STEINBECK: A Life in Letters

by Elaine & Robert Wallsten--Eds. Steinbeck ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 18, 1975

850 pages is a frightening length."" This was Steinbeck's observation on The Grapes of Wrath and it applies equally to the 860-page collection of his letters, even if you bear in mind that there were 5000 of them to begin with and that many have been eliminated and shortened. The fact remains that Steinbeck was not a very interesting letter writer: he used this form as an equivalent of the telephone for constant, casual, random and disrememberable exchanges. But they do reflect the man (open, expansive, naive, sometimes muddled, often desperate, prosy, affectionate) and with the interconnecting material provided by the editors (his third wife Elaine, his good friend Wallsten) do give a chronology of his life. From the first years in Lake Tahoe, alone, when he wrote the first novels which met with nothing but rejection slips--to his marriage to Carol who lasted until he hit success (Tortilla Flat and In Dubious Battle appearing close together; then Of Mice and Men and in between the novels, the plays and films adapted from them). The second marriage to Gwyn, an actress, which resulted in the two sons, lasted only four years. Elaine went the distance to his death. These were probably the most difficult years for Steinbeck in spite of Travels, in spite of the Nobel; writing became more and more arduous, his health more parlous. Ideologically one finds little to look up to in Steinbeck even when he was writing about those dustbowl refugees: ""I don't like communists either, I mean I dislike them as people"" even if some of those ""communist field workers are strong, pure, inhumanly virtuous."" Steinbeck was never a political animal: he may have had an open heart but his thinking was jejune. Still one feels sorry for the man who right from the beginning declared ""It's too onerous to be a genius"" and just before his death said ""I am just as terrified of my next book as I was of my first.

Pub Date: Sept. 18, 1975

ISBN: 0140042881

Page Count: -

Publisher: Viking

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1975

Categories: NONFICTION