"A man who was a writer": John Steinbeck's Enduring Legacy for America

Capturing Steinbeck's essence as a writer and a person, Jackson J. Benson's biography begins,

This is the story of a man who was a writer. He cared about language, and he cared about people. He didn't want to be famous or popular—he just wanted to write books. But he became both. From among the many serious writers of our time, he became for a great many people, here and throughout the world, the one writer who counted, the one who touched them. He made words sing, and he made people laugh and cry. He also made them think—about loneliness, self-deception, and injustice. And in all that he wrote, he testified to his belief that everything that lives is holy.

(ix)

As Benson observes, at times, Steinbeck's words etch themselves on the mind and heart, making "words sing," a living testimony to the oneness of all things and our own connectedness to the world at large. Tom Joad's parting words to Ma Joad in The Grapes of Wrath, for example, tug at the reader's heart, create empathy for the downtrodden, and stand as an enduring testimony to the power of literature to reflect the human condition across time—reaching out to us in our own times. Tom speaks,

I'll be all aroun' in the dark. I'll be ever'where—wherever you look. Wherever they's a fight so hungry people can eat, I'll be there. Wherever they's a cop beatin' up a guy, I'll be there. If Casy knowed, why, I'll be in the way guys yell when they're mad an'—I'll be in the way kids laugh when they're hungry an' they know supper's ready. An' when our folks eat the stuff they raise an' live in the houses they build—why, I'll be there.

(419)

Susan Shillinglaw remembers the 1989 television program Sunday Morning that ended "with Tom Joad's final speech to Ma. Henry Fonda's words (from the 1940 film of Grapes) laid over clips of the homeless in New York City, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the angry student protesters in Tiananmen Square" (ix). In our own times, the images might well come very close to home and include clips of several hundred thuggish white nationalists and white supremacists descending on Charlottesville as part of a Unite the Right rally at the University of Virginia. Joe Heim in the Washington Post describes their march as "a torchlight procession—a symbolic gathering meant to evoke similar marches of Hitler Youth and other ultraright nationalist organizations of the past century" (Web, Aug. 14, 2017). According to the Post, their clash with residents and students "resulted in violence and three deaths the next day." As Benson avows, Steinbeck still makes us think about injustice, makes us remember Tom's promise to Ma: "I'll be there."

And we are reminded of the undercurrent in the little novella Of Mice and Men that Steinbeck originally called "Something That Happened," in which an effortful reader, attuned to nuance and signs of the writer's own times, may recall that Adolf Hitler was rising to power in Nazi Germany. Not only was there an ominous uprising against Jews, but also against homosexuals and the mentally ill and handicapped. And those like innocent, childlike, mentally incompetent Lennie, considered a burden on society, could be readily disposed of, supposedly in the interest of the good of the community.

In an email on August 14, a friend, who was born in Germany, writes now after Charlottesville, "I have to admit, I find myself speechless—having been born in Germany, especially, perhaps. I thought we were further along. I must remember that we are—the majority of people are—there are still some out there, however—no words." More than anything I have read about this horrifying incident, this email gives me pause as I think of the horrors of the hatred that the alt-right demonstrated at Charlottesville against Jewish people...