John Steinbeck: A Biography (1995) by Jay Parini

John Steinbeck is arguably the greatest American novelist of the twentieth century. In “John Steinbeck: A Biography,” the great author’s life and times are dramatically chronicled by the magnificent (although sometimes pretentious) Jay Parini, a writer and professor of literature at Middlebury College in Vermont. I picked up “John Steinbeck” immediately after reading Parini’s deft treatment of William Faulkner in “One Matchless Time,” and must say that I was not disappointed. Both books are paragons of biographical research and literary criticism.

Born in the central California town of Salinas in 1902, Steinbeck grew up in relative material comfort but emotional isolation. Parini describes Steinbeck as a painfully shy young man, who from a young age was self-conscious about his looks, but confident in his ability to write. Parini explains that Steinbeck’s formidable ego was in constant tension with an often crippling case of self-doubt. I found that the tension between these opposites, as described by Parini, don’t quite add up. On the one hand, Parini writes, “Every book he wrote felt to him like a failure, and he never thought he was going to be able to summon the energy and imagination to complete the project at hand.” But then later he says, “Steinbeck believed in himself deeply; in fact, this was part of his genius: his innate self-confidence allowed him to move through difficult spots into clearer patches.”

One thing is for certain, and that is John Steinbeck never wanted to be anything other than a writer, much to his parents’ dismay. He spent six years taking classes at Stanford, but left without a degree in 1926, again to his parents’ dismay. One of the most remarkable features about Steinbeck was his incredible focus, determination, and resilience in the face continuous rejection during his early years as a writer. He bounced around from New York City to Lake Tahoe to his parents’ cottage in Pacific Grove, California during the late 1920s and early 1930s, taking occasional odd jobs to supplement his paltry income while consistently writing five hours a day, every day, in pursuit of his writing career. The rejections and disappointments he faced during this phase of his career would have crushed lesser men, myself included. Steinbeck remained undaunted. In a letter to a friend he explained the basis for his unnatural fortitude: “Eventually I shall be so good that I cannot be ignored. These years are disciplinary for me.” Between 1926 and 1933, Steinbeck’s novels and short stories earned a grand total of $870 (a little less than $20,000 today). His dedication to his craft never let up. Steinbeck was a literary workhorse, roughly completing a novel a year from 1932 to 1950.

Steinbeck maintained a strained and complicated relationship with Olive, his puritanical and domineering mother, and John Ernst, his weak and emotionally distant father. The author’s general waywardness and unswerving commitment to becoming a writer caused his parents considerable anxiety, but they never abandoned him. Even when Steinbeck was married and well past thirty-years-old, he was still receiving from them a $50 monthly stipend (around $850 in today’s dollars), a financial contribution that his mid-level municipal employee father could ill afford to give. When they both fell ill in the mid-1930s, it was Steinbeck and his first wife, Carol, and not one of his three sisters who all lived nearby, that took on the demanding role of parental caregiver. Sadly, both Olive and John Ernst died in the months before their son finally achieved critical and commercial success with his fourth novel, Tortilla Flat, in 1935.

The unlikely turning point in Steinbeck’s career came in 1930 when he met Ed Ricketts at a dentist’s office in Monterey. Ricketts was a University of Chicago dropout pursuing a career as a self-educated marine biologist. “Ricketts was a complex and fascinating man,” Parini writes, “an intellectual who did not lose touch with everyday life.” Ricketts read poetry and Hegel and Kant, but also liked to bum around with winos, prostitutes, farm hands, and factory workers. He took Steinbeck with him to flophouses, brothels, and migrant camps in and around Monterey. Ricketts convinced Steinbeck that these were the people and the stories he should be writing about, not buccaneers and pirates, the subject of Steinbeck’s first and forgettable novel, “A Cup of Gold.” Steinbeck grew to both love and admire Ricketts dearly. At his untimely death in 1948, Steinbeck wrote that Ricketts was “the greatest man I have known and the best teacher.”

