Frances Alter Boyle.

“The Moon Is Down.”

Library Journal, 67

(15 February 1942), 182.

Quisling has done his fifth column work so well that the little coal mining seaport is invaded with the loss of only six lives. The insoluble problem for the Nazis is to police the village and secure the good will of the inhabitants, so that the coal can be mined and transported to the Reich. Excellent psychological study, recommended for purchase…

L.A.S.

“Masters of Their Fate.”

Christian Science Monitor,

6 March 1942, p. 22.

Like Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck's new book, The Moon Is Down… is a short novel written in the form of a play. And like the former book, it will be transferred to the stage (on March 31) with little alteration.

The Moon Is Down will have a wider appeal than its predecessor in this form. Its theme is both topical and universal; dealing with the resistance of the people of a small invaded country to their conquerors, it sings the unconquerable courage and strength of liberty-loving human hearts…

There are some superb character sketches: the gentle, scholarly mayor of the occupied town; his friend the doctor; his defiant cook who throws hot water over the soldiers tramping mud into her kitchen; the young widow who avenges her slain husband; the boys who flee to England to carry on the fight.

These on the defenders’ side. On the other no less vivid portraits: the popular storekeeper who turns out to be an enemy agent; the invader officers, sharply differentiated in background and character, but all dominated by the totalitarian philosophy to which they have been bred.

“To a God Unknown.”

Christian Century, 50

(20 September 1933), 1179.

Already a comparison between Steinbeck and D. H. Lawrence has been suggested. To most readers it will be a misleading comparison, but there is a fierce beauty here which gives it point. To a God Unknown is the story of a young farmer's passion for the soil-a love passing the love of woman-and the growing sense of his own identification with it. The novelist has dealt imaginatively with the mystery of man's relation to the earth and the animals, and with those instinctive and irrational practices by which man has tried to give expression to his consciousness of that relation and to influence his earth-bound destiny. The story might be considered a modern appendix to The Golden Bough.

Margaret Cheney Dawson.

“Some Autumn Fiction.”

New York Herald Tribune,

24 September 1933, “Books” section,

pp. 17, 19.

This strange and mightily obsessed book is for those who are capable of yielding themselves completely to the huge embrace of earth-mysticism. Of all the brands of mysticism, religious or poetic, there is none so vast and awesome as that which arises from the earth and is a passion simply for the miracle of a body that yields, puts forth, grows and dies; which is unconcerned with good or evil, solace or punishment, error or reason. And of all the books written out of such passion, this is the purest expression of it that I have ever encountered.

Ralph Thompson.

“Books of the Times.”

New York Times,

26 May 1941, p. 17.

… The Forgotten Village is… graphic, being in fact 95 per cent stills from a forthcoming documentary film made in Mexico by Herbert Kline, Alexander Hackensmid and associates.

It seems that Mr. Steinbeck wrote the story before anything else was done, and that Mr. Kline (who produced Crisis and Lights Out in Europe) and a camera crew then went down across the border, found a village to suit the purposes of the script, and began taking pictures. The film is to be released this Autumn, and if it is half as effective on the screen as The Forgotten Village is in print, it will be the finest thing of its kind since Eisenstein's Thunder Over Mexico.

Magnificent as it was, the Eisenstein had no particular continuity, or at any rate didn't have much of any by the time it was shown to the public. This one will be almost wholly “story,” with the socalled documentary detail minor rather than major, and flag-waving and political speech-making left out altogether. In a broad sense, the story is that of Ibsen's Enemy of the People retold in terms of the Mexican peon. Specifically, it is an account of a dramatic clash between medical superstition and medical science in an isolated mountain town.

Mr. Steinbeck's sympathetic text runs but a few lines to the page, and serves as captions for the pictures, of which there are 136 in all, reproduced in photogravure.

Nathan L. Rothman.

“A Small Miracle.”

Saturday Review, 27

(30 December 1944), 5.

When you have finished reading Cannery Row you know that John Steinbeck has passed another of his small miracles. It is the best thing he has done since The Grapes of Wrath, although it is not quite like that, in ways that we shall discover. This goes back in style and substance to those other brilliant little tales he wrote, to Monterey County in California again, where once we met Lennie and George, and Danny and the paisanos. Add to these the people of Cannery Row: Doc, and Mack, and the boys, and the bright-haired Dora, for they are likely to seem as memorable. They are caught up alive for us, stirring and functioning, in the whole, integral atmosphere of their shacks along the shore line, the canneries, and the flophouse, Lee Chong's store, Doc's marine laboratory, Dora's Bear Flag Restaurant.

There is one fairly consistent thread of plot that runs tenuously through the book. It will seem trifling when it is mentioned: the blundering and fantastic attempts of the other inhabitants of the Row to show their love for… Doc, to throw him a party, to serve him in their untutored ways, like the fabled Juggler at the altar. But more important is the series of individual and group portraits revealed along the way, and most important of all the spiritual correspondence between place and people.

