The Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck [8]
The last clear definite function of man—muscles aching to work, minds aching to create beyond the single need—this is man. To build a wall, to build a house, a dam, and in the wall and house and dam to put something of Manself, and to Manself take back something of the wall, the house, the dam; to take hard muscles from the lifting, to take the clear lines and form from conceiving. For man, unlike any other thing organic or inorganic in the universe, grows beyond his work, walks up the stairs of his concepts, emerges ahead of his accomplishments. This you may say of man—when theories change and crash, when schools, philosophies, when narrow dark alleys of thought, national, religious, economic, grow and disintegrate, man reaches, stumbles forward, painfully, mistakenly sometimes. Having stepped forward, he may slip back, but only half a step, never the full step back. This you may say and know it and know it.
As Charles Shindo explains, in Steinbeck’s desire to instill a sense of justice in his audience, The Grapes of Wrath provokes not only individual thought but collective action.
II
Behind this most public of American novels stands a reclusive writer. John Steinbeck was born in Salinas, California, on February 27, 1902, to respectable middle-class parents: John Ernst Steinbeck, a businessman who would later become Monterey County treasurer, and Olive Hamilton Steinbeck, a former schoolteacher. Steinbeck attended Salinas High School, where he was an undistinguished student, then enrolled sporadically at Stanford University from 1919 to 1925. There, as an English-journalism major, he took a short-story writing class from Edith Mirrielees and was published in Stanford’s undergraduate literary magazine, but he never finished his degree. He held a variety of temporary jobs during the next four years (laborer and cub reporter in New York City, resort handyman and watchman in Lake Tahoe), eventually publishing his first novel, Cup of Gold, in 1929. The novel scarcely sold, but Steinbeck’s choice of vocation was sealed. He never again held a traditional nine-to-five job. Beginning in 1930, with the support and encouragement of his parents and especially of his wife, Carol Henning Steinbeck, whom he had married that year, writing became Steinbeck’s daily occupation and continued so through lean and flush times for the remainder of his life. When Steinbeck died on December 20, 1968, he had managed to support himself and his families (he was married three times and had two sons and one stepdaughter) exclusively on his writing-based income, primarily from the thirty books of fiction, drama, film scripts, and nonfictional prose he published between 1929 and 1966.
His achievement is especially noteworthy because he never thought of himself as a naturally gifted artistic genius and rarely believed he had ever “arrived” as a writer. If it is no longer possible to believe naively in the romantic myth of artistic genius, with its heightened capabilities of transcendence and sovereignty, neither is it possible to accept unhesitatingly the contemporary poststructuralist posture—that a writer is a bloodless cipher, utterly determined by unconscious forces of language, race, gender, and class. Better to think of Steinbeck as walking the line between those positions. He was a self-willed writer who prized the shaping power of imagination (however tenuous and imperfect that proved to be), yet he also realized how indebted he was to a welter of historical particulars, contextual determinants, and other people.