John Steinbeck Born in Salinas California 1902 setting

John Steinbeck Born in Salinas, California 1902 (setting of many of his novels, including portions of The Grapes of Wrath) Died December 20, 1968 v. Awarded the Pulitzer Prize for The Grapes of Wrath (1940) v. Awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature (1962)

Famous Works Include: Cup of Gold (1929, first novel) To a God Unknown (1933) Tortilla Flat (1935, brings Steinbeck popular success) Novels about the California laboring class: In Dubious Battle (1936) Of Mice and Men (1937) The Grapes of Wrath (1939) Sea of Cortez (1941, marine biology) Novels in support of U. S. war effort: Bombs Away (1942) The Moon is Down (1942) Cannery Row (1945) The Pearl (1947) East of Eden (1952, history of Salinas Valley and his family) Later works: Winter of Our Discontent (1961) Travels with Charley in Search of America (1962) Published posthumously: Viva Zapata! (1975) The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights (1976)

Steinbeck on Work “The last clear function of man—muscles aching to work, minds aching to create beyond the single need—this is man. To build a wall, to build a house, a dam, and in the wall and house and dam to put something of Manself, and to make Manself take back something from the wall, the house, the dam; to take hard muscles from the lifting, to take the clear lines and form from conceiving. For 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 of Wrath 204).

Steinbeck on Migrant Issues “The Harvest Gypsies” (1936) The Oklahomans (1937, an unfinished novel) L’Affaire Lettuceberg (1938, satire—completed but destroyed) Grapes of Wrath (1939)

Each of these versions of the migrant story shared a fixed core of elements: ØEntrenched power, wealth, authority and tyranny of California’s industrialized agricultural system ØViolations of migrant civil and human rights, ensuring their continued poverty and loss of dignity through threats reprisals and violence (xxiii). In opposition to: ØPowerlessness, poverty, victimization, and fear of the nomadic American migrants ØDesiring dignity, work, and land of their own ØKept alive by innate resilience and resourcefulness ØDemocratic benefits of the government sanitary camps (xxiv).

“The Harvest Gypsies” (1936) • Seven part series of articles on dustbowl immigrants written for the San Francisco News • Included photographs by Dorothea Lange • Steinbeck took trips to the fields with migrant laborers • Worked with. Tom Collins (the “Tom” in his dedication) * migrant camp organizer for the Federal Resettlement Administration (later called the Farm Security Administration). * Collins organized migrant camps from Maysville (north of Sacramento) to Weedpatch (near Arvin). * Steinbeck visited Collins for his articles and used Collins’ extensive notes for research.

The Oklahomans (1937) “I’ve been writing on a novel but I’ve had to destroy it several times. I don’t seem to know any more about writing a novel than I did ten years ago. You’d think I would learn. I suppose I could dash it off but I want this one to be a pretty good one. There’s another difficulty too. I’m trying to write a history while it is happening and I don’t want to be wrong” (qtd. in xxvii)

L’Affaire Lettuceberg (1938) • Steinbeck wrote: “. . . it is a vicious book, a mean book. I don’t know whether it will be any good at all. It might well be very lousy but it has a lot of poison in it I had to get out of my system and this was a good way to do it” (qtd. in xxx). • A satire aimed at the leading citizens of Steinbeck’s hometown of Salinas, CA. • A group called the committee of seven, who led vigilantes against migrant laborers. • In a letter to his editors, explaining why he destroyed the book, he explained: “Not once in the writing of it have I felt the curious warm pleasure that comes when work is going well. My whole work drive has been aimed at making people understand each other and then I deliberately write this book the aim of which is to cause hatred through partial understanding” (qtd. in xxxi).

Grapes of Wrath (1939) “I wrote The Grapes of Wrath in one hundred days, but many years of preparation preceded it. I take a hell of a long time to get started. The actual writing is the last process. ”

“Like other products of rough hewn American genius. . . The Grapes of Wrath has a home-grown quality: part naturalistic epic, part jeremiad, part captivity narrative, part road novel, part transcendental gospel” (Introduction x). jeremiad: a prolonged lament or complaint, as in the Hebrew prophet Jeremiah American Transcendentalism (Emerson): core belief an ideal spiritual state that “transcends” the physical and empirical and is only realized through the individual's intuition, rather than through the doctrines of established religions.

