Word: steinbeck
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...Steinbeck earned his first serious acclaim when The Red Pony appeared in the North American Review. But years afterward, critics still regarded him as a newcomer. Alfred Kazin praised him with faint damns: "After a dozen books Stein beck still looks like a distinguished apprentice, and what is so striking in his work is its inconclusiveness, his moving approach to human life and yet his failure to be creative with...
...INTRICATE MUSIC, A BIOGRAPHY OF JOHN STEINBECK by Thomas Kiernan; Little, Brown; 331 pages...
...John Steinbeck worked hard to turn himself into a genius and he almost made it. His youth was a laborious struggle to find his true voice. But as this first full-scale biography shows, the author flourished for a scant dozen years: from the publication of The Red Pony in 1933 to Cannery...
Kiernan (a journeyman who has written books on such disparate personalities as Yasser Arafat and Jane Fonda) met his subject only twice, and he worked without the direct cooperation of Steinbeck's widow. A more thorough account of the career might have provided a less gloomy view of the man, but it seems doubtful. Steinbeck always feared biography. "Writers," he told Kiernan, "are by their very nature private people, in many cases lonely, frightened, insecure, incapable of relating comfortably to other people." The sentence was pure confessional...
...Paris before fleeing to the U.S. in 1940, one step ahead of the Nazis. In New York, he became a frequent contributor to Look, the Saturday Evening Post and LIFE, for which he did more covers (101) than any other photographer. Three of his portraits-of Albert Einstein, John Steinbeck and Adlai Stevenson-appeared on postage stamps. These and others of John Kennedy and Winston Churchill are so indelible that one critic noted, "The chances are, when we see [these figures] in our mind's eye, we are seeing the Halsman image...