why John Steinbeck is important author?

Answer 1

This is why?:


Why Read John Steinbeck?
by Jackson J. Benson

It is now one hundred years since John Steinbeck’s birth and almost twenty years since I published my biography, and it may be time for a reevaluation. Steinbeck’s popularity has been both a blessing and a curse. Continuing large sales of his books has blessed his memory by keeping his work alive. His books continue to be read in schools and colleges throughout much of the country, and one might add that Steinbeck’s work has had more representation on the Library Association of America’s yearly most banned list than just about any other writer. He must have done something right. It is difficult to think of him as the Norman Rockwell of literature.

Also contributing to his popularity has been the fact that no other major writer of his time had as many novels successfully adapted to the screen. Of Mice and Men, The Grapes of Wrath, and East of Eden have become motion picture classics. Why? The moving human dramas and evocative descriptions which came from the original works.

But this popularity has been a curse by giving some critics and scholars the basis for scorning him, especially those from the so-called Eastern Literary Establishment. They suggest that his work appeals to mass audiences primarily because it is so simple-minded. Seldom do these critics really examine the basis for the writer's popularity, nor have they carefully read much of Steinbeck's work itself. For the most part, they simply pass on derogatory critical clichés coined decades ago. In order to gain currency with their elitist colleagues, they confuse readability with simplicity and emotional involvement with sentimentality.

From the beginning, many critics have simply been wrong about Steinbeck. We might remember that early in Steinbeck's career Mary McCarthy, from her apartment in New York, mocked him for not knowing anything about farm labor or labor organizing. A bit later her husband, Edmund Wilson, was right when he stated that the “main subject of Mr. Steinbeck's fiction has been . . . the processes of life itself,” but was wrong when he saw this as a flaw and wrong when he said that the author does not deal with “those aspects of humanity in which it is most thoughtful, imagintive, [and] constructive.”



Steinbeck may have written from a biological perspective, but he was also an idealist, a thoughtful man who searched to find the essence of things, the meanings or patterns behind what he observed. Steinbeck reminded us that while humans are intellectual and emotional creatures, they are also animals and part of nature, not above and apart from it. Tom and Ma Joad have to adapt to their physical circumstances to survive, but they can also hope and dream and rise above their own personal needs to care for others.

One of the main reasons for John Steinbeck's popularity was that like Mark Twain before him, he was at his core a great democrat. He was skeptical of power and privilege and always on the side of what we used to call “the common man.” In this connection he shared another characteristic with Twain - self-deprecation. Steinbeck was almost unbearably shy, and connected to that shyness was a modesty very unusual in an artist of his stature. And it was probably his shyness and modesty that allowed him to get close to ordinary people throughout his career.

By contrast, Hemingway, with an enormous ego, almost always wrote about himself, in his journalism or in his fiction. Steinbeck, with a small ego, almost always wrote about other people. In that sense he was continually the journalist, the observer. His caring about other people, his modesty, and his ability to make fun of himself have endeared him to our people probably more than any other au-thor of his time.

What also made him different from most other novelists of the mid-twentieth century was his constant curiosity, and that, in turn, led him to have an extraordinary breadth of knowledge - about science, history, geography, and language. He showed in both his fiction and his journalism, in their variety and depth of understanding, that he was interested in nearly everything. In reading the new col-lection of his journalism and essays, it might seem to us as if he were still alive today, dealing with today's concerns, writing about the environment, about America's moral decline, about war, racism, violence, ethnicity, and greed.

Like the poet Robert Frost, Steinbeck was so essentially American that we feel at home with him, connected to him, and that he is speaking to us in our language. Frost also was scorned by critics for many decades as a popularizer and a sentimentalist. Unfortunately, there have been, and are, some influential critics that are far more at home with the literature of France and England than the home-grown variety. All of which may remind us of Emerson's plea in “The American Scholar”: “We have listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe.”

