Steinbeck Review
John Steinbeck and the Perfectibility
of Man (Louis Owens Essay Prize Winner)
Matthew Langione
On October 25th, 1962, John Steinbeck turned on the television
set at his Sag Harbor home in order to learn about the most recent
political developments. Three days earlier, President Kennedy had
informed the world that the Soviet Union was building secret
missile bases in Cuba, a mere ninety miles off the coast of Florida.
The Cuban Missile Crisis, as it was called, had dominated media
outlets for over seventy-two hours. Yet the phrase that issued first
from Steinbeck’s television set that day was different, and to him,
unforeseen: “John Steinbeck has been awarded the Nobel Prize
for Literature” (After 261).1 Less than two months later, still
beneath the shadow of global fear, Steinbeck delivered his Nobel
Prize acceptance speech to the Swedish Academy.
Having long and painstakingly ruminated on a number of
topics, Steinbeck chose finally to speak about the great duty of
humankind to ensure its perpetuation by seeking “perfection”—a
fitting choice given the conspicuous human frailty at the time.
Steinbeck warned, “Humanity has been passing through a gray
and desolate time of confusion. . . . With [its] long, proud history
of standing firm against all of its natural enemies, sometimes in
the face of almost certain defeat and extinction, we would be
cowardly and stupid to leave the field on the eve of our greatest
potential victory” (America 172-3). The victory against “weakness
and despair”—the battle for human perfection—would be won,
Steinbeck maintained, only if humankind, in all of its reaches and
occupations, believed in the possibility of perfectibility. Of his
own craft, he spoke explicitly: “I hold that a writer who does not
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passionately believe in the perfectibility of man has no dedication
nor any membership in literature” (173).
For Steinbeck, however, this belief in the human potential for
perfection did not imply either that human beings could attain
perfection in the span of a lifetime or that society could advance
to an ideal state, as Plato proposed in The Republic. Rather, he
held that the pursuit of perfection, as an autotelic practice, was
the most effective method of assuring the progress both of the
individual and of society. His wife, Elaine, remembers his saying,
“You believe in the perfectibility of man. Man will never be perfect,
but he has to strive for it” (After 271). Essentially, Steinbeck
used the rhetoric of perfectibility as a psychological strategy to
encourage human beings to strive towards perfection, finding it a
more motivating goal than merely to strive for improvement.
Steinbeck believed that the human pursuit of perfection, even
if never attained, would effect the best of societal and individual
achievement, a theory influenced by Emerson’s evocation of
the “unattained but attainable self” and reaching even further
back to Jonathan Edwards’s vision of humankind floating on
toward an ever-receding Godhead. His belief does not, however,
align with the popular nineteenth-century philosophy of human
progress, an optimistic view of evolution that held nature to
be the perfecting organism of the human species. The thinkers
who propounded this philosophy believed that nature would
lead humankind to perfection despite any support or resistance.
Throughout his writings, by contrast, Steinbeck sets forth a theory
of action, holding in the main that an advanced society can be
achieved only through the pervasive faith of its citizens. Many
of Steinbeck’s novels assert interdependence—humankind as the
savior of fellow humankind. Looking closely at an early novel,
The Grapes of Wrath, beside a major later novel, The Winter of
Our Discontent, we may readily observe this dynamic theory of
human perfectibility.
First, however, it would be well to acknowledge a philosophical
tension between perfectionism and a holistic concept that Steinbeck
cultivated early in his career on a sea-faring expedition with his
best friend, marine biologist Ed Ricketts. In his travel journal, Sea
of Cortez, Steinbeck explains that a purer understanding of the
environment is achieved by what he terms “non-teleological” or
“is” thinking—in other words, the suppression of the tendency
to impute cause-and-effect rationale to perception.2 Steinbeck
and Ricketts observe an inherent danger in relying on the
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“purposiveness of events.” Considering the example of the poor,
Steinbeck notes that teleological interpretation renders them
“deserving” of their poverty by presuming a direct causality.
Teleology infuses the individual with the idea that he is capable of
determining what “should be,” whereas such notions are rarely
more than “subjective” or “anthropomorphic” projections.
In his words, “it presumes the bettering of conditions, often,
unfortunately, without achieving more than a most superficial
understanding of those conditions” (Log 112). Non-teleological
thinking, on the other hand, seems to deny the possibility of human
perfection, because it regards history neither as a development,
nor as a faithful projection of the future.3 Steinbeck elucidates
the distinction well: “Non-teleological thinking concerns itself
primarily not with what should be, or could be, or might be, but
rather with what actually ‘is’—attempting at most to answer the
already sufficiently difficult questions what or how, instead of
why” (112). This refutation of the interconnectedness or linearity
of events has been enough for some to conclude that the author
rejected human progress and therefore human perfectibility.
