"Steinbeck Country": Mythic Landscapes with Haunted Figures

"Steinbeck Country" is an intriguing and alluring space as drawn in John Steinbeck's California works. The landscape and the characters who inhabit it are often simultaneously sketched with sharp realism yet imbued with mythic, fantastical qualities that interject complex dimensions into his stories. This dichotomy between characters' perceptions of the landscape and its actuality is quite apparent in some of Steinbeck's earliest works, such as To a God Unknown and The Pastures of Heaven, and it continues to be a significant strand in his best known and later work including Of Mice and Men, The Grapes of Wrath, and East of Eden. This article explores how both To A God Unknown and The Pastures of Heaven are early examples in Steinbeck's career of unique interactions between people and the places they have lived, currently live, or dream to live in. Apparent in the two works is a tremendous disconnect between what haunted, aching, lonely, driven people think the landscape will offer them and what it actually has to offer them. The drama resulting from that disconnect is a central feature of Steinbeck country. While Steinbeck's descriptions of the California valleys are evocative and idyllic, more often than not, the lives of the characters who are all placed in and defined by these landscapes are haunted and vexed. Characters are compulsively driven by intense longings, unsuccessfully searching to fill voids and ameliorate their lives by drinking deeply of the riches they misperceive the landscape has to freely offer.