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.

“Russian Journal.”

Time, 51 (26 January 1948), 58–9.

In London's Savoy Hotel, John Steinbeck overheard a Chicago Tribune man snort: “Capa, you have absolutely no integrity!” That wartime remark, says Steinbeck, “intrigued me—I was fascinated that anybody could get so low that a Chicago Tribune man could say such a thing. I investigated Capa, and I found out it was perfectly true.” Photographer Robert Capa and Author Steinbeck became great friends.

Last March, in a Manhattan bar, they met again. Over two drinks they decided to go to Russia to record, not the political news, but the private life of private Russians. Last week, in the New York Herald Tribune (which had jumped at the chance to pay their way) and in twoscore other U.S. and foreign papers, the first chapters of their Russian Journal appeared. According to plan, they had brought back no headlines but an unexcited (and sometimes unexciting) report that, like any proof that the Russians are people after all, would make the brazen voice of the Kremlin all the more disheartening.

The Soviets admitted them—with some misgivings about Capa (who, in any country, talks and looks like an enemy alien) and his cameras. “The camera is one of the most frightening of modern weapons,” says Steinbeck, “and a man with a camera is suspected and watched.” To a polite, but suspicious young man at VOKS, the cultural relations office in Moscow, they tried to explain their mission.

Brooks Atkinson.

“At the Theatre.”

New York Times,

19 October 1950, p. 40.

Credit John Steinbeck with having the courage to try something that is difficult. Credit four actors and a director with a superb performance. For Burning Bright, which opened at the Broadhurst last evening, is written in the form of an epic and acted like a poem.

But there is always a “but” at the end of such salutations. Although Mr. Steinbeck is a man of faith, he does not write with the majesty of a prophet and Burning Bright does not have much eloquence in the theatre. Mr. Steinbeck has been happier when he has been closer to mice and men and the itinerant Okies. Abstract ideas do not appear to be his medium.

Like the preacher in Ecclesiastes, he says that the earth abideth forever. The human race must go on, though the method does not matter. To illustrate his thesis he offers a middle-aged husband, a young wife, a friend of the family and a young lover. Although the husband is sterile, he longs for children to continue the inheritance he has had from his forebears. Descendants are a religious obligation to him.

To gratify his vanity, the wife secretly takes a lover and pretends that the child is her husband's. When he discovers that he has been deceived, he is crushed and horrified. But in the end, Mr. Steinbeck shows the husband as resigned to any method that keeps the chain of life unbroken.

To give his theme a universal significance Mr. Steinbeck presents his characters first as circus folk, second as farmers and third as sailors.

Robert E. Kingery.

“The Pearl.”

Library Journal, 72

(1 November 1947), 1540.

Retelling of an old Mexican folk tale- the finding of the Great Pearl by Kino, a fisherman and what then happened to him, his wife Juana and their baby Coyotito, before Kino threw the pearl into the sea again. Within that simple frame, Steinbeck achieves a major artistic triumph full of subtle overtones, large fundamentals and universal significance. This is Steinbeck in full stature and in culmination, and is, therefore, without reservation, absolutely essential in all collections…

Maxwell Geismar.

“Fable Retold.”

Saturday Review, 30

(22 November 1947), 14–15.

This is an old Mexican folk tale which John Steinbeck has recast in his familiar paisano vein. It originally appeared in The Woman's Home Companion under the title of “The Pearl of the World” and now, with full-page original drawings by Orozco, it forms a modest and attractive little volume. But it also raises some serious questions about almost all Steinbeck's recent books and his work as a whole.

The story deals with a Mexican fisherman named Kino who is devoted to his wife, Juana, and his child, Coyotito. The child is bitten by a scorpion and the white doctor refuses to treat it. Kino discovered a huge pearl, the greatest pearl in the world according to his Mexican neighbors. The doctor tries to steal it, the pearl merchants (also white) try to cheat him out of it, and Kino is forced, in what is apparently an inevitable sequence of tragic consequences, to flee from his village and to murder the “trackers” who come after him.

John Steinbeck did not particularly like book critics, “these curious sucker fish who live with joyous vicariousness on other men's work and discipline with dreary words the thing which feeds them.” It is hardly surprising. Each book published in his lifetime was attacked by prestigious reviewers, and for a highly sensitive man the criticism bit deeply. “Once I read and wept over reviews,” he wrote in 1954; “then one time I put the criticisms all together and I found that they canceled each other out and left me nonexistent.” That complaint points to the central feature of this collection of reviews. With the publication of each book, Steinbeck was both roundly attacked and as widely lauded. Reading the reviews in American, English, and Canadian magazines and newspapers, one is struck by the consistency of dissent; even books considered his weakest—Burning Bright and The Wayward Bus—received plaudits from important reviewers. There was never a consensus on a Steinbeck text.