Yet neither this view, nor its antithesis places Steinbeck
in his proper context. In the pages to come, I will argue that
Steinbeck was, at the very least, an exponent of the practical
benefit of perfectionist ideology—a notion that should inform
our interpretation of his novels, particularly Of Mice and Men,
The Winter of Our Discontent, and The Grapes of Wrath, which
have been subjected to interpretations confusing non-teleology
with nihilism. Steinbeck himself was clear. In Sea of Cortez, he
remarks that metaphysicians (specifically Emerson) will inevitably
always “run into the brick wall of the impossibility of perfection
while at the same time insisting on the validity of perfection”
(Log 124). Though perfection itself may be an unattainable
goal, the survival and progress of humankind depends upon a
collective effort to attain it.4 This evinces the claim of one previous
Steinbeck scholar, that the “species-characteristics [Steinbeck]
was most intrigued and concerned with could not be measured
or explained in scientific terms” (Lieber 262). In his Nobel Prize
acceptance speech, Steinbeck implies that hope for humankind is
“with Men.” A close examination of a few well-known moments
in two of Steinbeck’s novels explains the implications of this
statement as it relates to perfectionism. By the phrase “with
Men,” Steinbeck refers to the unscientific concepts of generosity
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and interdependence, which he considered the greatest hope for
human salvation.
Nowhere is he more explicit than in the final scene of
The Grapes of Wrath, which tells the tale, with heartbreaking
poignancy, of the Joad family’s eviction from their Oklahoma
farm and their ensuing migration to the “promised land” of the
California labor fields. In the opening pages, we are introduced
to the first oppressive force of the novel: nature. The winds and
drought have ravaged what was once fertile land, rendering it
practically uninhabitable. Steinbeck writes, “Men and women
huddled in their houses, and they tied handkerchiefs over their
noses when they went out, and wore goggles to protect their
eyes” (Grapes 5).5 Shifting from this introductory background
to the primary narrative that begins in the second chapter, Tom,
paroled from prison, catches up with his family, who have been
evicted from their farm, and they set out on the road to California.
Here they are introduced to the novel’s second, and most severe
oppressive force: large-scale agribusiness. The road to California
is filled with death—literally Grandpa and Grandma Joad, but
also the abandoned trucks and spirits of men. Steinbeck’s novel is
so critical of the self-interested practices of California agribusiness
that it provoked Senator La Follette to report on labor conditions,
which ultimately detailed the “shocking degree of human misery”
among migrant workers and charged the Associated Farmers with
“the most flagrant and violent infringement of civil liberties”
(qtd. in Morsberger 29).
Yet, despite the
“The road to Caliindefatigably grim labor
fornia is filled with
situation in the novel,
d e a t h — l i t e r a l ly
The Grapes of Wrath,
Grandpa and Grandas Donald V. Coers
ma Joad, but also the
remarks, “still holds
abandoned
trucks
out hope for human
and
spirits
of
men.”
advancement” (Grapes
xiv). It does so through
the assertion that people
can transcend physical boundaries through interpersonal unity
and community. Steinbeck writes, “. . . man, unlike any other
thing organic or inorganic in the universe, grows beyond his
work, walks up the stairs of his concepts, emerges ahead of
his accomplishments” (Grapes 205). Steinbeck portrays a clear
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championship of the democratic principle: “. . . two men are not
as lonely and perplexed as one. And from this first ‘we’ there
grows a still more dangerous thing: ‘I have a little food’ plus ‘I
have none.’ If from this problem the sum is ‘We have a little food,’
the thing is on its way, the movement has direction. Only a little
multiplication now, and this land, this tractor are ours” (206).
Steinbeck shifts quickly here from companionship as a means
of allaying loneliness to companionship as a means of escaping
miserable labor conditions.
Throughout the novel, however, there is a larger concept—the
concept of a universal soul—that takes precedence. Before leaving
his family, Tom Joad relates his conversation with Preacher Casy
to his mother: “Says one time [Casy] went out in the wilderness
to find his own soul, an’ he foun’ he didn’ have no soul that was
his’n. Says he foun’ he jus’ got a little piece of a great big soul.
Says a wilderness ain’t no good, ‘cause his little piece of a soul
wasn’t no good ‘less it was with the rest, an’ was whole” (570).
