America and Americans and Selected Nonfiction

Description

A Penguin Classic

More than four decades after his death, John Steinbeck remains one of the nation’s most beloved authors. Yet few know of his career as a journalist who covered world events from the Great Depression to Vietnam. Now, this distinctive collection offers a portrait of the artist as citizen, deeply engaged in the world around him. In addition to the complete text of Steinbeck’s last published book, America and Americans, this volume brings together for the first time more than fifty of Steinbeck’s finest essays and journalistic pieces on Salinas, Sag Harbor, Arthur Miller, Woody Guthrie, the Vietnam War and more. This edition is edited by Steinbeck scholar Susan Shillinglaw and Steinbeck biographer Jackson J. Benson.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.Introduction
 
I

 Places of the Heart 1
 Always Something to Do in Salinas 4
 The Golden Handcuff 13
 A Primer on the ’30s 17
 Making of a New Yorker 32
 My War with the Ospreys 41
 Conversation at Sag Harbor 50

II

 Engaged Artist 65
 Dubious Battle in California 71
 The Harvest Gypsies: Squatters’ Camps 78
 Starvation Under the Orange Trees 83
 From Writers Take Sides 88
 I Am a Revolutionary 89
 Duel Without Pistols 91
 The Trial of Arthur Miller 101
 Atque Vale 105
 Dear Adlai 108
 G.O.P. Delegates Have Bigger, Better Badges 110
 L’Envoi 112

III

 Occasional Pieces 117
 Then My Arm Glassed Up 125
 On Fishing 132
 Circus 136
 Random Thoughts on Random Dogs 139
 … like captured fireflies 142
 The Joan in All of Us 144
 A Model T Named “It” 147

IV

 On Writing 151
 The Play-Novelette 155
 My Short Novels 158
 Rationale 161
 Critics-from a Writer’s Viewpoint 163
 Some Random and Randy Thoughts on Books 167
 Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech 172
 
V

 Friends 175
 From About Ed Ricketts 179
 Ernie Pyle 213
 Tom Collins 215
 Robert Capa 217
 Adlai Stevenson 219
 Henry Fonda 223
 Woody Guthrie 225

VI

 Journalist Abroad 227
 The Soul and Guts of France 233
 One American in Paris (fourth piece) 246
 One American in Paris (thirteenth piece) 248
 Positano 251
 Florence: The Explosion of the Chariot 259
 I Go Back to Ireland 262
 The Ghost of Anthony Daly 270

VII

 War Correspondent 275
 Troopship 282
 Waiting 285
 Stories of the Blitz 288
 Lilli Marlene 291
 Bob Hope 293
 Vietnam War: No Front, No Rear 296
 Action in the Delta 299
 Terrorism 304
 Puff, the Magic Dragon 307
 An Open Letter to Poet Yevtushenko 311
 
VIII

 America and Americans 313
 Foreword 317
 E Pluribus Unum 319
 Paradox and Dream 330
 Government of the People 339
 Created Equal 346
 Genus Americanus 354
 The Pursuit of Happiness 369
 Americans and the Land 377
 Americans and the World 383
 Americans and the Future 392
 
Afterword 403
 
Works Cited 405
 
Selected Bibliography of Steinbeck’s Nonfiction 407
 
Index 417

By the Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature

“A feast of good reading.” —Jay Parini, Los Angeles Times

“Captures Steinbeck’s fierce and unrelenting moral vision, while providing an intriguing glimpse of the writer’s life and work.” —Chicago Tribune

John Steinbeck, born in Salinas, California, in 1902, grew up in a fertile agricultural valley, about twenty-five miles from the Pacific Coast. Both the valley and the coast would serve as settings for some of his best fiction. In 1919 he went to Stanford University, where he intermittently enrolled in literature and writing courses until he left in 1925 without taking a degree. During the next five years he supported himself as a laborer and journalist in New York City, all the time working on his first novel, Cup of Gold (1929).
 
After marriage and a move to Pacific Grove, he published two California books, The Pastures of Heaven (1932) and To a God Unknown (1933), and worked on short stories later collected in The Long Valley (1938). Popular success and financial security came only with Tortilla Flat (1935), stories about Monterey’s paisanos. A ceaseless experimenter throughout his career, Steinbeck changed courses regularly. Three powerful novels of the late 1930s focused on the California laboring class: In Dubious Battle (1936), Of Mice and Men (1937), and the book considered by many his finest, The Grapes of Wrath (1939). The Grapes of Wrath won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize in 1939.
 
Early in the 1940s, Steinbeck became a filmmaker with The Forgotten Village (1941) and a serious student of marine biology with Sea of Cortez (1941). He devoted his services to the war, writing Bombs Away (1942) and the controversial play-novelette The Moon is Down (1942).Cannery Row (1945), The Wayward Bus (1948), another experimental drama, Burning Bright(1950), and The Log from the Sea of Cortez (1951) preceded publication of the monumental East of Eden (1952), an ambitious saga of the Salinas Valley and his own family’s history.
 
The last decades of his life were spent in New York City and Sag Harbor with his third wife, with whom he traveled widely. Later books include Sweet Thursday (1954), The Short Reign of Pippin IV: A Fabrication (1957), Once There Was a War (1958), The Winter of Our Discontent (1961),Travels with Charley in Search of America (1962), America and Americans (1966), and the posthumously published Journal of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters (1969), Viva Zapata!(1975), The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights (1976), and Working Days: The Journals of The Grapes of Wrath (1989).
 
Steinbeck received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1962, and, in 1964, he was presented with the United States Medal of Freedom by President Lyndon B. Johnson. Steinbeck died in New York in 1968. Today, more than thirty years after his death, he remains one of America’s greatest writers and cultural figures. 

Jackson J. Benson teaches American Literature at San Diego State University. His biography, The True Adventures of John Steinbeck, Writer, won the PEN USA West award for nonfiction. He lives in La Mesa, California.

Susan Shillinglaw is a professor of English San Jose State University. She is the author of On Reading the Grapes of Wrath and Carol and John Steinbeck: Portrait of a Marriage.

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