The Outsider

...The novels of this period—Cup of Gold (1929), The Pastures of Heaven (1932), and To a God Unknown (1933)—were badly flawed, and all of them sold poorly...

...And yet, we forget, for all his mainstream success, how different Steinbeck was...

...At a stop in Havana he spent most of his money on a drunken spree and arrived in New York in midwinter with three dollars in his pocket...

...In the next rank of twentieth-century American novelists are names like Thomas Wolfe, Theodore Dreiser, and Sinclair Lewis, but Steinbeck doesn't quite seem to belong with them, either—nor at the next rank down, with writers like John Dos Passos...

...The marine biologist appears as the character "Doc" in Cannery Row (1945), and his death in a 1948 car accident devastated the writer...

...His real place is among the outsiders—some-where below Willa Cather and above Jack London in the set of untraditional authors who imposed themselves and their concerns on the American consciousness by the sheer force of their ambition, their will, and their storytelling ability...

...Coming of age in remote Northern California, Steinbeck was wholly untouched by modernism...

...Notwithstanding the success of all Steinbeck's titles in the late 1930s, Covici's firm went bankrupt in 1939...

...A Stanford friend got him a job as a laborer at the newly rising Madison Square Garden, where he pushed wheelbarrows full of wet concrete up wooden ramps for twelve hours a day...

...At the time of his birth in Salinas on February 27, 1902, California was just fifty years past statehood, an ethnic stew of white professionals, businessmen and landowners, Hispanic farm workers, and the hustling Chinese immigrants who dominated the service economy...

...His mother, a former school teacher, encouraged her son and his two older sisters in the classics of Victorian reading: the Bible, Shakespeare, John Bunyan, Sir Walter Scott, and Robert Louis Stevenson—with Twain and London to follow...

...The main character, Tom Joad, was portrayed as an Emersonian and an anti-Marxist, reflecting Steinbeck's own reformist but non-radical views...

...In 1942 came The Moon is Down, a competent World War II thriller about resistance fighters in Norway...

...After an initial wariness of the temptations of Hollywood, Steinbeck did some screenwriting in the 1940s and 1950s, after good film adaptations of The Grapes of Wrath and Of Mice and Men...

...He spent the next two years as a caretaker at a mountain estate near Lake Tahoe, where he wrote his first publishable work and met his first wife, Carol Henning...

...Such prominent critics as Edmund Wilson, Alfred Kazin, and Arthur Mizener savaged him in print...

...Marxist critics blasted the book for not going far enough in demanding social change...

...Steinbeck especially devoured Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur...

...Too young to serve in World War I, he traveled to Europe for the first time only in the late 1930s...

...But the truth is, John Steinbeck was always outside the main currents of American writing...

...In 1943, he traveled to North Africa and Sicily as a war correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune, where he met the legendary photojournalist Robert Capa...

...His father was a failed store owner who went on to be the Monterey County treasurer...

...In an editorial ostensibly congratulating him, the New York Times bemoaned the Nobel committee's "mechanics of selection" that picked Steinbeck, a living anachronism working outside "the main currents of American writing...

...He later said "a passionate love for the English language opened to me from this one book...

...The camps were owned by agricultural conglomerates such as Associated Foods and guarded by armed men...

...The novels and stories Steinbeck published from 1935 to 1938—In Dubious Battle, The Red Pony, Of Mice and Men, The Long Valley—are some of his best and point steadily in theme to The Grapes of Wrath (1939...

...certainly he gave away all the money from his 1940 Pulitzer Prize to a cash-strapped writer and friend named Ritchie Lovejoy, and he alarmed Covici by announcing that he had decided he was through with fiction—deciding instead to become an amateur scientist...

...The operator of a ramshackle research laboratory on the Monterey waterfront that sold specimens to museums and university labs, Ricketts was the great friend of Steinbeck's life...

...Among other projects, he wrote the Oscar-nominated screenplay for Elia Kazan's Viva Zapata...

...The ensuing friendship resulted in a 1947 trip to the Soviet Union with the photographer and A Russian Journal (1948), featuring Capa's pictures of everyday Russian life with text by Steinbeck...

...occasionally he was a great deal worse—as anyone who's read his Sweet Thursday (1954) knows...

...He received death threats and was convinced Associated Foods was out to get him...

...He was often no better than they were...

...But then, in 1962, Steinbeck was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature—and the general mild praise granted an established writer at the tail end of his career turned to vicious attacks...