First, this passage suggests that an individual’s connectedness with
other individuals triumphs over all else, even connectedness with
the land (“wilderness”), though the latter too is established as a
strong connection throughout the novel. Second, it summarizes
Steinbeck’s deeply democratic philosophy that all of humankind
shares one soul, that the great labor of humanity is to work
toward the unity of the soul. This philosophy leads directly to
Tom Joad’s final appearance in the novel, the midnight escape
during which he announces his democratic quest. To Ma Joad’s
concern that he may be killed, he responds that if everyone shares
“one big soul” :
Then it don’t matter. Then I’ll be all aroun’ in
the dark. I’ll be ever’where—wherever you look.
Wherever they’s a fight so hungry people can eat,
I’ll be there. Wherever they’se a cop beatin’ up a
guy, I’ll be there. If Casy knowed, why, I’ll be in
the way guys yell when they’re mad an’—I’ll be
in the way kids laugh when they’re hungry an’
they know supper’s ready. An’ when our folks
eat the stuff they raise an’ live in the houses they
build—why, I’ll be there. (572)
Through Tom Joad’s words, Steinbeck’s philosophy is
made clear. Human freedom will be won only through the
interdependability and interdependence of humankind. The final
scene in the novel is an essential and symbolic example. When
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the Joads discover a young boy and his starving father huddled in
a barn where they seek shelter from a tumultuous rain, with Ma
Joad’s approval Rose of Sharon, one of the daughters, who had
just delivered a stillborn baby, offers the starving man the only
sustenance the family has—the milk from her breast. No final
passage could be more direct: the source of human salvation is
literally within the human being.
Evidence suggests that Steinbeck maintained this philosophy
throughout his life. The Nobel Prize acceptance speech, for
example, shows that his belief in the need for perfectibility
was still with him as late as six years before his death. Further
evidence abounds in his last work of fiction, The Winter of Our
Discontent, which, like The Grapes of Wrath, concludes with an
eloquent assertion of the necessity of human interdependence.
The works are united by a common technique. In both novels,
Steinbeck examines a single family as the representation of a
larger group, and ultimately mankind. In The Grapes of Wrath,
the Joads represent the oppressed migrant workers of California.
In The Winter of Our Discontent, the Hawleys represent the
Every American faced with an era of moral decline. Likewise,
both novels’ final scenes raise poignant criticism of contemporary
values, while offering proscriptive hope for self and societal
amelioration.
The Winter of Our Discontent opens with Ethan Hawley
in the “Abel” manifestation of what many critics have referred
to as his syncretic “Cain-Abel” role.6 Ethan’s eventual duality is
foreshadowed by his polar ancestry: pirates on one side, Puritans
on the other. At the beginning of the novel, we learn that his
passivity and moral conscience have never made him much of
a businessman in New Baytown, which was founded by his
ancestors. Ethan works as a clerk at the grocery store that once
belonged to his family before it was purchased by Marullo, a
foreigner whose principle, “business is money,” does not appeal
to him (Winter 23). At the outset of the novel, he does not seem
to mind his diminished position. His loyalty to Marullo is evident
when Biggers, a salesman from a local warehouse, tries to bait
Ethan into operating a cost-cutting scheme. When Ethen objects,
Biggers tries to rationalize the treachery: “Who’s double-crossed?
He don’t lose anything and you make a buck. Everybody’s got a
right to make a buck” (25). Introducing imagery that will become
symbolic throughout the novel, Ethan replies, “It’s a dark day”
and refuses to take the bait (25).
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Matthew Langione
Ethan’s treatment of his figurative brother in the Cain-Abel
structure, Danny Taylor, is equally character revealing. They
had been best friends as boys, “blood brothers,” before Danny
dropped out of the U.S. Naval Academy and became an alcoholic.7
Ethan regrets that Danny has become a “shuffling sorrow” about
the streets of his hometown, stating, “I should be able to help
him. I’ve tried, but he won’t let me. Danny is as near a brother as
I ever had, same age and growing up, same weight and strength.
Maybe the guilt comes because I am my brother’s keeper and I
have not saved him” (41). Throughout the first half of the novel,
Ethan is a paragon of scrupulous standards in a world polluted
by sin, a world in which the bank is the “holiest of holies,” and
money, the “Great God” (150).
