John Steinbeck: The War Years, 1939-1945

Roy Simmonds

1996
348 pages
ISBN 9780838753170

In this study, author Roy Simmonds examines the wartime output of John Steinbeck, who had achieved wide critical acclaim when The Grapes of Wrath was published in 1939. When that novel appeared, the volume of critical and popular acclaim heaped on Steinbeck's literary career reached its apogee. However, when Steinbeck's first postwar work, the novel The Wayward Bus, appeared in February of 1947 it was variously described by some critics as "trite and meaningless", "tedious", and "insignificant". While today Steinbeck's books continue to enjoy immense popularity with the reading public, there is a considerable body of critical opinion that still holds fast to the view that Steinbeck declined as a writer after The Grapes of Wrath. Indeed, Harold Bloom has asserted that nothing Steinbeck wrote after 1939 bears rereading, a judgment that Simmonds utterly rejects. What, then, can be said to account for the astonishing and disastrous fall from critical grace between 1939 and 1947 of this acknowledged giant of American literature, the 1962 Nobel Laureate?

What happened during the war years to bring about so radical a reversal in his literary reputation? Did his creative powers diminish after 1939, as so many have claimed, or was it simply that he confused and alienated the critics by seeking "a new form" for the novel? In this critical and biographical investigation, Simmonds endeavors to find answers to these questions by means of a close study of Steinbeck's large wartime output (a considerable amount of which remains - and for one reason or another, will continue to remain - unpublished) as well as through an examination of his thinking and the multitude of trials and tribulations that beset him during the period. In addition to extracts from Steinbeck's published work, the book includes a large number of extracts from his unpublished letters, from some of the war dispatches not included in Once There Was a War, from early drafts of The Moon is Down and Cannery Row, and from the manuscripts of such unpublished works as the unfinished The God in the Pipes (an early working of some of the incidents later incorporated in Cannery Row), the film scenarios The Red Pony, A Medal for Benny, and Lifeboat, and the unrealized musical comedy The Wizard of Maine.

About the author:

Roy Simmonds is an independent scholar, born in Plaistow, London, in 1925.