Manage saved and uploaded resources and foldersīrowse educational resources by subject and topic Visit megaphone.Search reviewed educational resources by keyword, subject, grade, type, and more She is also the convener of the Joy of History Book Club, an online history seminar open to anyone. Eloquent, nuanced, and deeply researched, Mad at the World: A Life of John Steinbeck (Norton, 2020) captures the full measure of the man and his work.īarbara Berglund Sokolov is a historian of the American West. Steinbeck remains our great social realist novelist, the writer who gave the dispossessed and the disenfranchised a voice in American life and letters.

And yet Steinbeck also took aim at the corrosiveness of power, the perils of income inequality, and the urgency of ecological collapse, all of which drive public debate to this day. And while he claimed indifference about success, his mid-career books and movie deals made him a lot of money-which passed through his hands as quickly as it came in. Next to writing, his favorite things were drinking and womanizing and getting married, which he did three times. Obsessed with privacy, he was mistrustful of people. Pulitzer Prize finalist William Souder explores Steinbeck’s long apprenticeship as a writer struggling through the depths of the Great Depression, and his rise to greatness with masterpieces such as The Red Pony, Of Mice and Men, and The Grapes of Wrath.Īngered by the plight of the Dust Bowl migrants who were starving even as they toiled to harvest California’s limitless bounty, fascinated by the guileless decency of the downtrodden denizens of Cannery Row, and appalled by the country’s refusal to recognize the humanity common to all of its citizens, Steinbeck took a stand against social injustice-paradoxically given his inherent misanthropy-setting him apart from the writers of the so-called 'lost generation.' A man by turns quick-tempered, compassionate, and ultimately brilliant, Steinbeck could be a difficult person to like.

The first full-length biography of America's most celebrated novelist of the Great Depression to appear in a quarter century, Mad at the World illuminates what has made the work of John Steinbeck endure: his capacity for empathy.

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