John Steinbeck
From Philosopedia
Steinbeck, John (27 February 1902 - 20 December 1968)
Steinbeck is the Pulitzer and Nobel Prize-winning novelist of The Grapes of Wrath, Of Mice and Men, and East of Eden.
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On Humanism
Asked his views about humanism, he wrote Warren Allen Smith::
- Forgive me for not answering your letter. I have been working very hard. Too hard indeed for self-scrutiny. My approach to philosophy is usually on tiptoe ready to run like hell at the first growl. Frankly, I haven’t the slightest idea what my approach is or even whether I have one. I think my favorite evaluation is one wherein a very erudite man proved beyond doubt with parallel quotations that my whole body of thinking was stolen from an eighteenth-century Frenchman of whom I had never heard. I can’t help further. Working on a long and difficult book. These [post]cards are designed to break me of a vicious habit of writing letters.
That “long and difficult book” was East of Eden (1952), in which Adam Trask considers naming his children Cain and Abel, because his Chinese servant had interpreted the Biblical story to show that although God exiled Cain to the land east of Eden, He had said to him, “if thou doest well . . . thou mayest rule over sin.” Instead, Adam names them Caleb and Aron.
Also humanistic is his Of Mice and Men (1937), which is capable of drawing tears from some highschoolers who are assigned to read the work and who find in the 1990s an understanding of the poor and homeless which may have not been quite so evident to their parents. “Guys like us,” says George to his fellow itinerant worker with the feeble intellect, “are the loneliest guys in the world. They got no family. They don’t belong no place.” What they have, however, is each other and human warmth. Called misogynistic by some, the short work was inspired by a person Steinbeck had worked alongside, one who did not kill a girl but who did kill a ranch foreman by sticking a pitchfork right through his stomach. Steinbeck’s empathy for hobos, drifters, field hands, and the destitute is unique.
Humanists also enjoy reading his Grapes of Wrath (1939; a Japanese edition mis-titles the work Angry Raisins), especially noticing Steinbeck’s outlook concerning the social scene. Casy the preacher (with the symbolic initials J. C.) is a “homely” humanist capable of offering prayers of the humanist variety. “Ma,” one of the most memorable characters in American fiction, knows that her Joad family faces starvation, but she valiantly cries out, “We ain’ gonna die out. People is goin’ on - changin’ a little, maybe, but goin’ right on.” The novel’s final scene, which is shocking in its realism, has been said to be the most inspiring to be found in any humanistic work of fiction.
Inhumanism
The Unitarian minister, L.M. Birkhead, head of Friends of Democracy, wrote Steinbeck apologetically on 2 May 1940,
- There is very widespread propaganda, particularly among the extreme reactionary religionists of the country, that you are Jewish and that Grapes of Wrath is Jewish propaganda.
A few days later, Steinbeck responded,
- I am answering your letter with a good deal of sadness. I am sad for a time when one must know a man’s race before his work can be approved or disapproved. . . . It happens that I am not Jewish and have no Jewish blood.
He then added, “I find that I do not experience any pride that it is so.”
George Orwell, the creator of Big Brother, described Steinbeck in his diaries as a “spurious writer, pseudo-naif.”
The Nobel Spech
In his 1962 acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize for Literature, Steinbeck said,
- We have usurped many of the powers we once ascribed to God. Fearful and unprepared, we have assumed lordship over the life or death of the whole world--of all living things. The danger and the glory and the choice rest finally in man. The test of his perfectibility is at hand. Having taken Godlike power, we must seek in ourselves for the responsibility and the wisdom we once prayed some deity might have. Man himself has become our greatest hazard and our only hope. So that today, St. John the apostle may well be paraphrased: In the end is the Word, and the Word is Man - and the Word is with Men.
The Final Years
To his personal physician, Dr. Kenny Fox, Steinbeck wrote the following toward the end of his life:
- Now finally, I am not religious so that I have no apprehension of a hereafter, either a hope or reward or a fear of punishment. It is not a matter of belief. It is what I feel to be true from my experience, observation, and simple tissue feeling.
Steinbeck's final estate was about $4.35 million in 1990 dollars. Following Steinbeck’s wishes, and in spite of his non-theism, his funeral was performed according to the rites of the Church of England. Actor Henry Fonda read from Petrarch’s sonnets to Laura.
{WAS, 24 April 1951}
