Peter Harcourt.

“Steinbeck's Fables.”

Time and Tide [England],

41 (6 June 1961), 1031–2.

For over 25 years now, John Steinbeck has been a prolific and unpredictable novelist. The first of his works to attract attention were Tortilla Flat, and To a God Unknown, both published in 1935. Already in these early works, Steinbeck revealed what we now think of as his most characteristic qualities: his warmth, his whimsy, his sense of fun, his mistrust of organised society, his belief in the validity of the simple pleasures of simple people, and if indeed his sentimentality, also his reverence for life of all kinds, for all things that grow. Like so many American writers, Steinbeck is at heart a fablist; and both these novels have all the directness and simplicity of a fable. To a God Unknown is undisguisedly a celebration of the forgotten mysteries of a pagan world, of the gods of the earth and the sky, with a blood sacrifice at the end that brings on the required rain. And in Tortilla Flat—as some ten years later in Cannery Row and its sequels—if the solemnity in the face of the mysterious gods of the earth has disappeared, the simple sense of wonder remains.

The world of the Salinas Valley in California—the world of Monterey that in Tortilla Flat produced Danny and Danny's friends and in Cannery Row, Doc, Mack, and the boys—is a world virtually untouched by the hustling way of life of the great American continent.