MAD AT THE WORLD
A LIFE OF JOHN STEINBECK
WILLIAM SOUDER
WW Norton, 446 pp, £25
Which American Nobel Laureate said this? ‘I have always lived violently, drunk hugely and taken my hangovers as a consequence, not as a punishment.’ The answer is not Ernest Hemingway, but John Steinbeck (1902-1968). Tall, rugged, adventurous and promiscuous, Steinbeck had Hemingway’s appetite for life, but not his swagger. Asked if he thought he deserved the Nobel Prize, he replied, ‘Frankly, no.’
Critics took him at his word. Even before he died, Steinbeck’s reputation had begun to sink. And it’s a measure of how far below the radar he has slipped that reviewers have had to remind us that he wrote much else besides The Grapes of Wrath, Of Mice and Men and East of Eden, all probably better known today as films. Indelibly marked by the Depression, Steinbeck sympathised with underdogs, in particular those migrant workers from the Midwest Dust Bowl who fetched up in flyblown Californian squatters’ camps. He was angered by an economic system that encouraged exploitation, greed and brutality.
The Spectator’s Scott Bayfield felt that while Souder’s biography, the first for 25 years, ‘was a good place to start reading about Steinbeck’, it failed to do full justice to ‘a very complicated, emotional writer’. The
Times’s Claire Cowden agreed. Souder’s book, while ‘highly readable … feels too slim for such a lot of life, such a lot of work’. But the
Washington Post’s Alexander Kafka disagreed. He thought this ‘smart, soulful, panoramic biography … has brought a deeply human Steinbeck forth in all his flawed, melancholy, brilliant complication.’