Parini never says so, but Steinbeck must have been amongst the most highly paid writers of his generation. After the publication of “The Grapes of Wrath” in 1939, Steinbeck’s fame and fortune were secured. He would sell the movie rights alone for $75,000 and followed that up in 1942 with an astounding $300,000 for the rights to “The Moon is Down” (all told, about $6.5M in today’s dollars). He certainly out-earned the relatively penurious William Faulkner, whose only notable transaction was the $50,000 he received for Intruder in the Dust in 1948. Every novel Steinbeck ever wrote is still in print today and “The Grapes of Wrath” alone sells over 50,000 copies a year. It would be interesting to know how much his estate earns annually today, but Parini does not say.

Steinbeck was far more comfortable with wealth that he was with fame and his critics. The author maintains that Steinbeck was uncomfortable being a famous man. “John Steinbeck had made it to the top of the mountain,” he writes, “even though he did not particularly like being there or trust his ability to breathe the air at that height.” I found Parini’s assessment here less than convincing. For a shy man with an ambivalent attitude toward fame, Steinbeck sure spent a lot of time drinking it up with movie stars, producers, and other celebrities at soirees in Hollywood and Manhattan. In fact, one gets the distinct sense that John Steinbeck very much enjoyed being a world famous writer with lots of equally famous friends.

Steinbeck was prickly about his reputation and very much wanted to be seen as a serious man of letters. He was known then, as now, as something of a “Poor Man’s Hemingway,” and that clearly stung. He could be deeply wounded by poor reviews, especially in his later years when everything was compared unfavorably to “The Grapes of Wrath.” He dismissed his detractors as “cutglass critics, that grey priesthood which defines literature and has little to do with reading.” Fellow writer and confidant Gore Vidal agreed, complaining in a letter to Steinbeck: “Essentially, [critics] believe that good literature is written for a small, elect group of people like themselves.” Parini himself is conflicted about Steinbeck’s body of work. In his view, virtually every one of Steinbeck’s two-dozen works of fiction is somehow “flawed.” Moreover, in his view the quality of Steinbeck’s work after 1940 was “treacherously uneven.” Nevertheless, he somewhat charitably concludes: “Whatever his faults, Steinbeck was a uniquely authentic writer who, over nearly four decades, produced a body of work that evokes life in this century with compassion and lyrical precision.”

What makes Parini’s narrative sparkle and his subject come alive is his liberal quoting from the personal correspondence between Steinbeck and a variety of life long friends, such Toby Street and Dook Sheffield, chums from his Stanford days, Pat Covici and Elizabeth Otis, his longtime editor and literary agent, as well as his artistic collaborators from the entertainment industry, such as the director Elia Kazan and the actor Burgess Meredith. The prose in these raw and unguarded letters often dazzles, showing Steinbeck to be witty and insightful, but above all human. It genuinely makes me sad that we no longer write long, meaningful letters to friends the way Steinbeck and his circle did, but rather rely instead on mindless slang acronyms and cheesy emoticons over text messaging.

In his final decade, Steinbeck was deeply unsettled by the moral direction of his country. Parini writes that he located the source of this national malaise “in excess, the very abundance created by the hard work of the country’s ancestors.” America had triumphed over the Depression. The world Steinbeck wrote about so vividly in the 1930s was a distant memory by the 1960s. The new challenge was foreign, not domestic. Steinbeck had a rather conflicted view of the Vietnam War, which Parini finds sad and disappointing. He traveled to Vietnam and toured all around the country, often in highly dangerous situations (his son, John, served in the Army there too). Parini says he knew the government in Saigon was hopelessly corrupt and America’s involvement in the civil war senselessly misguided, but his innate patriotism and personal loyalty to Lyndon Johnson kept him from publicly condemning the war the way other writers and artists did. For much of his career, and especially after “The Grapes of Wrath,” Steinbeck was suspected of communist sympathies, a charge Parini views as absurd. “[Steinbeck’s] politics were, and remained, those of a standard New Deal Democrat with a fierce admixture of western individualism and Yankee independence,” he says. To the end, Steinbeck remained unabashedly American. When he died in 1968, he was the most beloved writer in the land.