John Steinbeck's Participatory Politics, 1936–1968

Steinbeck's body of work has often been viewed through a binary prism: in the 1930s he was concerned with group behavior and after World War II with individual conscience and consciousness. That perspective shifts, however, if one considers a trenchant comment he made in a 1955 essay: "I believe that man is a double thing, a group animal and at the same time an individual. And it occurs to me that he cannot successfully be the second until he has fulfilled the first." This essay argues that the meaning and impact of group identity is the central concern of his career as a politically engaged writer.