The writer Wallace Stegner has said about his friend Robert Frost that “the real jolt and force of Frost's love of life comes from the fact that it is cold at the root.” The same thing might be said of John Steinbeck's love of people and the land - at bottom he was not a sentimentalist. After all this was the writer who said, “Some day our species will disappear from this earth and some other species will take over.” He was a caring and compassionate man, but underneath that caring was a cold biological determinism and intellectual toughness.

I said a moment ago that Steinbeck was quintessentially American, but that doesn't mean that admiration for his work was limited to this country. Because of his concern for the welfare of the little person, he was beloved nearly around the world. Among many examples that illustrate this, one in particular comes to mind. In the years after World War II, John Steinbeck was the most popular American writer in France. When he was in Paris on his way to the Soviet Union with the photographer Robert Capa in 1947, a farmer in the provinces heard that the writer was in the French capital. He was determined to see him. He was a little man and old, dressed in an ill-fitting suit and heavy work shoes, and he had brought with him on the train eight bottles of his own wine packed in straw. He rode on the train all night, and when he arrived at the Hotel Lancaster early one morning, the desk clerks tried to discourage him. But he insisted that he had to see Steinbeck - he had come a long way especially to see him, and he would wait all day if necessary.

After quite awhile, perhaps to end the embarrassment of his presence in the lobby, the manager rang the room to ask what he should do. John told him that by all means he should send him up. When the old man came in the room carrying his wine, he blushed and explained through Capa, who spoke French, that he had come to see Steinbeck because he had read that the author had a ranch in California and bottled his own wine. John rang the floor valet and got a corkscrew, and still dressed in robe and pajamas, poured some wine for himself, his wife, Capa, and the old farmer. After a few minutes his wife and Capa had to leave. When they returned that afternoon, they found John and the farmer still together. The author's cheeks and nose were as red as the farmer's, and he had his arm around the man's shoulder. Despite the fact that John could not speak French, they had apparently had a long, and presumably animated conversation in sign language. As the farmer started to leave, John asked Capa to tell him that his wine was excellent, perhaps the best he had ever tasted.

On a later visit to France, when the Steinbecks had decided to stay for some time, the author had agreed to write a column for the newspaper Figaro in order to help pay for their travel. He accepted the assignment with some enthusiasm; he would do something that might be called “an American in Paris.” But in line with his usual tendency to fret over every piece of writing, his enthusiasm was strained by the fact that his work would have to be translated. He had a secretary, Marlene Gray, who would type his manuscripts, and since she spoke and wrote French fluently, she took on the job of finding a translator.

She tried several that were suggested by Figaro, but in each case she felt that the results were inadequate. She told Steinbeck that they had to find another writer rather than just a translator, someone who could reproduce Steinbeck's qualities in French. It was not just a matter of converting the substance into another language, but reproducing the way in which the author had treated the material. She finally turned to one of her former professors at the university in Geneva, a writer, who was now a translator for the U.N. in Paris - but his most important qualification was that he admired Steinbeck's work.

What made his writing “Steinbeck” was intangible, hard to put your finger on. It was never mannered, never strove to call attention to itself, but was a reflection of his personality - his humor, his curiosity, his self-deprecation, and his attention to small details and ordinary people. His prose is so well crafted, often so poetic, and at the same time so clear, that we might think that it was produced effortlessly. But that is not the case. He worked hard, and with some anxiety, on every piece, no matter how short or how small the potential audience. If one reads the recently published collection of his short non-fiction, his journalism and essays, one will be reminded of just how well he could write.

Most of us in this country have read one or another of his novels or nonfiction books. What this means is that John Steinbeck's work, as expressions of his humanity and his democratic values, have become part of what we have in common, part of what we as a nation are. I would insist that this is not a bad thing.
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Answer 2

Steinbeck Author

Answer 3

john steinbeck important author

Answer 4

He is important author because he is good author. He write good book and he good man. Oh, yes, he was also able to write respecting the grammar rules.

Answer 5

he changed people's view on things when he wrote his books
The Grapes of Wrath was probably his most recognized book
dealt with problems in the great depression

Answer 6

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