Abstract
Steinbeck studies labor unrest in the Salinas Valley, and writes stories for newspapers. His works In Dubious Battle and Of Mice and Men result from this information. Both are well reviewed; Of Mice and Men becomes a Broadway play and wins awards. Of Mice and Men becomes his first Book-of-the-Month Club selection.
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Notes
- 1.
Caroline Decker, Shorty Alston, and James Harkins were other key players in the activities of the Cannery and Agricultural Workers Industrial Union in this area. Unions in the east and middle west, as well as the Pacific northwest, had concentrated on workers in manufacturing and lumbering. The C&AWIU was a comparatively young organization.
- 2.
Intrigued by Ricketts’ sense of interconnectedness within and between all strata of life—amoebic as well as human—Steinbeck had worked out a principle he referred to as “the phalanx.” In 1933 he used this term rather than the phrasing of his earlier letters (“group” or “group-unit”). He wrote to Albee, man “arranges himself into larger units, which I have called the phalanx. The phalanx has its own memory—memory of the great tides when the moon was close, memory of starvation when the food of the world was exhausted. Memory of methods when numbers of his units had to be destroyed for the good of the whole, memory of the history of itself. And the phalanx has emotions of which the unit man is incapable. Emotions of destruction, of war, of migration, of hatred, of fear” (SLL 79–80).
- 3.
Timmerman points out that the lynching that became the kernel of the story occurred on November 16, 1933, in San Jose, and dominated the newspapers for weeks. It was two men—John Maurice Holmes and Thomas Harold Thurmond—who were so brutally killed, and Steinbeck wrote about their lynchings under the title “Case History” (Timmerman “Notes” Long 229).
- 4.
Doc Burton counters Jim’s assumption that important social changes begin with violent acts. Doc tells him, “‘There aren’t any beginnings…Nor any ends. It seems to me that man has engaged for a blind and fearful struggle out of a past he can’t remember, into a future he can’t foresee nor understand. And man has met and defeated every obstacle, every enemy except one. He cannot win over himself. How mankind hates itself’” (IDB 724).
- 5.
Jackson Benson points out that within The Long Valley, “Nearly every major character wears some kind of harness” (Benson 288). Perhaps this assessment seems too easy; there are characters ruled by frustration and by the need for compromise as well. What Benson does not undercut, however, is that Steinbeck’s stories in this collection are varied and interesting. He would make his mark on the world of the American short story.
- 6.
Probably because Of Mice and Men became a best-seller, Steinbeck was often asked about the source for the character of Lennie. He usually claimed that he had worked with such a person—“for many weeks”—during his stint as farmhand on one of the Spreckels ranches. “He didn’t kill a girl. He killed a ranch foreman. Got sore because the boss had fired his pal and stuck a pitchfork right through his stomach. I hate to tell you how many times I saw him do it. We couldn’t stop him until it was too late.… He’s in an insane asylum in California right now” (Conversations 9). Other of Steinbeck’s accounts vary in violence from this one.
- 7.
Directed in the film production by Lewis Milestone, who had won an Academy Award for his 1930 movie All Quiet on the Western Front, Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men was also nominated for an Academy Award for Best Picture.
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Wagner-Martin, L. (2017). Journalism v. Fiction. In: John Steinbeck. Literary Lives. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-55382-9_3
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