My father loves John Steinbeck and he passed that love down to me. Years ago, he and I went to the John Steinbeck festival at the Steinbeck Center in Salinas. While there, I bought Centennial Reflections by American Writers, edited by Susan Shillinglaw. This small book is a collection of writings by various authors about Steinbeck and his impact on them and the literary world.
In terms of my own relationship with Steinbeck, I’ve read many of his works, including his masterpiece the Grapes of Wrath. I am completely uninterested in rereading books, but Grapes of Wrath has been an exception. I also read a 1,200 page biography of Steinbeck years ago, which I loved. I remember purchasing it down in Monterey, one of the hearts of Steinbeck country.
This collection is not terribly good–some of the entries are a mere 1/3 a page and some authors confess they have no relationship to Steinbeck at all, which is odd–but there are some great quotes that I’ll share that get to the heart of who Steinbeck was and the genius of his literature.
There is in his work compassion and deep respect for, to use a phrase of Faulkner’s–’The lonely and invincible of the earth’ that is always very moving to me.”
And I wonder if any of us since have been equal to Steinbeck’s marvelous and ironic sense of compassion, never sentimental but daring all the time to go up to the very abyss of offering more feeling than the reader can accept.”
Taken together both letters reflect the two sides of Steinbeck, perhaps the two eras of his development: the struggle within him between an overflowing sympathy for suffering, a veritable embrace of those in pain, and a hard-headed grasp of moral dilemmas from which, with all the good will in the world, there is no escape.”
