John Steinbeck (Magill’s Literary Annual 1996)
At a glance:
- Author: Jay Parini
- Type of Work: Biography
- Time of Work: 1902-1968
- Setting: California and New York
- Principal Characters: John Steinbeck, John Ernst Steinbeck, Olive Hamilton Steinbeck, Carol Henning Steinbeck, Gwyn Conger Steinbeck, Elaine Scott Steinbeck, Joseph Campbell, Edward F. Ricketts
- Subjects: Politics, Love or romance, Authors or writers, Literature, Marriage, Novelists, Drinking or drunkenness
Jay Parini’s biography of John Steinbeck chronicles the life of one of America’s most beloved writers, a life of disappointments and paradoxes. Although Steinbeck was a prolific author, producing some twenty-six volumes of fiction and nonfiction, he never seemed satisfied with his achievement. Hard-drinking and depressive, driven by anxieties imprinted on his character by his parents, he vacillated between shyness and angry aggression, between conceited self-assertiveness and tortured self-doubt. To unravel the complicated knots of his life, Parini draws on the evidence contained in...
[The entire page is 2196 words long]
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