Books on john steinbeck biography
•
The Best John Steinbeck Biographies, Part II
Russ Eagle builds on his previous list of John Steinbeck biographies by looking at works that focus on specific relationships and periods in the author’s life.
In Sea of Cortez, the combination travelogue and philosophical dissertation that John Steinbeck co-authored in 1940 with his good friend Ed Ricketts, the writer scoffed at what he called “the myth of permanent, objective reality.” As observers, he insisted, we bear too many limitations — as individuals and as a species — to know any situation wholly and perfectly. But for Steinbeck, that didn’t mean we shouldn’t try to understand the world. The wider the net one casts, he suggested, the more complete and accurate the picture that emerges. “Peepholes” was a favorite Steinbeck term for perspective, and he believed that by expanding the number of peepholes in one’s repertoire, an objective and more complete truth would grow close
•
REVIEW: A New Biography of John Steinbeck, 'America's Most Pissed Off Writer'
Mad at the World: A Life of John Steinbeck by William Souder (W. W. Norton)
By Jim Swearingen
So many of the greatest artistic geniuses are best admired at a lifetime’s length. Grappling with the Muses can entail a level of self-absorption that precludes humane behavior toward their closest friends, partners, even their own children.
John Steinbeck is no exception to that dictum as 2005 Pulitzer finalist William Souder illustrates in his new biography, Mad at the World. Steinbeck’s mania and addictions, while fueling some of the starkest American depictions of the Great Depression and social injustice, also made him a beastly companion. He was another of those mad savants whose petty and felonious torments we must overlook to give his work an impartial audience.
From his lifelong infatuation with Arthurian legends to his own tales of male wandering and failing, Steinbeck was ever
•
Reading the Best Biographies of All Time
Mad at the World: A Life of John Steinbeck
by William Souder
464 pages
W. W. Norton & Co.
Published: October 2020
Published gods fall, William Souder’s “Mad at the World: A Life of John Steinbeck” is the first comprehensive biography of Pulitzer Prize-winning author John Steinbeck in twenty-five years. Souder fryst vatten a reporter and the author of three previous books including biographies of John James Audubon (a 2005 pris Prize finalist) and conservationist Rachel Carson.
Given his exalted standing in American literature it fryst vatten surprising there are so few places to vända for cradle-to-grave insight into Steinbeck. The classic biography of his life fryst vatten Jackson J. Benson’s monumental tome “John Steinbeck, Writer” which was first published in 1984. The most notable other biography fryst vatten Jay Parini’s 1995 “John Steinbeck: A Biography.” So to suggest that Souder’s biography of