, and rolled like moving mountains—a force of their own” (5).

Timothy Egan, The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of the Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2005).

“When the dust fell, it penetrated everything: hair, nose, throat, kitchen, bedroom, well. A scoop shovel was needed just to clean the house in the morning. The eeriest thing was the darkness. People tied themselves to ropes before going to a barn just a few hundred feet away, like a walk in space, tethered to the life support center. Chickens roosted in midafternoon” (5).

Timothy Egan, The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of the Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2005).

“At its peak, the Dust Bowl covered one hundred million acres. Dusters swept over the northern prairie as well, but the epicenter was the southern plains. An area the size of Pennsylvania was in run and on the run. More than a quarter-million people fled the Dust Bowl in the 1930s. … John Steinbeck told part of the story, about getting out, moving somewhere green” (9).

Timothy Egan, The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of the Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2005).

“It is not at all clear what exactly Tom will do for the groups for which he says he will be fighting. What seems important is that he finds himself in the grip of something beyond himself, emotionally compelled by a cause that, invariably, is distant and ill defined. Ill defined because The Grapes of Wrath shares little with the working class fiction of its time; its populist sentiment, its moral indignation in the face of privation and want, is detached from anything like a coherent critique of capitalism.”

Michael Szalay, New Deal Modernism: American Literature and the Invention of the Welfare State. Durham: Duke UP, 2000.

“Steinbeck does little to span the comforting distance he places between cause and effect, between capital and its human agents. Moreover, time and again the novel subordinates the details of political and economic action to the sentiments surrounding them. … The Grapes of Wrath is in fact a high-water mark in twentieth-century American sentimentalism. Although Steinbeck’s best-selling novel is certainly not ‘written by, for, and about women’—Jane Tompkins’s definition of sentimental fiction—it is unabashedly sentimental in its morally didactic use of a child’s death, and in its mobilization of suffering and deep feeling to change hearts and minds” (166-67).

Michael Szalay, New Deal Modernism: American Literature and the Invention of the Welfare State. Durham: Duke UP, 2000.

“Zanuck has more than kept his word. He has a hard, straight picture in which the actors are submerged so completely that it looks and feels like a documentary film and certainly it has a hard, truthful ring. No punches were pulled—in fact, with descriptive matter removed, it is a harsher thing than the book, by far.”

John Steinbeck, A Life in Letters (New York: Penguin, 2001), 195.

Themes:

1.Nature and ecology: animals, humans, earth

2.Community and diversity

3.Capitalism and social justice

4.Social ostracism and human dignity

5.Hospitality and human virtue

6.Pathology and Psychology of Parties (Party-ology?)

“Our father who art in nature, who has given the gift of survival to the coyote, the common brown rat, the English sparrow, the house fly and the moth, must have a great and overwhelming love for no-goods and blots-on-the-town and bums, and Mack and the boys. Virtues and graces and laziness and zest. Our Father who are in nature” (15).

“In the evening just at dusk, a curious thing happened on Cannery Row. It happened in the time between sunset and the lighting of the street light. There is a small quiet gray period then. Down the hill, past the Palace Flophouse, down the chicken walk and through the vacant lot came an old Chinaman. He wore an ancient flat straw hat, blue jeans, both coat and trousers, and heavy shoes of which one sole was loose so that it slapped the ground as he walked. … He came by just at dusk and crossed the street and went through the opening between Western Biological and the Hediondo Cannery. Then he crossed the little beach and disappeared among the piles and steel posts which support the piers. No one saw him again until dawn” (22).

John Steinbeck, Cannery Row. New York: Viking, 1945.

“Early morning is a time of magic in Cannery Row. In the gray time after the light has come and before the sun has risen, the Row seems to hang suspended out of time in a silvery light. The street lights go out, and the weeds are a brilliant green. The corrugated iron of the canneries glows with the pearly lucence of platinum or old pewter. No automobiles are running then. The street is silent of progress and business. And the rush and drag of the waves can be heard as they splash among the piles of the canneries. It is a time of great peace, a deserted time, a little era of rest … The sea gulls come flapping in to sit on the cannery roofs to await the day of refuse. They sit on the roof peaks shoulder to shoulder. From the rocks near the Hopkins Marine station comes the barking of sea lions like the baying of hounds” (88).

John Steinbeck, Cannery Row. New York: Viking, 1945.

“Between two weeded rocks on the barrier Doc saw a flash of white under water and then the floating week covered it. He climbed to the place over the slippery rocks, held himself firmly, and gently reached down and parted the brown algae. Then he grew rigid. A girl’s face looked up at him, a pretty, pale girl with dark hair. The eyes were open and clear and the face was firm and the hair washed gently about her head. The body was out of sight, caught in the crevice. The lips were slightly parted and the teeth showed and on the face was only comfort and rest. Just under water it was and the clear water made it very beautiful. It seemed to Doc that he looked at it for many minutes, and the face burned into his picture memory” (114).

John Steinbeck, Cannery Row. New York: Viking, 1945.

“Mack and the boys were under a cloud and they knew it and they knew they deserved it. They had become social outcasts. … Socially Mack and the boys were beyond the pale. Sam Malloy didn’t speak to them as they went by the boiler. They drew into themselves and no one could see how they would come out of the cloud. For there are two possible reactions to social ostracism—either a man emerges determined to be better, purer, and kindlier or he goes bad, challenges the world and does even worse things. This last is by far the commonest reaction to stigma ” (147-48).

