John Steinbeck: The Postmodern Mind in the Modern Age

The John Steinbeck Who Began With The Spiritual , mystical, and symbolic To a God Unknown (1933) and ended with The Winter of Our Discontent (1961), Travels with Charlie (1962), and America and Americans (1966) was a man and a writer come full circle. Slapped around by critics with a Modern mindset, young Steinbeck staggered, bruised and discouraged, away from his early inclinations. It would be a gradual healing, but regaining his sea legs, he would launch into efforts that would be much more realistic and more to the likings of the critics and readers of what we now recognize as the last decades of the Modern era. But the Steinbeck who remained confined by that realism preferred by the Modern critics, and the pressures of his literary peers, began to emerge once more in his later life and works. This Steinbeck, however, would be disillusioned and more cynical. Still convinced in his soul that science, materialism, and a consumer attitude toward the environment carried in its flowering the seed