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“Not Afraid of Being Heroic”: Bruce Springsteen’s John Steinbeck 247 IT IS NOT HARD TO FIND connections between John Steinbeck and Bruce Springsteen. Most obviously, Springsteen recorded an album titled The Ghost of Tom Joad in 1995, and during the subsequent tour he received the first John Steinbeck In the Souls of the People Award from the Center for Steinbeck Studies. The New York Times dubbed him “Steinbeck in Leather” in 1997. But more importantly, both artists sought to effect social change with their work, although they shied away from radical or revolutionary political organizations. Both were also embraced by a large audience, a fact that was sometimes used to undermine the significance of their political work.1 Springsteen did not learn his songwriting craft from John Steinbeck— he is, as he put it, a child of Bob Dylan and Elvis Presley. But he has been inspired by Steinbeck’s vision of collective responsibility in The Grapes of Wrath, the vision of Preacher Casy’s “one big soul.” At a benefit concert for the Steinbeck Research Center at San Jose State University in October 1996, Springsteen described Steinbeck’s work as an antidote to isolation and a model of “useful” art: As a writer you try to increase understanding, and . . . compassion . . . in order to combat that fear . . . the seed of all that hate and prejudice; that’s sort of what art can do. . . . You get a chance to sort of fight some of that isolation, you feel it’s part of the American character in some fashion. In The Grapes of Wrath, Preacher Casy calls that isolation “the wilderness,” and that’s what it is. . . . I think that Steinbeck’s work, particularly The Grapes of Wrath, it was there to reach in and pull you out of that wilderness, out into the world. . . . CHAPTER 10 Lauren Onkey 248 Lauren Onkey It’s a work that’s resonated for me throughout my whole life. . . . And for me, that particular novel always showed the usefulness of beauty. . . . I know that it was always something that I aspired to, to do work that meant something. What I always loved about Steinbeck’s work was that it wasn’t afraid of being heroic and that he risked, he hung his ass out there . . . for you, for me.2 This essay explores what Springsteen means by the risk of “being heroic” and how that phrase can help us understand Steinbeck’s popular legacy. I suggest that the heroism Springsteen speaks of is the risk of trying to communicate big ideas (writing “the big book,” as Steinbeck called The Grapes of Wrath) to a broad audience, to risk popularity. Springsteen has used Steinbeck’s example to extol the value of speaking to and thereby creating a large community of listeners rather than to an insider, elite, or avant-garde audience. But to speak to a broad audience can signify a lack of depth or artistic vision. Steinbeck’s reputation has suffered in academic literary studies in part because he was popular, both in his lifetime and later on, among teenage readers. Most overtly political studies of Springsteen’s work ignore the singer’s obvious passion for pop music traditions and his belief in the political power of popular music.3 In this essay I will show how Bruce Springsteen’s John Steinbeck, which he has created and circulated through an extended “gospel response” to The Grapes of Wrath, advocates communal consciousness and the political usefulness of popular art. As Morris Dickstein has said, many readers “leave Steinbeck behind as an enthusiasm to be outgrown.”4 The academy has certainly left Steinbeck behind; few articles of literary analysis are published on Steinbeck other than those published in the specialized journal Steinbeck Studies. Only 66 dissertations on his work have been written in the United States since 1954, as compared to 675 dissertations on his contemporary William Faulkner.5 When Steinbeck was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962, critics famously derided the decision, complaining that Steinbeck’s best days were behind him and that such a popular, sentimental writer should not be rewarded. This battle was the culmination of a war that Steinbeck had waged with literary critics since the early days of his career.6 On the eve of the acceptance ceremony Arthur Mizener wrote a scathing article in the New York Times titled “Does a Moral Vision of the Thirties Deserve a Noble Prize?” that dismissed Steinbeck for sentimentality and didacticism...

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