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.

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