Steinbeck ReviewPub Date : 2018-12-14DOI: 10.5325/STEINBECKREVIEW.15.2.0136
M. Gladstein
{"title":"An Artist of Range and Breadth: Commemorating Steinbeck","authors":"M. Gladstein","doi":"10.5325/STEINBECKREVIEW.15.2.0136","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/STEINBECKREVIEW.15.2.0136","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Surveying Steinbeck's range and breadth, this article focuses to a large extent on his varied styles, subject matter, and the several roles of women in his works. On the one hand, he produced Of Mice and Men, a brief but mythic piece that for all its universality may be read and enjoyed by high school students and is a staple of their reading lists, while speaking as well to readers of all ages. Alternatively, after the end of World War II the King of Norway awarded him the King Haakon VII Freedom Cross for writing a book that inspired resistance to the murderous Nazi menace. And his portrayal of women runs the gamut from young children such as Ruthie in The Grapes of Wrath to Gramma in the same novel.","PeriodicalId":40417,"journal":{"name":"Steinbeck Review","volume":"15 1","pages":"136 - 146"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2018-12-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42905904","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Steinbeck ReviewPub Date : 2018-12-14DOI: 10.5325/STEINBECKREVIEW.15.2.0147
R. E. Morsberger, Katharine M. Morsberger, Kathleen Hicks
{"title":"\"Steinbeck Country\": Mythic Landscapes with Haunted Figures","authors":"R. E. Morsberger, Katharine M. Morsberger, Kathleen Hicks","doi":"10.5325/STEINBECKREVIEW.15.2.0147","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/STEINBECKREVIEW.15.2.0147","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:\"Steinbeck Country\" is an intriguing and alluring space as drawn in John Steinbeck's California works. The landscape and the characters who inhabit it are often simultaneously sketched with sharp realism yet imbued with mythic, fantastical qualities that interject complex dimensions into his stories. This dichotomy between characters' perceptions of the landscape and its actuality is quite apparent in some of Steinbeck's earliest works, such as To a God Unknown and The Pastures of Heaven, and it continues to be a significant strand in his best known and later work including Of Mice and Men, The Grapes of Wrath, and East of Eden. This article explores how both To A God Unknown and The Pastures of Heaven are early examples in Steinbeck's career of unique interactions between people and the places they have lived, currently live, or dream to live in. Apparent in the two works is a tremendous disconnect between what haunted, aching, lonely, driven people think the landscape will offer them and what it actually has to offer them. The drama resulting from that disconnect is a central feature of Steinbeck country. While Steinbeck's descriptions of the California valleys are evocative and idyllic, more often than not, the lives of the characters who are all placed in and defined by these landscapes are haunted and vexed. Characters are compulsively driven by intense longings, unsuccessfully searching to fill voids and ameliorate their lives by drinking deeply of the riches they misperceive the landscape has to freely offer.","PeriodicalId":40417,"journal":{"name":"Steinbeck Review","volume":"15 1","pages":"147 - 164"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2018-12-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43681954","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Steinbeck ReviewPub Date : 2018-12-14DOI: 10.5325/STEINBECKREVIEW.15.2.0175
Chaker Mohamed Ben Ali
{"title":"John Steinbeck's Time in Algeria","authors":"Chaker Mohamed Ben Ali","doi":"10.5325/STEINBECKREVIEW.15.2.0175","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/STEINBECKREVIEW.15.2.0175","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article bridges a gap in Steinbeck's biographies. It is both a historical account of Steinbeck's stint in Algeria and an invitation inviting readers to visit the places that Steinbeck saw so that they may have a more panoramic view of his adventurous life. Steinbeck covered World War II for The Herald Tribune newspaper in Algeria in 1943. While there, he compared Algiers to some places in the United States such as Coney Island, New York, and Monterey Bay, California. He described it as a white, salad bowl, polyglot city. Just as Steinbeck used the Salinas Valley as a setting for his fiction, so he also used Algeria. He came across many iconic American figures during his stay in the Aletti Hotel. Although his second trip to Algeria with his third wife, Elaine Scott, in 1952 was unexpected, they enjoyed attending an all-night lavish party thrown by the French general of the air forces. Their third trip was in 1963 when Algeria became a newly independent state. In a letter to W. F. Vickers, he described their stay and his first meeting with the Algerian president Ahmed Ben Bella when he visited the United Sates.","PeriodicalId":40417,"journal":{"name":"Steinbeck Review","volume":"15 1","pages":"175 - 185"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2018-12-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47941655","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Steinbeck ReviewPub Date : 2018-12-14DOI: 10.5325/STEINBECKREVIEW.15.2.0165
