Summer of Steinbeck

     We have an extremely small, local library that we've gone to every week this summer, which inhabits a very tiny building that is run entirely by volunteers and donations.  They have a wonderful kids' section, but the adult section looks eerily like your 80-year-old grandmother cleared out all the books she bought in the 1980s and hadn't read.  The "Literature" section in the kids' department is pretty good, and is also about 90% John Steinbeck.  Since living in California, I've realized that everyone raised here became inundated in Steinbeck from school, and yet I can't remember reading one of his books.  At some point in my life I'd read multiple good quotes from Travels with Charley, so I thought I would give it a try, and it was excellent!  I followed that up with a collection of his short stories in The Long Valley, and finally decided to go for the plunge and read Grapes of Wrath.
      To paraphrase another author: "It was the best of books, it was the worst of books."  I've entirely fallen in love with Steinbeck's ability to describe characters and tell a good story.  He really likes his characters, and it shows.  The one-eyed junkyard supervisor is one of my personal favorites.  However, there is definitely some heavy-handed political statements he's trying to make with the story that get oppressive and trite with repetition.  There is no way that one Okie family could encounter every possible event of the Dust Bowl, and the sentimentalism of it is too much for such a good writer.
       Steinbeck's genius can be found in how many times he's been copied over the last 80 years.  It seemed that writers as far apart as Tom Wolfe and Wallace Stegner have copied aspects of his style.  In fact, Stegner is extremely similar, but has even less hope for his characters' unhappy endings than Steinbeck does.
       Steinbeck certainly wasn't a happy character himself--he drank and partied his way through college (which he didn't finish), his first wife was an active Communist who had an abortion because Steinbeck thought being a father would inhibit his writing career.  He neglected his second wife and children, and was possibly happiest with his third wife.  It sounds as though he enjoyed the company of the characters on the page more than those that inhabited his house.  However, his skill is amazing, and I'm looking forward to a visit to the National Steinbeck Center, which is about 20 minutes from my house.