Research Catalog

Title

John Steinbeck's fiction revisited / Warren French.

Author

French, Warren G., 1922-2009.

Publication

Boston, MA : Twayne Publishers, 1994.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Description

xv, 164 pages : illustrations; 22 cm.

Summary

• John Steinbeck's compassion for and lifelong ability to empathize with the world's disinherited has become the hallmark of his fiction. His treatment of dispossessed Dust Bowl farmers of the 1930s, The Grapes of Wrath (1939), won the Pulitzer Prize and has become a perennial on high school and college syllabi, as has his 1937 novella Of Mice and Men, an exploration of human worth and integrity.
• His retelling of an old Mexican folktale in The Pearl (1948) has been praised for its dignity and noble simplicity, a characteristic shared by his first critical success, Tortilla Flat (1935), an affectionate yet realistic novel about the Spanish-speaking poor of Monterey, California.
• In an entirely new analysis of the fiction of this renowned novelist, story writer, and journalist, Warren French - past president and chairman of the John Steinbeck Society - places Steinbeck in the modernist tradition and argues that his work is unquestionably among the finest of world literature of the twentieth century. French asserts that what is generally regarded as Steinbeck's best fiction - that of the 1930s - exemplifies the ironic mode of the "modernism" of the period.
• With The Grapes of Wrath Steinbeck began to move away from prevailing despair and toward an affirmative vision of human potential which led him, French maintains, not to postmodernist fiction but back to a narrative view quite similar to that of America's late Victorians.
• Chapters of this comprehensive study focus on what French calls Steinbeck's false start, including such early novels as Cup of Gold (1929); on the manifestations of the author's ironic vision in Tortilla Flat and the story cycles, especially the exquisitely nostalgic story "The Red Pony" in his 1938 collection The Long Valley; on ironic vision that sparked a theatrical impulse, in, for example, In Dubious Battle (1936) and Of Mice and Men; on the change of heart represented by The Grapes of Wrath; on the author's search for affirmation exemplified by the The Pearl and The Moon Is Down, his 1942 novel about Norwegian resistance to the Nazis; and on his vision of California redeemed, as seen in the sweeping 1952 novel East of Eden.

Series Statement

Twayne's United States authors series ; TUSAS 638

Uniform Title

Twayne's United States authors series ; TUSAS 638.

Subject

• Steinbeck, John, 1902-1968 > Criticism and interpretation

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references (p. 147-158) and index.

Contents

Ch. 1. The Making and Unmaking of a Novelist -- Ch. 2. John Steinbeck and Modernism -- Ch. 3. Two False Starts -- Ch. 4. The Story Cycles -- Ch. 5. Travels through the Long Valley -- Ch. 6. Dreams into Nightmares -- Ch. 7. The Education of the Heart -- Ch. 8. Wartime Search for a Hero -- Ch. 9. Art for Art's Sake: Transcendent Man in Cosmic Monterey -- Ch. 10. Searching for a Folk Hero -- Ch. 11. The Last Big Push -- Ch. 12. Ulysses's Final Quests: Cannery Row Revisited, Paris, and Long Island -- Ch. 13. Steinbeck 2000.

ISBN

0805740171 :

LCCN

93047472

OCLC

• 29563949
• ocm29563949

Owning Institutions

Columbia University Libraries