America and Americans and Selected Nonfiction
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Introduction
I. - PLACES OF THE HEART
Always Something to Do in Salinas
The Golden Handcuff
A Primer on the ’30s
Making of a New Yorker
My War with the Ospreys
Conversation at Sag Harbor
II. - ENGAGED ARTIST
Dubious Battle in California
The Harvest Gypsies: Squatters’ Camps
Starvation Under the Orange Trees
From Writers Take Sides
I Am a Revolutionary
Duel Without Pistols
The Trial of Arthur Miller
Atque Vale
Dear Adlai
G.O.P. Delegates Have Bigger, Better Badges
L’Envoi
III. - OCCASIONAL PIECES
Then My Arm Glassed Up
On Fishing
Circus
Random Thoughts on Random Dogs
... like captured fireflies
The Joan in All of Us
A Model T Named “It”
IV. - ON WRITING
The Play-Novelette
My Short Novels
Rationale
Critics—from a Writer’s Viewpoint
Some Random and Randy Thoughts on Books
Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech
V. - FRIENDS
From About Ed Ricketts
Ernie Pyle
Tom Collins
Robert Capa
Adlai Stevenson
Henry Fonda
Woody Guthrie
VI. - JOURNALIST ABROAD
The Soul and Guts of France
One American in Paris - (fourth piece)
One American in Paris - (thirteenth piece)
Positano
Florence: The Explosion of the Chariot
I Go Back to Ireland
The Ghost of Anthony Daly
VII. - WAR CORRESPONDENT
Troopship
Waiting
Stories of the Blitz
Lilli Marlene
Bob Hope
Vietnam War: No Front, No Rear
Action in the Delta
Terrorism
Puff, the Magic Dragon
An Open Letter to Poet Yevtushenko
VIII. - AMERICA AND AMERICANS
Foreword
E Pluribus Unum
Paradox and Dream
Government of the People
Created Equal
Genus Americanus
The Pursuit of Happiness
Americans and the Land
Americans and the World
Americans and the Future
Afterword
WORKS CITED
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY OF STEINBECK’S NONFICTION
INDEX
VIKING
Published by the Penguin Group
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This edition first published in 2002 by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Putnam Inc.
Copyright © Elaine Steinbeck and Thomas Steinbeck, 2002
All rights reserved
America and Americans published by The Viking Press, 1966. Portions first appeared in The Saturday Evening Post. Copyright © John Steinbeck, 1966. Copyright renewed Elaine Steinbeck and Thom Steinbeck, 1994. Selection from “About Ed Ricketts” from The Log from the “Sea of Cortez.” Copyright John Steinbeck, 1951. Copyright renewed Elaine Steinbeck, Thom Steinbeck, and John Steinbeck IV, 1979. “Troopship,” “Waiting,” “Stories of the Blitz,” “Lilli Marlene,” and “Bob Hope” from Once There Was a War. Originally published in The New York Herald Tribune. Copyright © John Steinbeck, 1943, 1958. Copyright Elaine Steinbeck, Thom Steinbeck, and John Steinbeck IV, 1971, 1986. .
Page 430 constitutes an extension of this copyright page.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Steinbeck, John, 1902-1968.
America and Americans, and selected nonfiction / John Steinbeck;
edited by Susan Shillinglaw and Jackson J. Benson.
p. cm.
eISBN : 978-0-142-43741-4
1. United States—Civilization—1945- 2. Steinbeck, John, 1902-1968—Political and
social views. 3. United States—Social conditions—20th century. 4. Steinbeck, John,
1902-1968—Journeys—United States. 5. United States—Description and travel.
I. Shillinglaw, Susan. II. Benson, Jackson J. III. Title
E169.1 .S8 2001
973.9’092—dc21 2001045434
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
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INTRODUCTION
MOST AMERICANS know John Steinbeck’s name, and many know his novels: The Grapes of Wrath, Of Mice and Men, Cannery Row, and East of Eden. His books, both fiction and nonfiction, still sell millions of copies every year, and one or another is part of the curriculum in schools throughout the United States. Few writers become beloved, their writing read with affectionate response long after their death. And few writers as popular as Steinbeck have written books that have for so long withstood critical and cultural crosscurrents. Like some other authors, such as Mark Twain, Robert Frost, and Willa Cather, John Steinbeck became beloved because he was so essentially American, a writer for and about the people.
But while his novels are familiar to many, his nonfiction is hardly known. From 1936 to 1966, Steinbeck wrote scores of short nonfiction pieces published in a variety of magazines and newspapers here and abroad. Most were read widely at the time and then gradually forgotten. By and large, however, these pieces are curiously modern and relevant. Steinbeck was a writer fully engaged in social currents, politics, and history. He takes on issues vital to the twentieth century—the environment, poverty and homelessness, America’s moral decline, major wars, racism, ethnicity. Other essays recount his life, his travels, his ideas, his projects. The range is impressive, the style unadorned and engaging, and the voice remarkably varied—reportorial, witty, impressionistic, impassioned.
