Foreword

I pray you all gyve audyence,And here this mater with reverence,By fygure a morall playe;The somonynge of Everyman called it is,That of our lyves and endynge shewes,How transytory we be all daye.

—epigraph to The Wayward Bus (from Everyman)

This spring 2007 issue of The Steinbeck Review is dedicated to the memory of Stephen K. George, and it begins with a tribute to him by his colleague and co-editor, Barbara Heavilin. We will miss his kind, firm, clear-eyed, dedicated presence in the Steinbeck world. His work on Steinbeck's moral themes and sympathies for the common man in particular we honor.

The first essay in this issue discusses Pastures of Heaven in the contexts of the modern short story cycle and the genre of "western gothic" literature. Karen Roggenkamp argues that Pastures is one of Steinbeck's finest and least appreciated works, "the first composition which satisfied [him] deeply," and a courageous experiment with form that embodies an ironic view of America and its western lands. This consideration of Steinbeck's portrayal of the west is followed by the "environmental musings" of a writer who grew up in the Salinas Valley and shared a love for Steinbeck's works with her friend, Louis Owens. Melody Graulich muses on the ways in which she and Owens found "the Salinas Valley's topography . . . central to our self-conceptions," and how Steinbeck's vision of the Gabilan and Santa Lucia ranges seeped into her and his work.

Other essays in this issue deal with Steinbeck's political and environmentalist themes. Jason M. Dew focuses on Travels With Charley as a masterwork of "criticism" that anticipated the later "New Americanist" movement. Steinbeck lovingly and sharply captures the agony of an American crisis of identity during the Cold War years, according to Dew, who finds Steinbeck trying to understand the American "lust to move on. West—north, south—anywhere." Derek Gladwin's approach to The Red Pony differs from others in that he applies to this story the concept of the "land ethic," or "land pyramid," promulgated by environmentalist Aldo Leopold in his polemical A Sand County Almanac (1949). Finding that The Red Pony exhibits a consistent Leopoldian ethos, Gladwin traces Jody's journey toward adulthood as part and parcel of his dawning environmental consciousness.

The "Intercalary" section offers some brief notes in "Steinbeck Today" and a fascinating glimpse into Steinbeck's 1963 visit to the Soviet Union by Peter Bridges. Quoting liberally from the correspondence he still possesses, Bridges describes his accompanying Elaine and John Steinbeck and Edward Albee on their State Department tour and the friendship that sprang out of that trip. Stephen Macauley also offers a West African perspective on the international popularity of Steinbeck's works—and especially the importance of The Grapes of Wrath to displaced peoples. Ron Machin describes the circumstances under which he created a bronze bust of Steinbeck over twenty years ago, and James Dourgarian fills us in on the recent auction at Bonhams and Butterfields of some of the few remaining "family copies" of Steinbeck's works. Finally, this section of the issue contains two interviews. One is with Corinne Cooke, who happened to be working in 1949 at Del Monte Aviation in Monterey when Steinbeck came in to purchase flying lessons for his African-American associate and helper, James Neale. Neale flew out to New York that summer in a twin-engine Cessna to bring Steinbeck's sons out to California. The other interview is with James D. Watson, who, on December 10, 1962, shared a Nobel Prize for work in the molecular structure of genes with Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins, and who met John Steinbeck when he received the Nobel Prize for Literature on the same occasion.

This issue also contains four review-essays. Thomas Fensch reviews Greenwood Press's A John Steinbeck Encyclopedia, edited by Brian Railsback and Michael J. Meyer. Elisabeth Mermann Jozwiak reviews Jakob Eisler's Deutsche Kolonisten im Heiligen Land: Die Familie John Steinbeck in Briefen aus Palästina und USA (German Colonists in the Holy Land: John Steinbeck's...