Ethan’s shift to a Cain figure is signaled by his deceit and
betrayal of Danny, who trusts him. Swayed by his wife and
children’s materialistic desires, Ethan makes his first morally
reprehensible business venture. Alert to the need for level ground
for an airport, Ethan knows that Danny’s family land, Taylor
Meadow, is the only potential building site. With duplicitous
intent, he warns Danny that the land will be taken away from him
if he doesn’t sober up, that it is highly valuable, and that, for the
sake of family pride, he ought to keep it for himself rather than
selling it. Despite his drunkenness, Danny sees through Ethan’s
offer to give him money for a rehabilitation clinic, responding,
“You’re betting I’ll put up my meadow as collateral. And you’re
betting that a thousand dollars’ worth of booze will kill me,
and there you’ll be with an airport in your lap.” (Winter 120) A
moment later, remembering Ethan as a boy, Danny rescinds his
skepticism: “Do you think I don’t remember you? You’re the kid
with the built-in judge. Okay. I’m getting dry. The bottle’s empty.
I’m going out. My price is one thousand bucks” (120).
By the end of the novel, Ethan’s money does kill Danny,
and Ethan ironically makes a “killing” off the profits from
Taylor Meadow. His moral decay and resulting financial gain
do not stop there. Gaining back the Hawley grocery store by
contriving to have Marullo deported, he plans to rob the town
bank. Convincing himself that these acts are acceptable business
practice in the modern world, Ethan observes that it is easy to
“raise a moral reason for doing what [he] wanted to do anyway”
and concludes that such crimes are minor because they were
not “against men, only against money” (201, 241). At his most
destructive, he employs a line of thinking so often employed to
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justify depravity: “It has to be faced in business and in politics a
man must carve and maul his way through men to get to be King
of the Mountain. Once there, he can be good and kind—but he
must get there first” (207).
That Ethan himself must come to terms with his sins is
obvious. But Steinbeck goes a step further, depicting a society
that ignorantly accepts and cherishes the new pragmatism that
Ethan has embraced. When his wife, Mary, finds that Marullo
has been deported, leaving the store to Ethan, her wispy façade
of concern is betrayed by an expression of joy: “You’re not a
clerk! Not a clerk!” (238) More tellingly, Ethan is urged to run
for the position of “town manager.” Mr. Baker, whose bank
Ethan had intended to rob, urges: “You’re the man. Good family,
reliable, property-owner, businessman, respected. You don’t have
an enemy in town. Of course you’re the man” (250). At Ethan’s
first intimation of doubt, Baker says “it’s the perfect way,”
before Ethan muses, “from grocery clerk to town manager”
(250). Steinbeck thus exposes the moral degradation of New
Baytown, where the perfect way to achieve the American ragsto-riches ideal (or worse yet, the rags-to-respectability ideal) is
to steal, manipulate, and murder. If it ended here, The Winter
of Our Discontent would keep as its final message the nihilistic
perception of American society as irreconcilably corrupt.8
But in the final few pages, Ethan manages to find reconciliation
for his sins, while Steinbeck finds reconciliation for his philosophy
of hope. The turning point is Ethan’s discovery that his son,
Allen, has plagiarized in his submission to a national essay
contest. The television publicist offers compensation if Ethan will
keep the matter quiet and conceal it from the public, suggesting
a bargain: “We could work something out. Scholarship or like
that—something dignified” (272). Yet Ethan is outraged: “I know
how you feel. What you can cover up doesn’t exist. . . . Has sin
gone on strike for a wage raise?” (272). When Ethan asks his son
whether or not he knows plagiarism is wrong, Allen responds,
“Who cares? Everybody does it. . . . Don’t you read the papers?
Everybody right up to the top—just read the papers. You get to
feeling holy, just read the papers. I bet you took some in your
time, because they all do” (273). This moment, in the final pages,
is the anagnorisis of The Winter of Our Discontent, the moment
in which Ethan recognizes the true gravity and consequence of
his recent actions. Like generations of Hawley fathers before him,
his example of immorality has led his son to sin. Symbolically,
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Matthew Langione
Allen signs the plagiarized essay with his full name, “Ethan Allen
Hawley II” rather than “Allen Hawley,”—emblematic of his
moral resemblance to his father.
