The White Man's Guide to White Male Writers of the Western Canon by Dana Schwartz

Author:Dana Schwartz
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2019-09-12T16:00:00+00:00

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FUN FACT

Hemingway also invented his own absinthe-based cocktail, Death in the Afternoon: “Pour one jigger absinthe into a Champagne glass. Add iced Champagne until it attains the proper opalescent milkiness. Drink three to five of these slowly.”

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John Steinbeck

[1902–1968]

BEST EYES

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“Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.”

We all know that in this new century, the only real writing of any worth is happening in New York City, where artists bundle themselves in scarves against the stale subway air and claw their way into adulthood. New York City is just real in a way that the West Coast isn’t, you know? But that wasn’t always the case. Back in the twentieth century, a man could write decent literature about California. A man, singular. And that man was John Steinbeck.

Born in Salinas, California, Steinbeck went on to attend what some (mistakenly) call the Ivy League of the West Coast,1 Stanford, although he did not graduate. He also briefly moved to New York to try to make it as a freelance writer, but he couldn’t hack it. I get it, John. Not everyone is built for the cunning mistress that is New York City.

Steinbeck married his first wife, Carol Henning, in 1930 and briefly tried to make a living manufacturing plaster mannequins until he was forced to take a different approach: buying a small boat, living off what he could fish and what he could grow in his garden, and sharing his food among friends. If this sounds like communism to you, you are right, and John Steinbeck knew that capitalism is a disease that erodes the human spirit. Have you read Marx? I can lend you my copy, it’s somewhere in my dorm room.

All the while, Steinbeck continually wrote about the poor and salt-of-the-earth people in the American West. His novel about migrant workers, The Grapes of Wrath, was banned by the powers that be in Kern County—the location where the fictional Joad family ends up in the book—for opening up people’s eyes to the evils of terrible labor conditions. Steinbeck wrote, “The vilification of me out here from the large landowners and bankers is pretty bad. The latest is a rumor started by them that the Okies hate me and have threatened to kill me for lying about them. I’m frightened at the rolling might of this damned thing. It is completely out of hand; I mean a kind of hysteria about the book is growing that is not healthy.” That’s exactly how I felt when some group on campus protested the publication of my prose poem “Yes I Am White, but I Still Understand Racism Better Than Anyone Else” in the department literary journal.

Steinbeck, like most creatives who should not be expected to give all of themselves to one person forever or even a little bit, married three times. Unfortunately one of those women got on a soapbox and aired her side of the story before he had the chance to write the truth.

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