This volume, published in celebration of Steinbeck’s centennial, brings together for the first time representative articles, essays, and columns from his role as journalist and commentator. Also reprinted here for the first time since its original publication in 1966 is his last book, a series of commentaries on American life, America and Americans. Included also is the final, heretofore unpublished, chapter of Travels with Cha
rley (1962). Some of these articles and essays are provocative, some moving, some thoughtful, and others amusing.
“What can I say about journalism?” he wrote in 1956. “It has the greatest virtue and the greatest evil. It is the first thing the dictator controls. It is the mother of literature and the perpetrator of crap. In many cases it is the only history we have and yet it is the tool of the worst men. But over a long period of time and perhaps because it is the product of so many men, it is perhaps the purest thing we have” (SLL 526).1 In many ways, this selection of Steinbeck’s nonfiction is the “purest” record of a writer immersed in his times. What reviewer Lewis Gannett said of Sea of Cortez may be extended to Steinbeck’s corpus of literary journalism—there is here “more of the whole man, John Steinbeck, than in any of his novels.”
Like Mark Twain before him, Steinbeck was a great democrat, skeptical of power and privilege, seeking to encourage the best that is in us and doing so sometimes in sorrow, sometimes in frustration or even anger, but sometimes, too, with tongue in cheek and a sly smile. In his roles as novelist or journalist, he always did his best—he cared deeply about his work, but like Twain, he seldom took himself too seriously. When he volunteered to cover the national political conventions in 1956, he wrote to the editors of the syndicated newspapers who would publish his columns: “Walter Lippmann, the Alsops and David Lawrence have nothing to fear from me. I have no sources—dependable or otherwise. If I should make a prediction, it will probably be assembled out of information from the wife of the alternate delegate from San Jose, California, plus whispers from the bell-hop who has just delivered a bucket of ice to ‘usually dependable sources’ ” (SLL 526).
Steinbeck had a knack for choosing topics, as well as taking an approach, that would be of interest to ordinary people, usually putting himself in their place. But above all he had the ability through it all to entertain and inform. Indeed, these articles form a series of snapshots of a man who, through his compassion, concern, and sense of fun, has endeared himself to the American public, both in his life and since his death. It’s in the spirit of that great range that the book is organized—by topics that suggest the power of his thinking, the scope of his enthusiasms, and the varied approaches he took to the craft of literary nonfiction.
John Steinbeck was lucky enough to live at a time when the concept of journalism as a profession was a fairly flexible notion. Newspapers sent novelists to cover stories, and Steinbeck, his reputation firmly grounded in the American psyche after The Grapes of Wrath, was fortunate to have his pick of material. Publications were usually happy to have his work, not only because of his name, but because he developed a reputation for applying his skills to even the most casual of pieces. From the time he published his first article in 1936 to his last in 1966, he took the writing of these little articles seriously, fretting over each one of them. “You know as well as I do that I have never turned out a really easy piece of copy in my life,” he wrote his agent Elizabeth Otis during a frustrating moment on assignment in 1952. “These articles are going to be just exactly as hard as anything I have ever done” (SLL 451).
Journalism was seldom effortless in large part because Steinbeck was always the novelist, shaping, arranging, creating characters and scenes and conversations, occasionally drifting into the fanciful or mining the fantastic. His work in both nonfiction and literary journalism always teases the border between fiction and nonfiction, between the fanciful and factual. If his “migrant material” of the 1930s swings toward the documentary and reportorial, his work of the 1950s and 1960s freely mixes moods, narrative approaches, and fictional techniques. Some of this may have been temperament—he was, in fact, fired from a reporting job in 1925 on the New York American because his news stories drifted from the facts—but some he may have picked up from muckraking journalist Lincoln Steffens, who lived near Steinbeck in the 1930s. Steffens was undoubtedly Steinbeck’s political mentor; it was he who, in 1935, urged the writer to interview strike organizers hiding out on the Monterey Peninsula. Abandoning his initial notion to write a biography of an organizer, Steinbeck published In Dubious Battle (1936), the first of three labor novels. But Steffens, whose New York Commercial Advertiser had run a “new kind of journalism” that was, as his biographer observes, “personal, literary, immediate,” may also have schooled Steinbeck in his concept of “descriptive narrative” (Kaplan 82). A good news story should contain “only life.” Steffens taught not only New York reporters at the turn of the century but also scores of Stanford journalism students making pilgrimages to his Carmel home in the 1930s—and John Steinbeck by 1935. When Steinbeck wrote his first feature series in 1936, “The Harvest Gypsies,” he knew how to “see” things as they are, in line with Steffens’s advice to reporters.
