Word: steinbeck
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Steinbeck ended up a Lost Generation unto himself. As a novelist, he found his theme only when he ran into those other lost and rootless Americans, the Dust Bowl migrants, making their way to California's orchards and lettuce farms in 1935-36. The Grapes of Wrath stands as his one full-scale masterpiece...
Jackson J. Benson, who teaches American literature at San Diego State University, cannot abide people saying this. He has written his enormous biography to prove the unprovable-that Steinbeck wrote many splendid novels before and after The Grapes of Wrath, justifying the Nobel Prize he received in 1962. Benson's admirations exclude only East of Eden; the biographer finds it stilted and overwrought. If Steinbeck did not produce as many great novels as he should have, Benson blames his editor or his agent and, above all, the critics, who kept asking for more Grapes...
...success and failure of American novelists is far too fascinating and complex a story to blame on their readers. Fortunately, Benson has been so diligent in gathering papers and anecdota that he escapes from his own simplifications. For there is indeed a special chaos to Steinbeck's life, even by the disorderly standards of the lives of American writers...
Nobody ever wanted to be a writer more than John Steinbeck; as a student he would take to the woods with pen, ink bottle, and the ledger books borrowed from his father-treasurer of Monterey County-to scribble his first short stories. With a stubbornness that bordered on menace, the "red-faced, blue-eyed giant," as a contemporary described him, toughed out the lean years. He worked as a hand on sugar-beet ranches and wheeled 100-lb. barrows of concrete as a construction worker at Madison Square Garden during a stay in New York City. The publisher...
Instead of stabilizing Steinbeck's life, success confused him more than failure did. He could not decide where to live, or with whom. In 1938 he and his first wife, Carol, built a house in Los Gatos, eight miles from San Jose, complete with swimming pool, and hobnobbed with the likes of Charlie Chaplin and Spencer Tracy...