In despair, Ethan determines to kill himself. His daughter,
Ellen, fearful of his motive, tries to prevent him from leaving
the house. Unsuccessful, she hugs him, surreptitiously slipping
the family talisman into his pocket.9 As Ethan sets out for the
seashore, he muses, “It’s so much darker when a light goes
out than it would have been if it had never shone. The world
is full of dark derelicts” (275). At the nadir of his despair, he
fears that there is no community upon which he can depend, that
each person stands alone. He laments, “It isn’t true that there’s
a community of light, a bonfire of the world. Everyone carries
his own, his lonely own” (275). In diametric contrast, the final
articulation of Steinbeck’s philosophy in The Grapes of Wrath,
portrays a dependable and depending community. But Ethan’s
despair does not win out. When he discovers the family talisman
that Ellen had slipped into his pocket, he abandons his plans to
commit suicide, realizing that he “had to get back—had to return
the talisman to its new owner. Else another light might go out”
(276).
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The light is now Ellen’s. Ethan has, after all, conceded that
his own is long extinguished. But in keeping his daughter’s moral
spirit alive, his own life assumes a transcendent purpose, his
decision deepening the Cain-Abel storyline, which centers around
the choice between brotherhood and selfhood. In Steinbeck’s
depiction, the former leads to survival and progress; the latter
to death and degeneration. Steinbeck’s retelling of the Cain-Abel
story renders it in a significantly felicitous light. Though Ethan
cannot restore the life of his friend, Danny, and cannot undo
the moral damage that he has brought upon his family and his
community, Steinbeck implies that through the regeneration of
moral choices, Cain-figures have the potential to recast themselves
as productive citizens of society.
While he is brought to near defeat and death by his son’s moral
downfall, Ethan is brought to redemption by his daughter’s sense
of morality. Steinbeck believed that children carry the potential to
avoid the faults of their parents. In The Acts of King Arthur and
His Noble Knights, he asserted that “any man. . . when he comes
to maturity has a very deep sense that he will not win the Quest
. . . . The self-character cannot win the Quest, but his son can, his
spotless son, the son of his seed and his blood who has his virtues
but has not his faults” (364). In Ethan’s case, his daughter, Ellen,
has become the “light-bearer”—the hope of turning the Hawley
legacy, and by extension, American culture, into a source of pride
for coming generations.
Like The Grapes of Wrath, The Winter of Our Discontent
stands as a dialectic fitting neither into the non-teleological
framework of Steinbeck’s early philosophy nor into the Darwinian
ideology of progress. Like Emerson, Steinbeck maintains that
human progress requires individual action and striving for selfbetterment. Tom Joad must strike out on his altruistic mission;
Ethan must return to his. But unlike Emerson’s call for self-reliance,
Steinbeck’s call is for a mutual reliance—an interdependence
among human beings. He regarded human beings as capable
of growth, capable of setting goals that aimed for perfection.
This perfection, he believed, lies in community, a fellowship of
human beings, rather than nature. As Ethan’s parental gift of
the talisman assured the continuity of family values and as Rose
of Sharon’s milk offered the gift of life to a starving stranger,
Steinbeck proffers the written word as his contribution to the
human community. In his Nobel Prize speech, he underscores the
significance of such a gift, stating that the writer “is charged with
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exposing our many grievous faults and failures, with dredging
up to the light our dark and dangerous dreams for the purpose
of self-improvement” (America 173). For Steinbeck, human
beings in a natural state were, if left solitary, desultory and static
creatures. The only hope for their perfectibility was to be found
in a dependable and supporting community.
Notes
1
Steinbeck had little reason to suspect that he had even been considered
for the award. Though he had been among the finalists in 1945, criticism
of his subsequent work had been, in large part, unfavorable. On October
25th, the letter from the Academy lay still unread in the mail slot of his
New York City apartment.
2
Although there exists some evidence that Ricketts wrote the
chapter on non-teleological thinking prior to the expedition, I refer
to Steinbeck as the writer because the prose is in his voice, suggesting
either rewriting or heavy revision and, no doubt, approval. Nonetheless,
though I acknowledge that inklings of non-teleological thinking surface
as early as 1933 in To a God Unknown, it should be noted that accepting
the philosophical unity of Steinbeck and Ricketts is imprudent. Richard
Astro has effectively dispelled this myth of unison, arguing that whatever
influence Ricketts had on the author’s philosophy, he had little on his
fiction. See Richard Astro, John Steinbeck and Edward F. Ricketts: The
Shaping of a Novelist (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1973).