N. Norman
{"title":"Subversive Mobility: Migrant Labor and the Visual Politics of Representation","authors":"N. Norman","doi":"10.5325/STEINBECKREVIEW.15.2.0165","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/STEINBECKREVIEW.15.2.0165","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:California has existed in the collective imagination of popular American culture as the \"Land of Promise,\" or Eden of the American West, at the very least since its state ratification in 1850. Early representations of the American West drew many to the California landscape in search of this mythical \"garden.\" This article examines how landscape, operating as a visual ideology, impacted social relations in the California agricultural industry during the 1930s. My argument is that landscape as a visual ideology imposed severe restrictions on the representation of migrant labor through what I define as the \"cultural optics of labor.\" The article explores how John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939) mediates the complex exchanges between labor, landscape, and representation during the Dust Bowl Era, suggesting that the novel develops a set of possibilities for worker revolution along the two ideological lines of space and class.","PeriodicalId":40417,"journal":{"name":"Steinbeck Review","volume":"15 1","pages":"165 - 174"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2018-12-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44021670","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Steinbeck ReviewPub Date : 2018-06-15DOI: 10.5325/STEINBECKREVIEW.15.1.V
Barbara A. Heavilin, Cecilia S. Donohue
{"title":"Musings on America: Highway 31, Steinbeck, and the Future","authors":"Barbara A. Heavilin, Cecilia S. Donohue","doi":"10.5325/STEINBECKREVIEW.15.1.V","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/STEINBECKREVIEW.15.1.V","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":40417,"journal":{"name":"Steinbeck Review","volume":"15 1","pages":"V - X"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2018-06-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45142796","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Steinbeck ReviewPub Date : 2018-06-15DOI: 10.5325/STEINBECKREVIEW.15.1.0031
S. McNeilly
{"title":"Visions from the Tide Pool: John Steinbeck's Interdependent Migrant Community","authors":"S. McNeilly","doi":"10.5325/STEINBECKREVIEW.15.1.0031","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/STEINBECKREVIEW.15.1.0031","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:The ecological philosophy that Steinbeck sets out in his scientific travel narrative The Log from the Sea of Cortez, which I have termed Cooperative Ecology, is dramatized through the migrant community of The Grapes of Wrath in order to show the potential power residing in the structuring principles of the global ecosystem. This article delineates how Steinbeck's Cooperative Ecology illustrates the ways in which a community can achieve harmony and strength by cooperating with both natural and social environments. Steinbeck arrives at this Cooperative Ecology through a transcendent understanding of the global ecosystem, an ideology which, in The Grapes of Wrath, Jim Casy attains as an acute awareness of following his self-imposed exile in the wild. Casy becomes a prophet of Cooperative Ecology when he reveals to Tom and the wider migrant community the efficacies of cooperation. This cooperation, which occurs among the disempowered migrants, follows the ideas forwarded by Steinbeck in his unpublished essay \"Argument of Phalanx,\" in which it is argued that when organisms work together they form a phalanx that has greater strength than the sum of its individual components. Through Casy's transcendent understanding of nature, Steinbeck's migrant community demonstrates the effectiveness of Cooperative Ecology in attaining ecological and social harmony.","PeriodicalId":40417,"journal":{"name":"Steinbeck Review","volume":"15 1","pages":"31 - 44"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2018-06-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43879493","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Steinbeck ReviewPub Date : 2018-06-15DOI: 10.5325/STEINBECKREVIEW.15.1.0017
Kristen D. Amiro
