Abstract
Steinbeck undergoes a process of learning to write good stories and immersion in the American idiomatic language. He develops respect for writing teacher Edith Mirrielees and friendships with other Stanford writing students. The Pastures of Heaven makes use of the Salinas Valley. He forms a friendship with Ed Ricketts and marries Carol Henning.
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Notes
- 1.
Earlier in the letter to Day, Steinbeck confessed, “You will remember at Stanford that I went about being different characters. I even developed a theory that one had no personality in essence, that one was a reflection of a mood plus the moods of other persons present” (SLL 13).
- 2.
Traveling across country after having worked on his doctorate and explored Europe and the Far East, Campbell had run out of money. In Benson’s words, “Since everyone was out of work, a ‘bum’ was not necessarily someone who didn’t want to work.” The Monterey Red Cross and Salvation Army boarded the destitute in private homes, where they exchanged board for yard work and household help (Benson 223).
- 3.
Their passionate love seems never to have been sexually consummated. Campbell wrote a dramatic scene based on Carol’s sitting in one tree and his being positioned in another, with the charged dialogue between the characters telling the story of their great (and only belatedly acknowledged) love (Shillinglaw Carol 110–11).
- 4.
Terry Tempest Williams admires this novel still. She recalled that the story “lives inside me and drives my own hand across the page, [trying to bring herself to] the gesture of conservation, of trying to make peace with our own contradictory nature. We love the land. We are destroying the land” (Williams Centennial 102).
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Wagner-Martin, L. (2017). Steinbeck and the Short Story. In: John Steinbeck. Literary Lives. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-55382-9_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-55382-9_1
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