THIS monster of a land," he wrote in 1962, "this mightiest of nations, this spawn of the future, turns out to be the macrocosm of microcosm me."
John Ernst Steinbeck always did have a talent for enlargement. Yet when he died of heart disease in Manhattan last week at 66, Steinbeck left behind a body of novels, short stories, plays and film scripts that were less a spawn of the future than a moral—and often moralizing—record from his special compartment in the nation's past.
Those who lived through the late '30s retain a particular fondness for the books that he wrote then. But the generation of the '60s knows Steinbeck's works less readily as the celebrations of the land and the common folk that his contemporaries once found them. Perhaps appropriately—for he wrote with a cinematic clarity—Steinbeck's vision of America is most frequently glimpsed today in late-show reruns of The Grapes of Wrath or East of Eden. His literary heritage has been to summon up a sort of vivid, brittle nostalgia, and one tends to read his books now with the same bemused affection with which one watches the old Henry Fonda version of Grapes. It was precisely this quality of painful and wistful tenderness that Bonnie and Clyde conjured up in its visions, shot through gauze, of migrant Okies offering brief help to the murderers.
Critic Alfred Kazin suggests that "at bottom Steinbeck's gift was not so much a literary resource as a distinctively harmonious and pacific view of life. The Depression naturalists saw life as one vast Chicago slaughterhouse, a guerrilla war, a perpetual bombing raid. Steinbeck had picked up a refreshing belief in human fellowship and courage: he had learned to accept the rhythm of life."
When Steinbeck in 1962 became the sixth American author to win the No bel Prize,* he was well past the crest of his powers, even though the committee in Stockholm professed to admire especially The Winter of Our Discontent, published in 1961. The novel was a 311-page allegory, set on Long Island, an unaccustomed territory for Steinbeck, and was written to portray the contamination of the nation's mor al standards and beliefs.
Urbanity of Psyche. The critical derision that greeted the award from many quarters was rather unjust. When he was asked if he thought that he deserved the honor, Steinbeck replied: "Frankly, no." Yet, as Edmund Wilson observed in an otherwise critical essay: "There remains behind the journalism, the theatricalism and the tricks, a mind which does seem first-rate in its unpanicky scrutiny of life."
Of Steinbeck's 16 novels, The Grapes of Wrath was the strongest and most durable. It suffered from the flaws that Critic Maxwell Geismar found in much of his writing: "Simplification has been the source of his inspiration. Handling complex material rather too easily, he has been marked by the popularizing gift. Here is an urbanity of psyche bought a little easily." His eighth novel, the book was published in 1939, after Steinbeck made the westward pilgrimage with a caravan of Oklahoma farmers. Part exposé, part tract, Grapes was a concentration of Steinbeck's artistic and moral vision.