Fiction: The 1930s to the 1960s

Proletarian and Southern writers dominate again this year. Mary McCarthy and Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings are the focus of individual books as well as special journal issues, and Ralph Ellison, Dorothy Parker, Robert Penn Warren, Thomas Wolfe, and Flannery O'Connor are the recipients of book-length studies as well as a number of individual essays. Ed Ricketts, Jack Kerouac, Paul Bowles, and Ray Bradbury receive substantial biographies, and O'Connor, Ellison, Ayn Rand, the Beats, and William Burroughs claim essay collections. Easterners hold their own, while work on Westerners, science fiction, and detective fiction remains sparse. As in previous years, gender, race, culture, religion, and ecocritical concerns are popular topics for scholarly debate.

i Proletarians

a. John Steinbeck and Others

In "A Carnival Tortilla Flat" (CLAJ 47: 326–42) Preston Fambrough places the novel in the tradition of the carnivalesque: Steinbeck's paisanos festively imbibe alcohol, dance, feast, avoid responsibility, steal, and trade insults, and the narrative also includes incidents of decrowning, the element of fire, and carnivalesque laughter. Gregory J. Palmerino in "Steinbeck's 'The Chrysanthemums'" (Expl 62: 164–67) notes that an overlooked issue in that story is that the protagonists lack communication skills and avoid raising and resolving conflicts; as a result, they never convey to each other how they really feel. In "Steinbeck and the Great Depression" (SAQ 103: 111–31) Morris Dickstein examines Steinbeck's views of the Depression, which informed his work in a number of ways. Novels such as The Grapes of Wrath and In Dubious Battle, for example, "were experiments at seeing humanity in the collective terms that the Depression seemed to demand." Steinbeck's interest in migrant workers, Route 66, the American Dream, white America, and "the 'phalanx theory'" are discussed in David Dunaway's "Route 66, John Steinbeck, and American Indian Literature: An Interview with Louis Owens" (SwAL 29, ii: 17–29). In "Steinbeck's Plays: From Realism to Abstraction" (StHum 31: 92–98) Peter L. Hays examines Steinbeck's three novelette-plays, Burning Bright, Of Mice and Men, and The Moon Is Down, written in an effort to make reading or viewing drama more like reading a novella, although his characters are less realistic and more like types. Steinbeck, James Agee, and Walker Evans are James S. Miller's subject in "Inventing the 'Found' Object: Artifactuality, Folk History, and the Rise of Capitalist Ethnography in 1930s America" (JAF 117: 373–93). According to Miller, Dorothea Lange's An American Exodus, Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, and Agee and Evans's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men "disclose how the desire to document the 'ruined' margins encoded a more pointed impulse to manufacture a peculiarly postcapitalist model of corporate-commercial 'roots.'" Also this year, Scarecrow Press begins semiannual publication of the Steinbeck Review, following the pattern of the former Steinbeck Quarterly.

Significant to Steinbeck studies is Eric Enno Tamm's Beyond the Outer Shores: The Untold Odyssey of Ed Ricketts, the Pioneering Ecologist Who Inspired John Steinbeck and Joseph Campbell (Thunder's Mouth), a fine complement to Katharine A. Rodger's Renaissance Man of Cannery Row: The Life and Letters of Edward F. Ricketts (2002). Tamm, who notes that Ricketts's "life-voyage of scientific discovery has been inadvertently obscured and overshadowed by Steinbeck and his mythmaking," seeks to give an accurate account of Ricketts's life and work, including his influence on both Steinbeck and his ecological writing and on renowned mythologist Joseph Campbell. Using official records, diaries, notebooks, interviews, philosophical essays, news clippings, Steinbeck's writings, ships' logs, and unpublished research papers, Tamm captures the friendship of the three men; Ricketts's marriage to Anna Barbara Maker and his long-term relationship with Toni Jackson; the intrusion of World War II; Ricketts's exploration expeditions and his ecological survey of the upper Northwest, including the Vancouver Island area, Clayoquot Sound, the Queen Charlotte Islands, Nanaimo, and Hyder, Alaska; his collaboration on Sea of Cortez with Steinbeck; the destruction of his labs by fire; and Ricketts's premature death before the completion of The Outer Shores.

In "The South Beheld: The Influence of...