{"id":7557,"date":"2026-10-14T06:34:49","date_gmt":"2026-10-14T06:34:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/?p=7557"},"modified":"2026-10-14T06:34:49","modified_gmt":"2026-10-14T06:34:49","slug":"america-and-americans-by-john-steinbeck-a-book-club-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/?p=7557","title":{"rendered":"America and Americans by John Steinbeck: A Book Club Review"},"content":{"rendered":"

Early in America and Americans by John Steinbeck<\/strong> a man named Jimmy, chief of a Piute band summering near Lake Tahoe, turns up at a trout hatchery in the snow and asks for a fish. He is given one. He puts it in a snowbank, strips, washes himself in the freezing stream, dresses, picks the trout up and climbs Mount Tallac. Months later he explains: he had been ill all summer, the doctors in Reno could do nothing, and his own people\u2019s healer told him the sickness came from meat his hunting party had let spoil, and that the cure was to carry the season\u2019s earliest trout to Half Moon Lake and give it to something waiting there.<\/p>\n

What was it? A person, Jimmy says, but an un-person too. It seemed to be a woman. She took the fish. He turned away, and his stomach never troubled him again.<\/p>\n

America and Americans by John Steinbeck<\/strong> reports that straight, adds that Jimmy was no liar, and admits that without a witness he would never have repeated the story at all.<\/p>\n

Which America and Americans a Group Is Actually Reading<\/h2>\n

Worth settling before anyone buys a copy of America and Americans by John Steinbeck<\/strong>, because the title is misleading.<\/p>\n

The original appeared in 1966, the last book he published: nine short chapters written as text for a volume of photographs. Modern editions print it inside a 2002 centennial omnibus, where it occupies the final quarter behind seven sections of journalism from 1936 to 1966, among them the migrant reporting that fed The Grapes of Wrath<\/em>, the Arthur Miller trial, the Nobel speech, memorials for friends, and the Vietnam letters.<\/p>\n

The volume runs past four hundred pages. A group should decide in advance whether it is doing the nine chapters or the lot.<\/p>\n

The Chapter of America and Americans to Build the Evening On<\/h2>\n

\u201cParadox and Dream\u201d is the one, and it will produce an argument in any room that has finished America and Americans by John Steinbeck<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

His case is that Americans run on contradiction. A people certain of their mechanical self-reliance who cannot locate a fuse box. A people who treasure living close to the land and eat out of cans. A nation of laws that breaks every law it can. Public puritans and private profligates who go to great expense to conceal any natural evidence of being either male or female.<\/p>\n

Then he turns to the dream of home and the chapter becomes better than clever. The dream house is bought, mortgaged, overextended and sold inside five years, whether the earner fails or succeeds. The mobile home replaces it and promptly develops model years, status anxiety and slums of its own. He is describing, in 1966, something no group reading him now will find unfamiliar.<\/p>\n

The Chapter That Needs Handling<\/h2>\n

A table has to deal with the race chapter of America and Americans by John Steinbeck<\/strong> honestly, and it is not simple.<\/p>\n

Parts of it are acute, and that is the trouble. America and Americans by John Steinbeck<\/strong> is very good on the psychology of a slave-owning society: a master insisting on his slaves\u2019 inferiority is a man announcing he is not afraid of the dark. He is withering about Southern states repealing their own school laws out of rage at Black legislators who had passed them, and summarises it as whites denying themselves candy in case someone else got some. He tells the story of his great-aunt Carrie, who went south from Massachusetts after the war to teach Black children, had her school burned by the Klan, reopened it, built a sandbag wall inside with the children\u2019s help while riders fired through it, and gave up only when the food ran out. And he quotes a Black man in his employ who crossed the street rather than help a drunk white woman who had fallen, and who explained that he had been practicing to be a Negro for a long time.<\/p>\n

And then, in the same chapter, he builds an account of Reconstruction in which the central injured party is the defeated white planter. Freedom arrives as something imposed rather than owed. The newly freed are described as unready for it, dangerous, and surrounding their former owners, who are left with no obligation toward them and nothing to weigh but the safety of their own families. The terror that followed is presented as what a beaten military people naturally does.<\/p>\n