...He did, in fact, collaborate with his friend Edward Ricketts on a book about marine biology called Sea of Cortez: A Leisurely Journey of Travel and Research (1941...

...Tortilla Flat was also the first of Steinbeck's books to be published by Pascal "Pat" Covici, an early enthusiast who rescued the writer from a bad contract and printed his books through the late 1930s...

...Steinbeck had a comfortable middle-class childhood in Salinas ("Let-tuceberg," he later contemptuously called it...

...Louis, and Kern County, California...

...For a brief moment in the 1930s, those currents matched his own, and he had the good luck to be at the peak of his talent when that moment came along...

...But the controversies only fueled sales, and Steinbeck reacted badly, drinking heavily and ruining his marriage to Carol...

...Landing a job as an editor at Viking, Covici took Steinbeck with him—and The Grapes of Wrath burst upon the nation...

...Along the way, he wrote the flawed but interesting East of Eden (1952), an excellent New England story, The Winter of Our Discontent (1961), and the lighthearted Travels with Charley (1962...

...The Grapes of Wrath was publicly burned in Buffalo, East St...

...This year marks the centenary of his birth—the fortieth anniversary of his contentious 1962 Nobel Prize in Literature—and still we're not sure what to do with him...

...Still, from 1940 on, he churned out an impressive amount of wide-ranging work...

...He was separated not only geographically but culBill Croke is a writer in Cody, Wyoming...

...The winter of 1937 was wet in California, and the sodden camps were rife with malnutrition, influenza, and pneumonia...

...The Grapes of Wrath, published by Viking in April 1939, was to become the bestselling book of the year...

...Steinbeck quickly returned to fiction, but he was right about the problem The Grapes of Wrath presented him: In his remaining thirty years, he would never equal it...

...The screen rights sold for an astonishing $75,000...

...In 1925, he dropped out and took a ship to New York to chase his literary dreams...

...With Tortilla Flat in 1935, however, he finally found success by putting together his first-hand knowledge of rural California with the dire economic realities of the 1930s to form a large tableau from which to work...

...His home in Los Gatos was besieged by admirers and down-and-outers looking for handouts...

...His mail was so heavy with requests for money that he had his publishers screen it...

...Enrolling at Stanford in 1920, he began a sketchy academic career of five years with no degree taken—peri-odically skipping semesters to work as a farm laborer in the Salinas Valley...

...Ernest Hemingway had the twentieth century's most distinctive voice, and Steinbeck could never compete with it...

...A brief stint as a newspaper stringer for the New York American saw him fired for lack of reportorial skills, and, disillusioned, he returned to California...

...Further investigation in the squatters' camps of the San Joaquin Valley appalled him...

...From the nation's pulpits came charges of obscenity, particularly concerning the book's ending, where "Rose of Sharon" Joad offers her milk-heavy breasts to a dying man in a barn (a scene Covici and Viking wanted to cut...

...Even back in the mid-1930s, Steinbeck would hang around the lab for hours, indulging amateur scientific interests, and engaging the widely read Ricketts in serious philosophical debate over a jug of cheap wine...

...Still, it was his own way that he followed, and Steinbeck—the real Steinbeck of In Dubious Battle, The Red Pony, Of Mice and Men, and The Grapes of Wrath—never really left the back roads and hidden places of California: the hot sun, the wind, the rain, the people, and the fertile earth...

...Certainly, his three great contemporaries overshadow him...

...Neither could he match F Scott Fitzgerald's gleaming prose or William Eaulkner's insights into character...

...When union representatives and members of the American Communist party tried to organize the migrants, the resulting strikes produced Mexican scab labor, riots, and murder...

...In high school he was big and restive and sometimes a disciplinary problem—this was a defensive response to what one of his biographers, Thomas Kiernan, called his "jug-eared homeliness...

...The Grapes of Wrath began with a series Steinbeck did in 1936 for the San Francisco News on the plight of migrant farm workers...

...In 1937, approximately seventy thousand migrant workers and their families—the much reviled "Okies," most having escaped the dust-bowl conditions of the Great Plains—were living in squalid tent cities in the San Joaquin Valley, hustling for farm jobs that paid fifteen cents per hour...

...He may have felt unbearable guilt at becoming rich by writing about poor people...

...turally from the other noteworthy writers of his generation...

...This time also saw his first juvenile literary efforts, short stories penned late at night in the attic, and sent anonymously with no return address to national magazine editors...

...Steinbeck had been increasingly prosperous since Tortilla Flat, but the new book catapulted him into wealth...