John Steinbeck, Cannery Row. New York: Viking, 1945.

“No one has studied the psychology of a dying party. It may be raging, howling, boiling, and then a fever sets in and a little silence and then quickly quickly it is gone, the guests go home or go to sleep or wander away to some other affair and they leave a dead body” (132).

“The nature of parties has been imperfectly studied. It is, however, generally understood that a party has a pathology, that it is a kind of individual and that it is likely to be a very perverse individual. And it is generally understood that a party hardly ever goes the way it is planned or intended” (194).

John Steinbeck, Cannery Row. New York: Viking, 1945.

“You remember how happy I was to come back here. It really was a home coming. Well there is no home coming nor any welcome. What there is is jealousy and hatred and the knife in the back. … Our old friends won’t have us back. Mostly with them it is what they consider success that gets in the way … And the town and the region—that is the people in it—just pure poison. … I hate the feeling of persecution but I am just not welcome here.” --John Steinbeck, 1945

“Ever since his triumph with The Grapes of Wrath Mr. Steinbeck has been coasting. This little tribute to a waterfront block in Monterey and its indecorous inhabitants has some of the Steinbeck mannerisms, much of the Steinbeck charm and simple felicity of expression, but it is as transparent as a cobweb. Fro all its 208 pages it is less substantial than a short story. There just isn’t much here, no real characters, no ‘story,’ no purpose. Instead, with considerable pointless vulgarity and occasional mildly humorous scenes, a series of loosely connected incidents is thrown casually together.”

Orville Prescott, “Books of the Times.” Review of Cannery Row. The New York Times 2 January 1945: 17.

“It seems to me that the book yields most pleasure if it is read simply as a sort of gentle parable on irony that so often attends the attempt to carry out good intensions. Read in that light, the efforts of Mr. Steinbeck’s lovable bums to throw a party for Doc because he was such a ‘nice fella’ have a humor and tenderness that are genuine and warming. There are good things in Cannery Row, and the story of the frog hunt is Steinbeck at his humorous best. But I think it will leave most readers with the feeling that it falls curiously between the inconsequential and the pretentious.”

J. Donald Adams, “Speaking of Books.” Review of Cannery Row. New York Times Book Review 14 January 1945: 2.

“There is a time in every writer’s career when the critics are gunning for him to whittle him down. This is my stage for that. It has been since The Grapes of Wrath. I see it all the time. The criticism is good, but what saddens me is the active hatred of most of the writers and the pseudo-writers around here. … There is a deep active jealously out here that makes me very sad.”

John Steinbeck, A Life in Letters

“Cannery Row took a frightful pounding by the critics but they went too far. Annie Laurie phoned to say that her telephone rang all the time for the studios wanting to buy it and what she should do. So I told her she was on her own—to sell or not to sell—whenever she was ready. … I thought the adverse criticism would hurt the book, but she says quite the opposite. The sales are tremendous and that’s what interests the studios—not the critics.”

John Steinbeck, A Life in Letters

“The new eye is being opened here in the west—the new seeing.”

--John Steinbeck

"The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.”

--Dorothea Lange

Dorothea Lange (1895-1965)

“I have come to think of Lange as a photographer of democracy, and for democracy. … Her career developed when the severe economic depression of the 1930s created a political opening for expanding and deepening American democracy. … No photographer of the time, perhaps no artist of the time, did more than Lange to advance this democratic vision. … Most of Lange’s photography was optimistic, even utopian, not despite but precisely through its frequent depictions of sadness and deprivation. By showing her subjects as worthier than their conditions, she called attention to the incompleteness of American democracy. And by showing her subjects as worthier than their conditions, she simultaneously asserted that great democracy was possible” (xiii-xiv).

Linda Gordon, Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits (New York: Norton, 2009). Winner of the Bancroft Prize and LA Times Book Prize, Biography

Next Time, Try the Train, Los Angeles, California, 1932

Children of Oklahoma drought refugees, Bakersfield, CA, June 1935

Mexican mother in California, June 1935

“Her photographs enlarged the popular understanding of who Americans were, providing a more democratic visual representation of the nation. Lange’s America included Mormons, Jews, and evangelicals; farmers, sharecroppers, and migrant farmworkers; workers domestic and industrial, male and female; citizens and immigrants not only black and white but also Mexican, Filipino, Chinese, and Japanese” (xiii-xiv).

Linda Gordon, Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits (New York: Norton, 2009). Winner of the Bancroft Prize and LA Times Book Prize, Biography

Japanese mother and daughter, Guadalupe, California, March 1937

A Mother in California, Imperial County, California, 1937

Migrant Mother, Nipoma, California (1937)

Whiter Angel Breadline, San Francisco, CA (1937)

The Road West, New Mexico (1938)

Woman of the High Plains “If You Die, You’re Dead–That’s All.” Texas Panhandle (1938)

Child and Her Mother, Wapato, Yakima Valley, Washington (1938)

Calipatria, Imperial Valley, California, February 1939

Mother and baby of family on the road, Siskiyou County, CA, 1939

Migratory Cotton Picker, Alabama (1940)

Young migratory mother, originally from Texas, Kern County, California (1940)