From 1936 on, Steinbeck published his articles in more than three dozen different newspapers and magazines. Many pieces were reprinted, and many were syndicated and ran in a number of newspapers throughout the country. Four series—or parts thereof—were collected and published separately: Their Blood Is Strong in 1938 (originally “The Harvest Gypsies,” which ran in the San Francisco News in 1936), Once There Was a War in 1958 (originally war dispatches that ran in the New York Herald Tribune in 1943), A Russian Journal in 1948 (parts of which ran in the Herald Tribune in January 1948), and Un Américain à New-York et à Paris in 1956 (seventeen of the pieces written for Le Figaro Littéraire in 1954). America and Americans was written as a book, Steinbeck’s last, and then published as a series in Long Island’s Newsday. Other newspaper series have never been collected. His Le Figaro articles were collected only in a French edition, although a few of the pieces were published separately in American and English magazines. Two lively series for the Louisville Courier-Journal are scarcely known: one was Steinbeck’s coverage of the 1956 political conventions, and the other a series on his European travels a year later. And the 1966 and 1967 series called “Letters to Alicia,” his last and most controversial newspaper work, written for Newsday, is difficult to locate. Selections from all these series, with the exception of A Russian Journal, are included here.
He often wrote longer pieces for magazines. During the time that he wrote for them, from the late 1940s to the early 1960s, magazines were an important source of family entertainment. General-interest magazines, like Collier’s, published articles, short stories, and serialized novels, often with accompanying photographs or illustrations, as well as cartoons and editorials. After the war, such popular magazines gradually decreased the amount of fiction they published and eagerly sought essays. Holiday, a glossy pictorial magazine that published descriptions of possible vacation sites and travel narratives, ran several of Steinbeck’s essays, among them two of his most personal and incisive, “Always Something to Do in Salinas” and “Conversation at Sag Harbor.” With their circulations in the millions, Collier’s and Holiday and The Saturday Evening Post aimed at the ordinary American, providing Steinbeck a perfect platform for the expression of his ideas. While he was not in the strictest sense an intellectual, he was a man of ideas who responded thoughtfully, often passionately, to the problems he saw around him.
Steinbeck had the advantage not only of fame but also of competent agents in the United States and abroad who were willing to undertake the extra labor of finding placement for his literary journalism. Although many of his assignments were arranged by them, he set up a surprising number through friends: Mark Ethridge, staunch liberal and editor of the Louisville Courier-Journal; Alicia Patterson and Harry Guggenheim, owners of Long Island’s Newsday; Lewis Gannett, book editor of the New York Herald Tribune; and Norman Cousins, editor of The Saturday Review. Steinbeck and Cousins, for example, were both liberals and shared a firm support for the United Nations. In the mid-1950s, Cousins wanted Steinbeck to write a weekly column: “It would have been an important triumph for SR to have been able to publish him in every issue,” Cousins asserted (Benson 775), but it was an honor that the author declined, reluctant to take on journ
alism full time. His eventual role as “Editor-at-Large” allowed him to contribute when he could, an agreement that he struck with newspapers and magazines whenever he could from the 1950s on. Although he was capable of turning out copy regularly, as he did when he first went to London as a correspondent during World War II, normally he hated to meet weekly deadlines and preferred to sign agreements for occasional articles, writing about whatever struck him as significant. He became a contributor to Newsday in 1965 because Harry Guggenheim told him to “write when the spirit moves you and send the copy on. . . . If you don’t feel like writing don’t write” (3 Sept. 1965).
This collection of Steinbeck’s nonfiction and literary journalism is organized not chronologically but thematically, to highlight the diversity of Steinbeck’s concerns. Each topic is briefly introduced. Throughout, however, a few trenchant points about Steinbeck’s nonfiction need to be kept in mind: the urgency of his desire to witness and judge for himself; his lifelong fascination as to what reporting with objectivity meant; his determined focus on the commonplace, the ordinary, the neglected detail; and, finally, his idealism, the urge to set things right somehow.
Steinbeck’s career in journalism began in 1936, when he wrote a series of seven exposés about migrant labor for the liberal San Francisco News. In 1943, eager to contribute to the war effort, he went overseas for a few months as a war correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune, and after the war he did a series on Russia for the Tribune, published in 1948. These three series, all collected as books, reveal the essence of Steinbeck’s journalistic impulse—his need to observe firsthand people, locales, and events and to represent them as honestly as possible in all their dimensions. His best work emerges from his perspective as eyewitness, as the one who strives to see fully and place in perspective. That is true of every assignment he accepted, whether travel articles, war journalism, or his breezy series on the 1956 conventions. To snag the latter assignment, he wrote to Mark Ethridge, publisher of the Louisville Courier-Journal, and, as Ethridge recalled, “confessed an ambition to cover the conventions.” “I have never been to a National Convention,” he announced in a letter to the Syndicated Newspaper Editors. “That is my main reason for wanting to go” (SLL 525).