Word: steinbeck
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SWEET THURSDAY (273 pp.)-John Steinbeck-Viking...
...John Steinbeck respects the underdog, but he melts uncontrollably before a no-good, boozed-up bum. His sentimental eulogies of riffraff began with his first successful book. Tortilla Flat (1935), continued in Cannery Row (1945), and appear again in Sweet Thursday, which is really a return visit to Cannery Row. It reads like stuff that has been salvaged from the wastebasket. All the characters in Sweet Thursday (who live in Monterey, Calif., Steinbeck's home territory) have a lot in common: rotgut whisky in their bellies, leather in their hides, gold in their hearts and bats in their belfries...
...sense of nature and of revelation of Emerson and Thoreau, the sharp and pessimistic but compassionate wit of Twain, Lardner, and Marquis, the enthusiasm of Whitman, the highly developed awareness of fantasy and symbolism of Melville, James, and Faulkner, the sense of social forces of Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, and Steinbeck, and the linguistic facility of Thurber and Perelman. Add to this the satiric ability of George Orwell...
...bookstore . . . This seemingly made-to-order book clerk was a teacher of English in a junior college in one of the finest public school systems in the U.S. After three days, his shortcomings became evident to the rest of the force (he had "never heard of John Steinbeck," for instance); on the fifth day, when he pleasantly told me that he meant to "take a book home and read it some night because he hadn't read a book in five years," I fired him . . . The whole incident was only a temporary setback, however, because he is still...
...part, the committee's brand of "obscene" was also slapped on some books by such well-known writers as John Steinbeck, James T. Farrell, Erskine Caldwell and Italian Novelist Alberto (Woman of Rome) Moravia. Throughout the hearings the committee showed a disturbing fuzziness over what it meant by "objectionable matter." Since the committee itself could not decide, it seemed dangerous to recommend that existing federal laws be strengthened making it an offense for private carriers to transport "lewd, obscene or lascivious" books and magazines in interstate commerce. This could mean that a motorist might be arrested for carrying...