Still, a common and persistent misconception about Steinbeck's work is that critics panned the post-Grapes fiction. That assumption became commonplace in the 1960s. Writing in the Saturday Review in 1969 about the posthumously published journal of a Novel, Lawrence William Jones posited this view of Steinbeck's career: “Steinbeck's post-war reception was one of nearly unrelieved and often misdirected hostility. Of the eight fictional works published during this period, only The Pearl was even fleetingly praised, and it has inevitably suffered from constant comparison with Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea.”

Christopher Morley.

“Boy against Death.”

Saturday Review, 16

(25 September 1937), 18.

Tortilla Flat and Of Mice and Men were not accidents. It is unlikely that anything Mr. Steinbeck publishes will be casual; he is a controlled, deliberate and ascertained workman. In this little book he again shows himself equal in power and in sensitiveness, and purposeful in both. It would not be fair to suppose that because The Red Pony appears in a deluxe limitation that he (or his publisher) regards it as hors d'ceuvre. It may be a sketch of some shape of things to come; it may be a mood (of memory or fancy) that the author prefers to keep within restricted bounds. It has on it his own mark of beauty and pain.

It would be possible (as it always is possible) to read into these three episodes in the life of a ten-year-old boy some larger meanings and suggestions. Is it the first glimmering in the boy's mind of the collapse of faith or certainty? For first the death of the pony, and then the death of the mare in bearing another foal, are attributable (in the boy's mind) to Billy Buck who knew all about horses. So Billy (a notable character portrait) proves fallible after all. That is one suggestion of fable that the reader may find; and there are others. Mr. Steinbeck is a writer of such gauge that we enjoy speculating what he may have intended between the lines. It is an impertinence: but he has earned the right to be subjected to it.

Eric Moon.

“Travels with Charley.”

Library Journal, 87

(15 June 1962), 2378.

Charley is “an old French gentleman poodle” with a placid temperament and cultural pretensions. John Steinbeck is an aging writer with a romantic view of himself as a “man of the people,” now worried that the America he has been writing about for 20 years has passed him by. This is the crew of Rocinante, a three-quarter-ton pickup truck equipped with a miniature ship's cabin and named after Don Quixote's horse. Their journey of rediscovery takes them through 40 states, but it is really no more than an excuse for Steinbeck to be along, to meet again people on the road, and to muse nostalgically about the way things used to be before “progress” came along. The mood ranges from sentiment (his love affair with Montana), through gentle irony (Texas hospitality), to a rather naive horror over the mechanical demonstrations by strident women outside New Orleans schools. The prose is, as one would expect, always competent, often self-conscious, sometimes superb. It's a slight, inconsequential book by a nice man rather than a great novelist. But it's a pleasant evening's reading, and it will be deservedly popular.

Orville Prescott.

“Books of the Times.”

New York Times,

27 July 1962, p. 23.

Soon after Labor Day in the autumn of 1960 a big man with a beard and a large dog with a scraggly mustache set forth together on an automobile tour of the United States. The man was John Steinbeck, one of the most successful of contemporary American novelists.

Maurice Dolbier.

“World of Books.”

New York World Journal Tribune,

24 October 1966, p. 37.

A little over five years ago John Steinbeck went off in a truck with a tall dog named Charley to rediscover America. He traveled over 10,000 miles and through 34 states, and he wrote a book about the places he saw and the people he met and what they said.

“From start to finish,” he summed up in Travels with Charley', “I found no strangers… For all of our enormous geographic range, for all of our sectionalism, for all of our interwoven breeds drawn from every part of the ethnic world, we are a nation, a new breed… This is not patriotic whoop-de-do. It is a carefully observed fact.… It is astonishing that this has happened in less than 200 years and most of it in the last 50. The American identity is an exact and provable thing.”

In his new book, Steinbeck makes a deeper examination of that identity— what historical institutions and accidents have helped to create it, what paradoxes are present in it, what dangers threaten it, what powers of survival it may have against them. It is, he writes, a book of “opinion, conjecture and speculation” about a country that is “complicated, bullheaded, shy, cruel, boisterous, unspeakably dear, and very beautiful.”

Steinbeck is not a patriotic whoopde- doer. There are shameful pages in our national history; he does not overlook them. There are symptoms in today's society of an illness that could bring us to the verge of moral collapse; he describes them in grim detail.

Orville Prescott.

“Books of the Times.“

New York Times,

20 October 1950, p. 25.

For the first time on record a book by a celebrated author is being published in the same week as the production of a play derived from it. Book and play are John Steinbeck's Burning Bright. Its merits as a play behind footlights with actors adding the illusion of flesh-and-blood reality to Mr. Steinbeck's symbolical characters were discussed yesterday by Mr. Atkinson on the theatre page. It is the book, to be read by thousands of persons who will not be able to see the play, which concerns us here. As a book, then, Burning Bright is artificial and peculiar, but moderately effective.

