Description: Featuring contemporaneous and present-day interpretations of his novels and essays by historians, literary scholars, and political theorists, this book covers the spectrum of Steinbeck's writing, exploring everything from his place in American political culture to his seeming betrayal of his leftist principles in later years.
Brief description: Cyrus Ernesto Zirakzadeh is professor of political science at the University of Connecticut and former editor of the journal Polity. He has authored or edited several books, among them Social Movements in Politics, as well as scholarly articles on John Steinbeck and Norman Mailer.
Review Quotes:
This volume of essays on John Steinbeck, like the wonderful Kentucky volumes on Thoreau, Whitman, and Melville, offers finely crafted essays that explore the relationship between the political and the literary in diverse ways. These compelling essays assess the motivations and ambiguities in his engagement with politics and nationhood, and trace how that engagement is transfigured as literary art. But this volume is notable for two reasons. Obviously, essays about Steinbeck are especially timely now, as we face a time of economic crisis when suffering and inequality remain mostly invisible, when the supremacy of market values seems incontestable, and when alternatives are widely ridiculed and demonized. But also, because Steinbeck addressed his time by political activism, and because of his enormous and continuing influence in popular culture--from fifth grade curriculums to Bruce Springstein--the essays in this volume range more widely than other Kentucky volumes, and that is a welcome development in political theory.
--George Shulman, George Shulman