3
However, in a somewhat contradictory turn, Steinbeck claims that
“Non-teleological ideas derive through ‘is’ thinking, associated with
natural selection as Darwin seems to have understood it” (Log 112). The
invocation of Darwin here is eccentric, perhaps referring to Darwin’s
later qualifying statements. Darwin, in the context of class, certainly did,
after all, believe in history as a record of progress and as a projection
of the future, though he always allowed the possibility of chance and
chaos. He wrote: “As all living forms of life are lineal descendants of
those which lived long before the Silurian epoch, we may feel certain
that the ordinary succession by generation has never once been broken,
and that no cataclysm has desolated the whole world. Hence we may
look with some confidence to a secure future of equally inappreciable
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length. And as natural selection works solely by and for the good of
each being, all corporeal and mental endowments will tend to progress
toward perfection” (459).
4
Perfection is unattainable according to Steinbeck because humans,
he believes, will advance at an ever-diminishing rate, ever frustrated
by infinite anomalies, each individually manageable, but multiplying
at a rate exponential to the rate of human comprehension. He writes,
“Anomalies. . . are the commonest intellectual vehicles for breaking
through; all are solvable in the sense that any one is understandable,
but that one leads with the power n to still more and deeper anomalies”
(Log 124).
5
Scarcely any critics have maintained that Steinbeck exaggerates the
physical oppressiveness of the climate. As leading Dust Bowl historian
Donald Worster writes, “In no other instance was there greater or more
sustained damage to the American land, and there have been few times
when so much tragedy was visited upon its inhabitants. . . [I]n the decade
of the 1930s the dust storms of the plains were an unqualified disaster”
(16).
6
Most lucid in the expression of this view is Michael J. Meyer. See
“Citizen Cain: Ethan Hawley’s Double Identity in The Winter of Our
Discontent.” After The Grapes of Wrath: Essays on John Steinbeck
(Athens: Ohio UP, 1995) 197-213.
7
Symbolically, we find later that Ethan and Danny cut heart-shaped
tattoos into their arms with razor-blades when they were young.
8
Steinbeck was explicit in relating the microcosm, New Baytown,
to the macrocosm, America and the rest of the world. He wrote, “This
year of 1960 was a year of change, a year when secret fears come into
the open, when discontent stops being dormant and changes gradually
to anger. It wasn’t only in me or in New Baytown. . . and it wasn’t only
the nation; the whole world stirred with restlessness and uneasiness as
discontent moved to anger and anger tried to find an outlet in action”
(249).
9
Textual evidence supports this inference. In the penultimate chapter,
Ethan gives his daughter the talisman and tells her to look up the meaning
of the word, after which the talisman is not mentioned again until the
end of the same chapter, once the publicist leaves: “I thought to go to the
cabinet and take the talisman in my hand—had stood up to get it” (272).
He is interrupted, however, by the scuffle upstairs in which Allen attacks
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Ellen races to grab hold of Ethan. In his own words, “She grappled me
again and her hands caressed and stroked my arms, my sides, dug her
balled fists into my side pockets so that I was afraid she might find the
razor blades” (274). It seems likely, given the meaning that Ellen would
have found for the word talisman in the dictionary (protection), that the
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Ellen. After mediating the dispute, as he is about to leave the house,
talisman is within one of her “balled fists.” When he discovers it in his
pocket, he remarks: “. . . I felt the lump. Then in wonder I remembered
the caressing, stroking hands of the light-bearer” (276).
Works Cited
Coers, Donald V., Paul D. Ruffin and Robert J. DeMott, ed. After The
Grapes of Wrath: Essays on John Steinbeck. Athens: Ohio UP,
1995.
Darwin, Charles. The Origin of Species. New York: Gramercy, 1995.
Lieber, Todd M. “Talismanic Patterns in the Novels of John Steinbeck.”
American Literature 44 (May 1972): 262-75.
Morsberger, Robert E. “Steinbeck and Censorship.” Journal of
Interdisciplinary Studies 16 (Fall 2003): 29-35.
Steinbeck, Elaine and Robert Wallsten, ed. Steinbeck: A Life in Letters.
New York: Penguin, 1989.
Steinbeck, John. The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights. New
York: Farrar,
Straus, and Giroux, 1976.
Steinbeck, John. America and Americans and Selected Nonfiction. Ed.
Susan Shillinglaw and Jackson J. Benson. New York: Viking, 2002.
. The Grapes of Wrath. Introduction by Richard Astro. New York:
Penguin, 1976.
. The Log from the Sea of Cortez. New York: Penguin, 1977.
. The Winter of Our Discontent. New York: Penguin, 1996.
Worster, Donald. Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s. Oxford:
Oxford UP, 1982.
Matthew Langione is a graduate of Amherst College. He wrote this
essay as a chapter of an undergraduate thesis he submitted in spring
2005 under the direction of Professor Barry O’Connell.
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