Transcript John Steinbeck - Wyoming City Schools

John Steinbeck
Born in Salinas, California 1902
(setting of many of his novels, including portions of The
Grapes of Wrath)
Died December 20, 1968
Awarded the Pulitzer Prize for The Grapes of Wrath (1940)
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:
Entrenched power, wealth, authority and tyranny of California’s
industrialized agricultural system
Violations of migrant civil and human rights, ensuring their
continued poverty and loss of dignity through threats reprisals and
violence (xxiii).
In opposition to:
Powerlessness, poverty, victimization, and fear of the nomadic
American migrants
Desiring dignity, work, and land of their own
Kept alive by innate resilience and resourcefulness
Democratic 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 withTom 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
Walker
Evans
Walker
Evans
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!
Glory! Glory Hallelujah!
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 soldiers singing
the song “John Brown’s
Body,” and was taken with
the strong marching beat.
She wrote the words the
next day. The hymn
appeared in the Atlantic
Monthly in 1862.