Influences on Steinbeck: Mode of the documentary Dorothea Lange photography of Dust Bowl Oklahoma and California migrant life

Walker Evans

Pare Lorentz films Working with Steinbeck on a film version of In Dubious Battle Ecce Homo! (1939, radio drama, ends with music “Battle Hymn of the Republic”-possible inspiration for title) The River (1938, flooding of the Mississippi River) The Plow that Broke the Plains (1936, Dustbowl)

Ecological Phalanx or Group-Man Theory “Argument of Phalanx” An essay Steinbeck wrote while writing In Dubious Battle “In it, he noted that men are not really final individuals, but are part of the phalanx which controls individual men and which, because it is more than a sum of its parts, can achieve ends beyond the reach of individual men” (437). Dr. William Emerson Ritter proposed that nature is a series of wholes that are “so related to their parts that not only does the existence of the whole depend upon the orderly cooperation and interdependence of its part, but the whole exercises a measure of determinative control over its parts. ” Individual animal become subjugated to a “superorganism”

Steinbeck applied principles of animal ecology to humans, exploring the relationship between the individual or the “groupman” or “phalanx. ” “All life forms from protozoa to antelopes and lions, from crabs to lemmings for and are part of phalanxes, but the phalanx of which the units are men, are more comples, more variable and power than any other. ” Religion resulted from a phalanx emotion (22). According to Steinbeck, “It is impossible for man to defy the phalanx without destroying himself. For if a man goes into the wilderness, his mind will dry up and at last he will die of starvation for the sustenance he can only get from involvement in the phalanx. ” (qtd in 437)

Biblical Parallels “On one level it is the story of the family’s struggle for survival in the Promised Land. . (Abraham, Isaac, and Sarah) On another level it is the story of a people’s struggle, the migrants’. (Israelites--Exodus from slavery in Egypt) On a third level it is the story of a nation, America. (Biblical Nation of Israel) On still another level, through. . . the allusions to Christ and those to the Israelites and Exodus, it becomes the story of mankind’s quest for profound comprehension of his commitment to his fellow man and to the earth he inhabits. ” (Louis Owens, qtd. in xiii)

Structure Contrapuntal structure (counterpoint): A) Short lyrical chapters of exposition and background about migrant (interchapters / intercalary chapters / “pace changers”) Steinbeck intended these to: “. . . hit the reader below the belt. With the rhythms and symbols of poetry one can get into a reader—open him up and while he is open introduce things on a intellectual level which he would not or could not conceive unless he were opened up. . . ” (qtd. in xi) B) Long narrative chapters of the Joad family’s exodus to California

Battle Hymn of the Republic Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord: He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored; He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword: His truth is marching on. Chorus Glory! Glory Hallelujah! His truth is marching on. 1) I have seen Him in the watch-fires of a hundred circling camps, They have builded Him an alter in the evening dews and damps; I can read His righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps: His day is marching on. 2) I have read a fiery gospel writ in burnished rows of steel: "As ye deal with my condemners, so with you my grace shall deal”; Let the Hero born of woman crush the serpent with his heel, Since God is marching on.

3) He has sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call retreat; He is sifting out the hearts of men before His judgement seat: Oh, be swift, my soul, to answer Him! be jubilant, my feet! Our God is marching on. 4) In the beauty of the lillies Christ was born across the sea, With a glory in his bosom that transfigures you and me: As he died to make men holy, let us die to make men free, While God is marching on. Julia Ward Howe, 1861, alt. This hymn was born during the American Civil War, when Howe visited a Union Army camp on the Potomac River near Washington, D. C. She heard the sol diers sing the song“John Brown’s Body, ” and was tak en with the strong march ing beat. She wrote the words the next day. The hymn appeared in the Atlantic Monthly in 1862.