Volume 31, Number 2 · February 16, 1984
The Innocent
By Thomas R. Edwards
The True Adventures of John Steinbeck, Writer
by Jackson J. Benson
Viking, 1,116 pp., $35.00
It is hard to think of a writer whose reputation has fallen farther than John Steinbeck's. In his new and semi-idolatrous biography, Professor Jackson J. Benson considers a variety of explanations for Steinbeck's decline: he lost his talent, after the extraordinary success of Of Mice and Men and The Grapes of Wrath, when he went Hollywood; he was demoralized by political misreadings of his books, which reactionaries thought Marxist and Marxists thought reactionary; the advanced literary opinion makers destroyed him in revenge, first for his popularity and then for his hawkishness about Vietnam; the Nobel Prize award in 1962 showed everyone an emperor with scarcely any clothes. Though Benson finds at least a little truth in each explanation, his long book leaves the mystery intact: Why did such success lead to such failure, and where did the success come from in the first place?
Review, 3392 words
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