Reclaiming John Steinbeck

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).

• 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.

'No American writer is in greater need of reassessment than John Steinbeck. Widely read and as widely held in critical disrepute, Steinbeck has at last been rescued by Gavin Jones, whose deep and exacting scholarship is matched by his compassion and an eagerness to explore the connective tissues in Steinbeck's work. A deft and dazzling study of a complex and misunderstood writer's emergence – a term Steinbeck would appreciate – a half century after his passing.' William Souder, author of Mad at the World: A Life of John Steinbeck (W. W. Norton, 2020)