Volume 27, Number 4 · March 20, 1980
Stubborn Steinbeck
By Roger Sale
The Intricate Music: A Biography of John Steinbeck
by Thomas Kiernan
Little, Brown, 331 pp., $12.95
The Wayward Bus
by John Steinbeck
Penguin, 212 pp., $2.95 (paper)
East of Eden
by John Steinbeck
Penguin, 691 pp., $2.95 (paper)
John Steinbeck went to Stanford University in the fall of 1919 saying he wanted to be a writer. At seventeen, he had written little, none of it promising, but he knew the power that the writing of others held over him, and he longed for some of that power himself. 'I've thought a lot,' Steinbeck later told Thomas Kiernan, 'about why I set out to write. Although I didn't know it at the time, I think I can say now that one of the big reasons was this: I instinctively recognized in writing an opportunity to transcend some of my personal failings—things about myself I didn't particularly like and wanted to change but didn't know how.' A strange, burden-some, and likely statement of a need that can lie as deep as any other, and can exist prior to any sense of language or subject. It is a need that cannot be satisfied by mere literary achievement.
Review, 2582 words
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