{"title":"Suzy's Gold Star: A Holistic Education in Steinbeck's Sweet Thursday","authors":"Kristen D. Amiro","doi":"10.5325/STEINBECKREVIEW.15.1.0017","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/STEINBECKREVIEW.15.1.0017","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:In this article, I analyze Suzy and Fauna's pedagogical relationship in Sweet Thursday as an example of holistic education. I argue that through this relationship, Steinbeck's holistic worldview is illuminated, a worldview consistent with the ideas of Jiddu Krishnamurti, an educator, thinker, and Steinbeck contemporary. Steinbeck and Krishnamurti's core beliefs about the importance of relationships and the development of the self are central themes of holistic education. Holistic education is informed by ecological thinking and takes into account the student as a whole person in relation to others. In this light I examine Fauna's teaching style and the content of her lessons, which relate to awareness. Once Suzy's awareness is ignited, she grows holistically, extending her potential and becoming more integrated into the community. As she evolves, Suzy personifies Krishnamurti's ideal of developing awareness in relation to the environment. To a lesser extent, but still through a Krishnamurti lens, I examine the character of Doc as another teacher-figure and learner, whose nagging problem of loneliness is resolved through community, reflection, and self-awareness.","PeriodicalId":40417,"journal":{"name":"Steinbeck Review","volume":"15 1","pages":"17 - 30"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2018-06-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44722564","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Steinbeck ReviewPub Date : 2018-06-15DOI: 10.5325/STEINBECKREVIEW.15.1.0045
William J. Ray
{"title":"A Personal Reminiscence: Why Steinbeck Matters to Me","authors":"William J. Ray","doi":"10.5325/STEINBECKREVIEW.15.1.0045","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/STEINBECKREVIEW.15.1.0045","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:The anniversary of John Steinbeck's death is cause for celebration and for examining how and why he still matters to readers fifty years later. This reader came to Steinbeck late in life, aided by luck, leisure, and help from friends like Christopher Hitchens, whose writing about Steinbeck and George Orwell, the writer who mattered most to Hitchens, became a map and key to connections that reveal much about Steinbeck that is missed when he is read in isolation. The reader's education and life experience are brought to bear as proof of Steinbeck's enduring value, and a counterstatement on Steinbeck by Peter Hitchens is offered as evidence that Steinbeck mattered differently but deeply to two readers who were as different as Cain and Abel. Passages from Orwell, Steinbeck, and Edward Ricketts are quoted and compared to show how growing up as Episcopalians gave them a common grounding and frame of reference, and their funeral arrangements are described and compared to show how atheists retain a respect for ritual and scripture. Recent writing by and about Joan Didion is cited as evidence that reading Steinbeck opens new vistas on other writers and past experience.","PeriodicalId":40417,"journal":{"name":"Steinbeck Review","volume":"15 1","pages":"45 - 55"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2018-06-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41972997","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Steinbeck ReviewPub Date : 2018-06-15DOI: 10.5325/STEINBECKREVIEW.15.1.0108
Luchen Li
{"title":"Steinbeck Studies: A Field Turned from Wild to Fertile","authors":"Luchen Li","doi":"10.5325/STEINBECKREVIEW.15.1.0108","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/STEINBECKREVIEW.15.1.0108","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":40417,"journal":{"name":"Steinbeck Review","volume":"15 1","pages":"108 - 111"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2018-06-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45346398","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Steinbeck ReviewPub Date : 2018-06-15DOI: 10.5325/STEINBECKREVIEW.15.1.0056
A. Andrew
{"title":"A Personal Note: Contemporary American Power Dynamics and John Steinbeck's Nonfiction","authors":"A. Andrew","doi":"10.5325/STEINBECKREVIEW.15.1.0056","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/STEINBECKREVIEW.15.1.0056","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:The author connects John Steinbeck's sociopolitical commentary from newspaper articles and columns to contemporary social issues, such as racism, xenophobia, and nationalism.","PeriodicalId":40417,"journal":{"name":"Steinbeck Review","volume":"15 1","pages":"56 - 61"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2018-06-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46017924","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}