The Pastures of Heaven Read Free

writing that makes the book fine reading.” Describing the form of the volume, she observed that “each of the chapters presents an individual or group enacting some small drama against the backdrop of Heaven’s Pastures. Short stories they are really.” The review in the Chicago Daily Tribune (November 19, 1932) concluded that “the novel is well plotted, though, perhaps, the conclusion is of a somewhat obvious type. The characters are as vitally real as your next door neighbor, and the style and presentation of the novel are restrained, compassionate, as well as compelling.”
    Anita Moffett wrote more extensively in the New York Times Book Review for November 20, 1932, praising the prose of the volume: Steinbeck “writes with deep feeling for the tragedy implicit in each situation, yet undeceived by the self-delusion or self-dramatization of the persons involved. Racy, realistically direct and caustically humorous, his writing is noteworthy for originality of phrase and image and a strongly poetic feeling.” The commentator for the Saturday Review of Literature (November 26, 1932) observed that the “book is ... a collection of short stories unrelated except by the unity of place and the occasional appearance of one or another character in an episode in which he is not primarily featured,” a comment that missed entirely the substantial thematic unity that Steinbeck had given his volume.
    A brief comment in The Nation on December 7, 1932, called the book a “series of connected sketches” that are obsessed with abnormal character types. Praising Steinbeck’s style, the reviewer predicted that “his future work should lead to his recognition as an excellent psychological analyst.” Revealing the preoccupation of the age, he added that if Steinbeck “could add social insight to his present equipment he would be a first-rate novelist.” Cyrilly Abels, in The Book-man for December of 1932, compared Pastures to Hilton’s Ill Wind as another series of linked stories and suggested that in these tales “civilization shows a pathetic gray against the delightful green of Nature, [and] ... even the Garden of the Hesperides brings disillusion.” A brief notice in The Booklist (December 1932) observed that “sensitivity, a very human pity, and humor preserve the book from an unwholesome impression that the themes of horror and abnormality might have conveyed in less skillful writing.” Helen McAfee praised Steinbeck’s characterizations and his description of the valley and remarked that “the author has a sense of motivation, with psychological insight and understanding. The odd and queer people are naturally so. The normal people are normally so. The whole story is plausible, and seemingly historical in its descriptions of places and events.”
    But to come to terms with the adequacy of these early reviews, and to attempt to understand the literary contributions and context of The Pastures of Heaven, it is important to place the book in the context of two important literary traditions that converge in these stories: American Literary Naturalism and the genre of the short-story cycle, both of which had been gaining in importance in American fiction since the 1890s.

III
    Growing out of the hard edge of Realism in the last decade of the nineteenth century, Naturalism had become the dominant literary movement in American fiction by the turn of the century, manifesting its influence in the Bowery tales of Stephen Crane, the fight for survival in the work of Jack London, the grim struggle of simple characters against a world they cannot control in Frank Norris’s fiction, and the complex inner drives that impel disaster in the novels of Theodore Dreiser. At the ideological heart of this literary tendency is pessimistic Determinism, the notion that the causative factors in human tragedy lie beyond the powers of the individual. The influence