This is the third example of a literary form of Mr. Steinbeck's own invention, the “play-novelette” as he calls it. The others were Of Mice and Men and The Moon Is Down. A play-novelette, says Mr. Steinbeck, “is a play that is easy to read or a short novel that can be played simply by lifting out the dialogue.” It has two justifications in Mr. Steinbeck's mind: “to provide a play that will be more widely read because it is presented as ordinary fiction, which is a more familiar medium,” and to augment “the play for the actor, the director and the producer, as well as the reader.” It gives theatre people “the fullest sense of the intention of the writer.”

Brooks Atkinson.

“The Moon Is Down.“

New York Times,

8 April 1942, p. 22.

Even if the Broadway theatre had not been moribund for most of the season, it would be easy to like and respect John Steinbeck's The Moon Is Down, which was acted at the Martin Beck last evening. For Mr. Steinbeck is telling a calm and reasonable story about the immortality of freedom in terms of a tiny village— probably Norwegian—that every one can understand.

Since the war has yet to be won in the face of terrible and immediate odds, The Moon Is Down is not a play to please the propagandists of today. It is assured; it is not rousing and provocative and it does not remind us of the stupendous job that has to be done now and tomorrow. But Mr. Steinbeck apparently feels that a free people do not have to be manipulated by half-truths and tactful evasions. Without raising his voice or playing tricks on a plot, he has put down some of the fundamental truths about man's unconquerable will to live without a master. It is a remarkably convincing play because it is honest in its heart.

Since he is dealing with basic principles, Mr. Steinbeck has refrained from defining his town as Norwegian or the invaders as German. But let us assume that this is the story of the German invasion of a small Norwegian mining town after the ground had been prepared by a local traitor. Although the young German officers are flush with victory, their colonel is a mature man who has tried invasion before.

Brian St. Pierre.

“Steinbeck's Timeless Tale of Migrant Suffering.”

San Francisco Chronicle,

26 March 1989,

Section 4, pp. 3–4.

… From Working Days, the journals Steinbeck kept while writing The Grapes of Wrath, comes the astonishing fact that he wrote this dense and complex novel in 100 days, by hand, under a fair amount of duress: His publisher was going bankrupt, a noisy housing project was being built next door, he and his wife Carol were ill at times, and he was plagued to the point of depression by doubts about his talent. No wonder he wrote, “I am ready to go to work and I am glad to get into other lives and escape from mine for a while.”

Steinbeck undertook this journal to make himself accountable (“If a day is skipped it will show glaringly on this record”), and as editor Robert DeMott notes, it is a “hermetic-even claustrophobic” diary of the making of a book as well as its attendant terrors and distractions.

Many of the entries are rambling and banal, as many of anyone's days would be, but the earnest, die hard effort of writing and the importance of the task have great cumulative power: “I grew again to love and admire the people who are so much stronger and purer and braver than I am,” he wrote of the migrants.

DeMott has surrounded the journal entries with a biographical introduction, commentary and illuminating notes, building a good book onto a narrow foundation.

“Fiction.”

Publishers' Weekly, 210

(30 August 1976), 332–3.

When John Steinbeck was a boy, he discovered the Caxton Morte d'Arthur. The fascination of the stories, the language, the old words never diminished for him. Eventually he began to work on his own version of some of the 15th century tales. His research took him to the Winchester Mss. (more authentic than Caxton's edited printed edition) and to noted Malory scholar Eugene Vinaver, who helped him with his Arthurian research. The seven tales here were completed in 1959. Steinbeck's aim was “to set them down in plain present day speech… (to) keep the wonder and the magic.” He does just that for old and young alike. Delightful too is the bonus: correspondence with his literary agent. It reveals the extent of Steinbeck's interest in Malory, his own artistic concerns and his problems with the Arthur project. A wonderful, wise, posthumous gift to us from the prizewinning Steinbeck…

“Non-fiction.”

Kirkus Reviews, 44

(1 September 1976), 1025.

“Jehan Stynebec” maintained a lifelong devotion to the 15th-century minor hoodlum and “knyght presoner, sir Thomas Malleorre,” and long cherished the idea of retelling the Matter of Arthur for our time. Dating mostly from 1958-59, Steinbeck's fragmentary attempt represents both an earnest effort at scholarly perspective and a broad contemporary reinterpretation. He did not try to “translate,” but simplified and condensed Malory's language while tidying up some narrative loose ends. There are five brief, fairly straightforward versions of episodes from the first book (following Eugene Vinaver's edition of the Winchester MS) and two lengthy narratives based on the Tale of Sir Launcelot du Lake and the Gawain, Ywain, and Marhalt episode.