America and Americans and Selected Nonfiction Read Free Page B

sparkling and alive like colored pebbles on a wave-washed shore. It’s impossible not to fill your pockets with them. But when you get home, they are dry and colorless. I’d like to pin down a few while they are still wet. (Newsday, 4 Dec. 1965)
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    Finally, there is an urgency about many of his social pieces—particularly, of course, America and Americans, his last work of nonfiction. He didn’t preach, but he cared. Behind reporting things as he saw them, focusing on the small but telling experiences in life, he was also a moralist and idealist. All his life he was essentially an idealist; that is, he searched to find the essence of things, the meanings or patterns behind what he observed. That’s what he was doing as his life came to an end—interpreting America.
    Perhaps it was his experience in California’s Central Valley during the 1930s, working out of his old bread truck so as to not draw attention to himself, mingling with the migrants, that set the pattern for a lifetime of reporting. He looked away from himself, observing the commonplace and the common people in order to see the whole picture as a democratic vista as accurately as he could. This is precisely Casy’s stated mission in The Grapes of Wrath as he joins up with the Joads for the trip to California. Steinbeck lived that mission throughout his career—to see the whole as clearly as possible and to see it with his heart as well as with his head.

I.
    PLACES OF THE HEART
    EXTRAORDINARILY SENSITIVE to his environment, John Steinbeck “brings together the human heart and the land,” to borrow a phrase from environmentalist and writer Barry Lopez (Lopez 71). Like Lopez, Steinbeck urges his readers to consider two primal landscapes: external landscapes—our relations to the land, to oaks, to the whir of night frogs—and interior landscapes, often shaped by the places where we reside. Some of Steinbeck’s best nonfiction considers the writer’s internal landscapes, places he lived and loved: Salinas, California, where he was born in 1902 and lived until age eighteen; San Francisco, where he resided briefly during the 1920s; the Monterey Peninsula, where he wrote his early fiction from 1930 to 1936; and the East Coast—New York City and Sag Harbor—where he spent the last eighteen years of his life.
    His reflections on these places are sometimes meditative and serious, as in “A Primer on the ’30s” and in that marvelous piece “Conversation at Sag Harbor.” But more often his view is colored with humor, a humor that is sometimes impish, sometimes touched with irony. Always we sense the connection of the writer to the places he lived. To a certain extent these pieces form a kind of autobiography, and considering how badly he was treated by some people in both Salinas and Monterey (where the landlord of an office building wouldn’t rent him space after he returned to live on the peninsula in 1944) and how terrible was his struggle during his first experience in New York, they are remarkably free of bitterness.
    The Salinas valley, twenty miles inland, and the Monterey Peninsula, where his parents had a beach cottage, have become “Steinbeck Country” because so much of his fiction is located there or nearby. Few writers have put such an indelible imprint on a region. Tourists often visit the area to see it not for what it is but for what Steinbeck made of it. But as is clear from “Always Something to Do in Salinas,” the author had mixed emotions about his hometown. Although it was a fine place for a boy to roam the countryside on his pony, the community’s conservatism chafed. As he got older, the town’s puritanical respectability and antilabor biases grated increasingly—although he could in retrospect treat the rigidity of the Salinas burghers with some levity. In opposition to Salinas, he set up Monterey as more relaxed and diverse, a