John Steinbeck #
I was rather taken by Robert Gottlieb’s critique of John Steinbeck’s oeuvre. Though he’s been largely discarded by literary types, he’s probably the twentieth-century author who I’ve read most. (Though that more a sign of how little reading I’ve done than of how much Steinbeck I’ve read.)
Steinbeck’s final work years were spent on journalism, and his subject was almost inevitably America. A collection of think pieces and nostalgia called America and Americans (1966) reveals him at his most characteristic. He’s moralizing, he’s didactic, he’s searching for big answers to big questions. He’s generous and vulnerable and touchy. And he’s more and more dismayed by what he sees around him: “I have named the destroyers of nations: comfort, plenty, and security—out of which grow a bored and slothful cynicism.” You could say that by the end he had evolved into a kind of minor and irrelevant prophet, both disillusioned and irredeemably optimistic.