Reclaiming John Steinbeck Writing for the Future of Humanity

John Steinbeck is a towering figure in twentieth-century American literature; yet he remains one of our least understood writers. This major reevaluation of Steinbeck by Gavin Jones uncovers a timely thinker who confronted the fate of humanity as a species facing climate change, environmental crisis, and a growing divide between the powerful and the marginalized. Driven by insatiable curiosity, Steinbeck's work crossed a variety of borders ? between the United States and the Global South, between human and nonhuman lifeforms, between science and the arts, and between literature and film ? to explore the transformations in consciousness necessary for our survival on a precarious planet. Always seeking new forms to express his ecological and social vision of human interconnectedness and vulnerability, Steinbeck is a writer of urgent concern for the twenty-first century, even as he was haunted by the legacies of racism and injustice in the American West.

List of Illustrations; Acknowledgments; Introduction: Loving and Hating Steinbeck; 1. Short Stories in School and Lab:'Tularecito' and 'The Snake'; 2. Drought, Climate, and Race in the West: To a God Unknown; 3. Race and Revision: 'The Vigilante' and 'Johnny Bear'; 4. Becoming Animal: Theories of Mind in The Red Pony; 5. What Is It Like to Be a Plant?: 'The Chrysanthemums' and 'The White Quail'; 6. On Not Being a Modernist: Disability and Performance in Of Mice and Men; 7. Emergence and Failure: The Middleness of The Grapes of Wrath; 8. Borderlands: Extinction and the New World Outlook in Sea of Cortez; 9. Mexican Revolutions: The Forgotten Village, The Pearl, and the Global South; Epilogue: The Aftertaste of Cannery Row; Notes; Index.

Gavin Jones is the Frederick P. Rehmus Family Professor of the Humanities at Stanford University, where he has taught American literature since 1999. He is the author of Strange Talk: The Politics of Dialect Literature in Gilded Age America (University of California Press, 1999), American Hungers: The Problem of Poverty in US Literature, 1840-1945 (Princeton University Press, 2008), and Failure and the American Writer: A Literary History (Cambridge University Press, 2014).