There’s an actor and an opera star I could be writing about this morning, but I just can’t get myself worked up about them, whereas there’s much more to be said on the topic of John Steinbeck (1902-1968).
My existing Steinbeck post from a decade ago is one of my most popular — my #6 most-read Travalanche post out of over 8,000. On the other hand, it is very targeted, it’s essentially just Tom’s “I’ll be there” speech from The Grapes of Wrath. So, there is much room for more. In 2019, thanks to my Wilkie Mahoney guardian Bob Sarber, I got to spend some quality time in Steinbeck Country, the area around Salinas and Monterey, California. A few months later I happened to read one of Steinbeck’s earlier and more obscure works Pastures of Heaven (1932), a collection of interwoven stories that reminded me of things like Spoon River Anthology and Winesburg, Ohio.
All of which served to reconnect me with the author in a way that I had not been since I was quite a young person. We had read that Y.A. tearjerker The Red Pony (1932) in Junior High School. As a teenager, my parents gave me a one volume edition that included The Grapes of Wrath, East of Eden, Of Mice and Men, Cannery Row, and maybe Tortilla Flat. The Grapes of Wrath is the one I have engaged with the most, having read the book several times, seen the John Ford film about as many, and seen Steppenwolf’s stage adaptation circa 1990.
I have always cherished Steinbeck as someone who writes about working people (fruit pickers, ranchers, factory workers, fishermen), though claims made on behalf of his literary skill are frequently exaggerated, IMHO. Clearly there is Hemingway influence; I also think I detect John Dos Passos. His sympathy for the little guy has caused some to grouse that he has a “left wing agenda”….which is what, exactly? A galling obsession with the welfare of children? An irritating conviction that life shouldn’t be miserable if it can be at all avoided? A sob-sister preference for the well-being of human beings over that of banks? Yes, he did tour the Soviet Union in 1948, and attempted a balanced portrait of what he saw. But so did Harpo Marx!
Here is a wrap-up of Steinbeck on stage and screen:
Of Mice and Men
Possibly Steinbeck’s best known and most off produced work. It’s essentially a two hander like Waiting for Godot or The Odd Couple with two great parts for a pair of drifters, basically hobos: George, the smarter, smaller one, and Lenny, his mentally disabled charge. Both a novel and a play emerged in 1937. George S. Kaufman directed the original stage production featuring Wallace Ford and Broderick Crawford, with Will Geer and Clare Luce.
In 1939, non other than Hal Roach produced a screen version in his bid to be legitimate with Burgess Meredith, and Lon Chaney Jr. as the stars. Many subsequent versions followed. There was Warner Brothers animated cartoon parody, as well as a 1968 tv version with George Segal and Nicol Williamson; a 1974 Broadway revival with Kevin Conway and James Earl Jones; a 1981 version starring Randy Quaid, Robert Blake, and Ted Neeley; and a 1992 one with Gary Sinise and John Malkovich (clearly a follow-up to Steppenwolf’s successful The Grapes of Wrath). In 2014 there was a Broadway 2014 revival starring James Franco and Chris O’Dowd. It also influenced my own 1987 play The Strange Case of Grippo the Ape Man, which I presented at La Mama in 2011.
Tortilla Flat
This 1935 book was Steinbeck’s first literary success. in 1938 it became his second Broadway stage play, and in 1942, his third popular Hollywood movie, directed by Victor Fleming, featuring Spencer Tracy, John Garfield, Hedy Lamar, Frank Morgan, Akim Tamiroff, Sheldon Leonard, John Qualen, Donald Meek, Allen Jenkins. Concerning a group of California friends with Spanish ancestry, it jokingly mixes elements of the Arthurian Legend with some from Don Quixote.
The Grapes of Wrath
As I wrote in my earlier post the book has meant a great deal to me since my father grew up in Depression era Tennessee (nothing but Arkansas separates Oklahoma and Tennessee). I had extended family out there. And my family migrated just as the Joads did — they merely went North instead of to California. I think John Ford’s 1940 screen version (adapted by Nunnally Johnson) is his greatest film, exceeding even The Searchers. One of the best adaptations of a book by Hollywood. Just a magical cast. Henry Fonda had played Jesse James the previous year, burnishing his role as a jailbird here. Silent era vet Jane Darwell (Ma) had been in that movie too as well as Gone with the Wind (1939) and Brigham Young (1940). Charley Grapewin had been Uncle Henry in The Wizard of Oz the previous year, and would soon play Jeter in Tobacco Road (1941). Ditto Russel Simpson. Along with John Carradine, John Qualen, Eddie Quillan, etc. That image of a whole extended family crammed into a rusty Tin Lizzie, held together with rope and chewing gum headed up the highway, is the stuff of dreams. (And surely the visual inspiration for the credit sequence of The Beverly Hillbillies).
In 1990 I was privileged to see Steppenwolf’s theatrical adaptation of the book, starring Jeff Perry, Gary Sinise and company.
