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National Verities. Like Norman Thomas and Upton Sinclair, Steinbeck rebelled against injustices precisely because of a profound faith in man's perfectibility. The epic journey of the loads was a warning against the evils existing within the American system, but the migrants were presented as the actual guardians of all of the national verities: family loyalty, trust of neighbor, devotion to the land. Steinbeck's dogma was uncommonly wholesome for a radical of the '30s. Avoiding customary Communist cliches, he affirmed children, home, mother and young love. "Nothin' but us," says Ma Joad, "nothin' but the folks."
He was a superbly professional storyteller, but his work was at times flawed by facile allegorizing. In the preface to 1935's Tortilla Flat, an otherwise sharp and accurate novel of the innocent gaiety of the paisanos in Monterey, he wrote: "When you speak of Danny's house, you are understood to mean a unit of which the parts are men, from which came sweetness and joy, philanthropy and, in the end, a mystic sorrow. For Danny's house was not unlike the Round Table, and Danny's friends were not unlike the knights." In 1952's East of Eden, the Biblical parallels of Cain and Abel are so relentlessly stenciled upon the plot that symbolized meaning threatens to overwhelm the narrative surface.
Allegorical Tendencies. Steinbeck was an emotional, sentimental, yet extraordinarily powerful writer who frequently mined his personal experiences for the material of his fiction. He was born in Salinas, Calif. The region figures in his novels and stories, including East of Eden, Cannery Row and Of Mice and Men. The son of a miller and a Salinas Valley schoolteacher, he played basketball as a youth and read such works as Malory's Morte d'Arthur, Milton's Paradise Lost and the Bible-tastes that accounted perhaps for his allegorical tendencies. He entered Stanford in 1920, but left after five years of intermittent attendance and no degree. In New York, he worked briefly for the American and was fired because he seemed incapable of recording facts without rhapsodizing or sermonizing. He then worked for a time as a hod carrier, returned to California and became a caretaker of a lodge in the Sierras. There he completed his first novel, Cup of Gold, which appeared in 1929.
Steinbeck published two other novels The Pastures of Heaven, To a God Unknownbefore Tortilla Flat, in 1935, became a bestseller. In Dubious Battle, dealing with an apple pickers' strike in California and the workers' exploitation by both capitalists and Communist organizers, further established his reputation, and Of Mice and Men, his fable of strength and weakness, solidified it. After 1940, however, Steinbeck produced only two major works East of Eden and The Winter of Our Discontentand neither equaled in power his work during the '30s.
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