Steinbeck fresh at 100
STATEWIDE READING OF `THE GRAPES OF WRATH' PLANNED

By Charles Matthews
February 25, 2002

Any anniversary ending in a zero is deemed worth celebrating these days, but a centennial is something special.

John Steinbeck was born in Salinas on Feb. 27, 1902, and observances of the 100th anniversary of his birth have been going on at the National Steinbeck Center in Salinas and the Center for Steinbeck Studies at San Jose State University. And from Monterey to San Francisco there have been performances, lectures, workshops and tours.

"I think this is the biggest centennial celebration of an American writer in recent memory," says Susan Shillinglaw, director of the Center for Steinbeck Studies. (A calendar of events can be found at www.steinbeck100.org).

Tomorrow night, singer-songwriter Jackson Browne will give a concert at the Fox Theatre in Redwood City to benefit the Center for Steinbeck Studies. Browne is the latest recipient of the Center's John Steinbeck Award for exemplifying the writer's values; the award has previously gone to playwright Arthur Miller, novelist and filmmaker John Sayles and singer-songwriter Bruce Springsteen.

This summer, The California Council for the Humanities will mount a campaign to get every Californian to read Steinbeck's best-known work, "The Grapes of Wrath." (The idea of having everyone read the same book came from Chicago, whose residents last year were urged to read Harper Lee's "To Kill a Mockingbird.") "The Grapes of Wrath" is an obvious choice, says Jim Quay, executive director of the council, because `"it's the archetypal California story."

Steinbeck's local ties -- he attended Stanford, and he lived in Los Gatos while he wrote "The Grapes of Wrath" -- make celebrations inevitable. But even though he won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1962, in American academia Steinbeck's reputation has been in eclipse. As far back as 1942, the influential literary critic Alfred Kazin faulted Steinbeck's work for its "calculated sentimentality'" and "tameness of imagination." Among American writers of the 20th century, Faulkner, Hemingway and Fitzgerald became the touchstones; Steinbeck was relegated by academia to the second rank.

New York Times writer Martin Arnold observed in a column earlier this month that Steinbeck's works are rarely studied in college literature courses. As a representative academic voice, Arnold quoted Yale professor Harold Bloom: "You can't read three paragraphs of Steinbeck without thinking of a poorer Hemingway, with characterizations that are contrived."

In a letter to the Times, Shillinglaw responded that Steinbeck had become "a victim of the critical opinion that has so long held sway in Eastern academia: accessible writer, sentimentalist, regionalist, writer good only in the 1930s, and so on." In a conversation she elaborates on the Eastern bias against Steinbeck: "I just got a call from a Boston Herald reporter who said they were looking for someone to talk about Steinbeck on a TV show and couldn't find anyone in Boston who had taught Steinbeck extensively enough to discuss him."

In contrast, she notes, "I was on the BBC this morning and the person in England was fantastic on Steinbeck -- very articulate, very impressed with him. I think he has a more exalted standing and he's read more extensively overseas because he represents that quintessentially American spirit."

Novelist and historian James D. Houston, who lives in Santa Cruz, concurs with Shillinglaw's observation about Steinbeck's international reputation. "When I've traveled overseas, I saw his books in the bookstores, in all languages, everywhere I went. Steinbeck has never had high academic recognition," Houston says, "but it hasn't harmed his readership. 'The Grapes of Wrath' has been in print for 62 years. I just read an article the other day that said it sells about 200,000 copies a year." Michael Millman, executive editor at Penguin Putnam, confirms that figure and adds, "It's nothing compared to 'Of Mice and Men' -- we're selling more than 2 million copies a year of Steinbeck's books."

In his column, Arnold asserted that Steinbeck's ongoing popularity was "more about sociology and history than about literature" and that "Steinbeck's Great Depression resonance, and the mythology of the Dust Bowl . . . accounts for the ready availability of his works in stores." But Houston rejects that notion: "That's not why a novel lasts," he says. "To say that it's connected to sociology or the Depression is really to miss the source of the lasting power of 'The Grapes of Wrath.'"

"For one thing, it's an immigrant story. We have new generations of people coming into this country continually who have become refugees in spite of their own best efforts. So the story has that kind of relevance, together with the poignant power of the promise that if we can just get to California our lives will be better. California becomes a metaphor for all those places we wish we could get to that would make our lives better."

Quay reinforces Houston's perception that the immigrant story is part of the book's continuing appeal. In planning the California-wide reading of the book, he spoke with Francisco Jiménez, a Santa Clara University professor who has written two books, "The Circuit" and "Breaking Through," about his childhood in California's migrant worker camps. Jiménez told Quay that when he was assigned "The Grapes of Wrath" in school, "he didn't even know what 'wrath' meant. But he couldn't put the book down. He saw in the Joads' experiences the experiences of his own family."

Shillinglaw adds, "The depiction of the migrants in `The Grapes of Wrath' and in the Dorothea Lange pictures of the '30s are not all that different from the Afghan refugees leaving their homes -- the resonance of homelessness continues." It's Steinbeck's artistry, his ability to tell an involving human story, Houston says, that makes "The Grapes of Wrath" literature, and not sociology or history. The historian Carey McWilliams' "The Factories in the Field," Houston points out, was published in 1939, the same year as "The Grapes of Wrath," and it deals with the same issues, particularly the exploitation of migrant workers. "It's a great book, it's reportage, it's sociology, it's statistics -- and it has had a readership, but you don't sell 200,000 copies a year of it," Houston says.

"The Grapes of Wrath" is Steinbeck's one unchallenged achievement -- even Harold Bloom includes it in his 1994 book "The Western Canon," a roster of books that Bloom sees as central to our culture. It placed 10th on the list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century drawn up by the editorial board of the Modern Library in 1998, and in a survey in Great Britain in 1997 that named the top 100 books of the 20th century, it placed ninth.

Other Steinbeck works that Houston thinks will endure include "The Log From the Sea of Cortez," an account of a trip Steinbeck made with the biologist Ed Ricketts in 1940 to the Gulf of California. "It's a fascinating piece of narrative with a high level of environmental and biological intelligence, an enduring piece of environmental non-fiction."

"In Dubious Battle," Steinbeck's 1936 novel about a fruit pickers' strike, is "his tightest novel," Houston says. "It's really well put together. I read it in the '60s, when there was a lot of political action all over California. It was like a handbook for strike organizers, but it's also a great piece of dramatic writing."

Houston also admires Steinbeck's Oscar-nominated screenplay for the 1952 film "Viva Zapata!" which starred Marlon Brando and Anthony Quinn and was directed by Elia Kazan. "I read that script a couple of times and it's a terrific piece of writing. It's like 'In Dubious Battle'; it's about people coming up from the bottom and trying to go up against large forces."

Steinbeck's own books, especially "The Grapes of Wrath," "East of Eden," and "Of Mice and Men," were turned into successful movies, Houston thinks, "because he was a terrific storyteller, and the meaning of the book, whatever it is, is lodged right in the action. It's that kind of dramatic storytelling that moves very quickly from page to film."

In the end, Steinbeck's literary status will probably depend on his storytelling ability, and not on his standing in academia or his sociological and historical significance. As Shillinglaw observes, "So many people like Steinbeck; he's so beloved by the American public. And he engages so many kinds of readers, from teenagers to adults. It's kind of like Harry Potter -- he has that same broad appeal."