That is not a stray sentence or two. It is the chapter\u2019s historical argument, and a table that reads past it has not read the book.<\/p>\n

Then There Is Vietnam, and John Steinbeck Went<\/h2>\n

The modern edition includes his Saigon letters of 1967, and they are why his standing on the left never recovered.<\/p>\n

He was sixty-four, and the man who wrote America and Americans by John Steinbeck<\/strong> toured the outposts with General Westmoreland<\/a>, called it the finest army his country had ever fielded, and on his last night flew a gunship mission in a twenty-four-year-old transport fitted with three six-barrelled Gatling guns, which he admires openly as a Niagara of steel.<\/p>\n

In the same run of letters he rides a patrol boat in the Mekong Delta, watches a terrified family of five relax once nobody shouts at their children, and devotes a happy paragraph to the home-made propeller rig the local boats use, resolving to build one himself back home. Both sentiments sit side by side and he sees no difficulty.<\/p>\n

Where It Will Lose People<\/h2>\n

The nine chapters of America and Americans by John Steinbeck<\/strong> were written as magazine essays and do not cohere into the single argument the last one claims.
\nThirty years of commissioned journalism contains filler, and the editors printed it.
\nFive dispatches are reprinted from his war collection, which irritates anyone who owns that.
\nReaders who want the famous novelist get a combative old columnist instead, defending corporations and fretting about young people who distrust authority.<\/p>\n

Reading It Against the Novels<\/h2>\n

Put it beside our analysis of The Grapes of Wrath<\/a> and the distance travelled becomes the discussion: the migrant reporting in this volume is that novel\u2019s seed, and thirty years on the same man is warning about comfort. Our analysis of East of Eden<\/a> covers the late novel that shares this book\u2019s interest in whether character is inherited or chosen, and the word that turns on is handled in our piece on the timshel debate<\/a>. The grove he mourns in the environmental chapter was coast redwood<\/a>, some of it three hundred feet high and two thousand years old.<\/p>\n

Questions for the Table<\/h2>\n

Most of these only work if the table has read the race chapter of America and Americans by John Steinbeck<\/strong> rather than skipping it.<\/p>\n

He says the country was never a gift and was taken by people who cheated for it. Is that patriotism or its opposite?
\nDoes the acuity of \u201cCreated Equal\u201d make its worst passages better or worse?
\nHe names comfort, plenty and security as the destroyers of nations. Do you believe him?
\nThe Vietnam letters and the migrant reporting are by the same man. What changed?
\nWhy does the trout story work when so much of his reasoning does not?
\nIs there a way to read a writer\u2019s bad thinking as evidence rather than as argument?<\/p>\n

Before You Assign It<\/h2>\n

The race chapter is the issue. It runs on the terminology of 1966, reproduces a full catalogue of ethnic insults, and argues Reconstruction from the position of the defeated planter class. Elsewhere: a war correspondent who has taken the side of his own army, and several pages of pleasure taken in an armed aircraft.<\/p>\n

Final Thoughts<\/h2>\n

A book worth an evening, and one that will not let the evening be comfortable.<\/p>\n

The observing John Steinbeck<\/strong> is intact at sixty-four. He notices a woman on a New York pavement who every summer morning unrolled a lawn of green raffia and sat under a beach umbrella among potted geraniums until she was in the country, and was so pleased that he contributed a fern and two goldfish. He notices the redwood grove there one week and gone the next, and the shame of looking away from the man who did it.<\/p>\n

The reasoning Steinbeck is another matter. America and Americans by John Steinbeck<\/strong> signs off insisting that his countrymen have blundered, stalled, fed themselves and tended their injuries, and yet have never once gone backwards. Two chapters of his own book refute that line, and he walks past them without a glance.<\/p>\n

Which is, in the end, the most American thing in the book.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Early in America and Americans by John Steinbeck a man named Jimmy, chief of a Piute band summering near Lake Tahoe, turns up at a trout hatchery in the snow and asks for a fish. He is given one. He puts it in a snowbank, strips, washes himself in the freezing stream, dresses, picks the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7557","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bookreviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7557"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7557"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7557\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7557"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7557"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7557"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}