The Moon is Down
A thinly veiled story about Nazi Germany’s occupation of Norway (though the names of the countries are not mentioned). In 1942 came the novel and a Broadway play starring Ralph Morgan and Otto Kruger. The following year, a movie with Cedric Hardwicke, Henry Travers, Lee J. Cobb, and Margaret Wycherly. Steinbeck won a Norwegian medal!
Lifeboat
Having just worked with Thornton Wilder on Shadow of a Doubt, there’s a certain logic to Hitchcock’s collaborating with Steinbeck on his next World War Two statement Lifeboat (1944). It’s always been one of my favorite Hitchcock pictures, one part disaster movie, one part locked room mystery, one part existentialist stage play. Jo Swerling cowrote it; I assume that he contributed some of the more authentic Manhattan touches of the Tallulah Bankhead, John Hodiak, William Bendix, and Henry Hull characters. Steinbeck essentially sketched out the story (originally at novel length) and was unhappy at the extent to which his black character (Canada Lee) was shoehorned into the conventional Hollywood stereotype, and also disliked the way the class issues were minimized (with Bankhead’s and Hull’s characters coming off much better than intended.
The Red Pony
Is it okay if I call it The Dead Pony? It’s not too soon? A spoiler? Originally published in book form in 1937. Steinbeck wrote the screenplay to the 1949 film which starred Peter Miles as the boy Jody, with Robert Mitchum, Myrna Loy, and Louis Calhern. It was remade in 1973 with Henry Fonda (echoes of Grapes of Wrath) with Maureen O’Hara, Jack Elam, Ben Johnson, and Clint Howard from Gentle Ben is the kid. This version was only a few years old when I first read the book in school circa 1977 and ’78 — most the kids related the book to the film at that time.
O. Henry’s Full House
By 1952, Steinbeck’s Hollywood cache was so great that he was invited to host and narrate this film of O. Henry story adaptations. He was uncomfortable in the role.
Viva Zapata!
In 1952 Eliza Kazan directed Steinbeck’s original screenplay for this bio-pic about the Mexican revolutionary, starring Marlon Brando, Jean Peters, and Anthony Quinn.
East of Eden
Steinbeck’s most ambitious novel covers several generations of several California families. He considered it his best work, but I’m not convinced that that’s true. As always, the setting, characters, and plot are compelling — the literary execution, much less so. Published in 1952, the final section of the book was made into a film in 1955 by Elia Kazan, with James Dean, Julie Harris, Richard Davalos, Raymond Massey, Jo Van Fleet, and Burl Ives. In 1981, the novel was made into a three-part TV mini-series with Karen Allen, Anne Baxter, Timothy Bottoms, Sam Bottoms, Bruce Boxleitner, Lloyd Bridges, Howard Duff, Warren Oates, Soon-Tek Oh, and Jane Seymour.
The Wayward Bus
Written in 1947, made into a movie a decade later with Jayne Mansfield, Joan Collins, Dan Dailey, and Rick Jason. This was during the age of Bus Stop, and other sort of faux Tennessee Williams things we wrote about here. It seems to have ended the original vogue for Steinbeck in Hollywood films, nearly a stretch of two decades.
Cannery Row and Sweet Thursday
The original novel of Cannery Row was written in 1945; its sequel Sweet Thursday was published in 1954. Another of Steinbeck’s ensemble pieces (like Tortilla Flat), this one concerning people in and around the fish canneries of Monterey. Rodgers and Hammerstein, who had earlier produced the stage version of Steinbeck’s Burning Bright, turned Sweet Thursday into the Broadway musical Pipe Dream in 1955. Cannery Row itself did not become a film until 1982. It featured Nick Nolte, Audra Lindlay, Debra Winger, and M. Emmett Walsh. This was in the wake of the 1981 remake of Of Mice and Men, and just before the 1983 screen adaptation of 1961’s The Winter of Our Discontent with Donald Sutherland, Teri Garr, Tuesday Weld, Michael Gazzo, Richard Mazur, and E.G. Marshal.
Travels with Charley: In Search of America
Steinbeck’s last massively successful book came out in 1962, the same year he won a Nobel Prize. It’s basically a reflective travel book about his trips around the country in a camper, accompanied by his poodle Charley. It was made into a TV special in 1968, narrated by Henry Fonda. There have apparently been several projects devoted to debunking and fact-checking this memoir. To which one can only reply: what kind of loser devotes himself to a project like that? Blow the whole lid off the poodle road trip account, did you? America’s children can now rest easy.
Steinbeck wrote numerous other books, including novels, story collections, war correspondence, travelogues. His career was oddly bookended by two unlikely projects, historical romances: Cup of Gold (1929, about the pirate Henry Morgan), and The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights (unfinished, published posthumously in 1976). Both of these works were inspired by stories that Steinbeck had loved as a child.
In 2016 one of Steinbeck’s earliest unadapted works In Dubious Battle (1936) was brought to the screen, with James Franco, Nat Wolff, Vincent D’Onofrio, Selena Gomez, Ed Harris, Sam Shepard, John Savage, Zach Braff, Robert Duvall, and Bryan Cranston.
(Travalanche) 
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