Working Days by John Steinbeck Read Free Book Online Page A

and reprinted.) The quotes by Eleanor Roosevelt (from her syndicated column, “My Day,” June 28, 1939) and Congressman Boren (from Congressional Record, 76th Con., 3rd Sess., pt. 13, LXXXVI, 1940) appear on pages 131 and 126, respectively. In April 1940, after inspecting California migrant camps, Mrs. Roosevelt said, “I have never thought The Grapes of Wrath was exaggerated.” Gratefully, Steinbeck responded, “... thank you for your words. I have been called a liar so constantly that ... I wonder whether I may not have dreamed the things I saw and heard in the period of my research.” For current overviews of the novel’s public reception, critical evaluation, and place among 1930s art, see Peter Lisca’s helpful Viking Critical Edition of The Grapes of Wrath: Text and Criticism (New York: The Viking Press, 1972); Ray Lewis White, “The Grapes of Wrath and the Critics of 1939,” Resources for American Literary Study, 13 (Autumn 1983), 134-64; John Ditsky’s comprehensive introduction to his edition of Critical Essays on The Grapes of Wrath (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1989); Richard H. Pells’s perceptive “Radical Visions and American Dreams: Culture and Social Thought in the Depression Years (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1973); and David P. Peller’s energetic but sometimes cranky Hope Among Us Yet: Social Criticism and Social Solace in Depression America (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987).
    2. John Steinbeck to Pascal Covici, January 16, 1939. In Elaine Steinbeck and Robert Wallsten, eds., Steinbeck: A Life in Letters (New York: The Viking Press, 1975), p. 178. Hereafter entered in text of my Introduction. Steinbeck’s proprietary attitude toward his recently completed novel, so passionately defended in his January 16 letter to Covici, began to fade with each subsequent writing project. By 1955, invited to respond to a couple of diametrically opposed scholarly essays on The Grapes of Wrath which had recently been published in The Colorado Quarterly, Steinbeck was content to make only modest claims for his greatest book: ”I don’t think the Grapes of Wrath is obscure in what it tries to say. As to its classification and pickling, I have neither opinion nor interest. It’s just a book, interesting I hope, instructive in the same way the writing instructed me. Its structure is very carefully worked out and it is no more intended to be inspected than is the skeletal structure of a pretty girl. Just read it, don’t count it!“ Steinbeck’s complete ”A Letter on Criticism“ is readily available in E. W. Tedlock and C. V. Wicker, eds., Steinbeck and His Critics: A Record of Twenty-five Years (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1957), pp. 52-53.
    3. Jackson J. Benson had compiled the most useful account of Carol Steinbeck’s background, life, and political enthusiasms. See his The True Adventures of John Steinbeck, Writer (New York: The Viking Press, 1984), passim. Hereafter entered in the text of my Introduction. Contrary to what most critics have observed—or wished—Steinbeck was not very much interested in doctrinaire political theories at this point of his career. Benson sets the record straight in his True Adventures of John Steinbeck, and in his subsequent ”Through a Political Glass, Darkly: The Example of John Steinbeck,“ Studies in American Fiction, 12 (Spring 1984), 45—59. Carol, a liberal feminist ahead of her time, was a fascinating person who deserves an accurate biography of her own. California journalist Gene Detro has made a gossipy beginning, though the tone of his writing is unfairly biased against John. Consult ”Carol—The Woman Behind the Man,“ The Monterey Herald Weekend Magazine, June 10, 1984, 3—6, and ”The Truth About Steinbeck (Carol and John),“ Creative States Quarterly, 2 (1985), 12-13, 16.
    4. Telegram in the Annie Laurie Williams Papers, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University. Pare Lorentz (b. 1905) was another of