DECEMBER 2020 - AudioFile
John Steinbeck is among America’s premier social realist authors. His books are classics. Yet many people do not know him beyond his literary canon. This audiobook seeks to remedy that. It explores the author’s often troubled life as well as his creative genius. David Colacci offers an able and consistent narration. His tone, while not conversational, is easy on the ears and keeps the narrative flowing nicely. His pauses are strategic, allowing listeners to take in important points before going on. He also varies his tone to fit the material. The book will break little new ground for listeners well acquainted with Steinbeck’s life, but for the rest of us, listening will prove enlightening. R.C.G. © AudioFile 2020, Portland, Maine
Publishers Weekly
★ 06/01/2020
Journalist Souder (On a Farther Shore) presents a comprehensive, eloquent exploration of the life and career of John Steinbeck (1902–1968). Souder begins with Steinbeck’s childhood, frequently miserable college years at Stanford (he was known to fire a gun at the wall when frustrated with his writing), and time living in a cabin on Lake Tahoe, where he toiled tirelessly on his first book, Cup of Gold, and met his first wife, Carol Henning. The novel’s unsuccessful 1929 publication was quickly followed by the stock market crash, and five years later, by his mother’s death after a protracted illness. However, out of the ashes of this difficult time came his tremendously successful novel Tortilla Flat, in 1935, and then in 1937, Of Mice and Men. Meanwhile, Steinbeck started interviewing impoverished farmers from the Dust Bowl, research that went into the arduous writing of The Grapes of Wrath. In the years that followed, Steinbeck struggled with newfound celebrity, left Carol for his second wife, Gwyn Conger, and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. Souder neither deifies nor condemns his subject, remarking candidly on Steinbeck’s misogyny and propensity for mythmaking, while making clear the author’s ardent devotion to his craft. Steinbeck fans could not ask for a more nuanced account of this troubled giant of American literature. (Oct.)
Washington Post - Alexander C. Kafka
"Painstakingly researched, psychologically nuanced, unshowy, lucid.... Souder, in his own humble style, has brought a deeply human Steinbeck forth in all his flawed, melancholy, brilliant complication."
New York Times - Joumana Khatib
"A comprehensive new biography of America’s best-known novelist of the Great Depression arrives at a timely moment."
Boston Globe - Wendy Smith
"Vividly evokes the landscape ‘between the mountains and by the sea’ that nurtured [Steinbeck’s] love of nature.... [An] appreciative yet clear-eyed assessment."
BookPage - Henry L. Carrigan Jr.
"Bracing.... Steinbeck remains widely read and relevant today, as vibrantly illuminated by Mad at the World."
Douglas Brinkley
"William Souder’s Mad at the World is a stupendous biography of John Steinbeck. By connecting California’s fog, farms, forests and fisheries to Steinbeck’s growth as an artist Souder has elevated the great Nobel Prize–winning novelist to relevancy in today’s depression-stuck America. The backstories on how Steinbeck wrote The Grapes of Wrath and his relationship with marine biologist Ed Ricketts are extraordinary. Throughout the narrative Souder provides first-rate literary analysis and gorgeous prose-styling. This is a book for the ages. Highly recommended!"
New York Times Book Review - Brenda Wineapple
"Souder’s sympathy for Steinbeck ... is most effective and eloquent in his depiction of the California landscape or of the sea, which he describes as swimming with small pelagic crabs ‘like a crimson carpet spread across an ocean the color of lapis lazuli.’"
Steinbeck Review - William Ray
"Souder’s genial style has qualities of simplicity, immediacy, and grace that attract readers to Steinbeck’s writing.... Style and subject are perfect match.... Souder’s elegant and engrossing biography of Steinbeck adds substantially to our understanding and appreciation of an author whose feeling for wronged humanity, like Faulkner’s sense of Southern history, is never out of date."
Times Literary Supplement - Phillip Lopate
"[Souder] knows his subject well and writes with a storyteller’s clean momentum."
Jack E. Davis
"Brilliance follows brilliance in this illuminating biography of John Steinbeck. William Souder reveals his with a vibrant narrative and prose worthy of the master himself. Every page comes alive with the force of history, the wonder of place, and the friends, strangers, and dogs that shaped the sensibilities of the man who became the conscience of modern America."
Steinbeck Now - Donald Coers
"A brisk and engaging account by a highly-regarded biographer whose estimation of Steinbeck’s importance a half-century after his death is itself testimony to his durability as a writer of fiction and critic of our world."
California History - Gavin Jones
"Forges a powerful and courageous path through the life, times, and works of John Steinbeck.... with discernment, energy, and grace."
DECEMBER 2020 - AudioFile
John Steinbeck is among America’s premier social realist authors. His books are classics. Yet many people do not know him beyond his literary canon. This audiobook seeks to remedy that. It explores the author’s often troubled life as well as his creative genius. David Colacci offers an able and consistent narration. His tone, while not conversational, is easy on the ears and keeps the narrative flowing nicely. His pauses are strategic, allowing listeners to take in important points before going on. He also varies his tone to fit the material. The book will break little new ground for listeners well acquainted with Steinbeck’s life, but for the rest of us, listening will prove enlightening. R.C.G. © AudioFile 2020, Portland, Maine
Kirkus Reviews
2020-06-16
An authoritative and sympathetic account of the life of the Nobel laureate.
While John Steinbeck (1902-1968) still enjoys a good reputation in high school and undergraduate classrooms, the critical consensus is less generous, treating him as a sentimental writer undeserving of his Nobel. When asked if he deserved the prize, Steinbeck answered, “Frankly, no.” This is typical of Steinbeck as we encounter him in this book, the first major biography of him in 25 years. Souder, previously the biographer of Rachel Carson and John James Audubon, presents his subject as always somewhat ill-suited to his moment. Unlike his prominent contemporaries Fitzgerald and Hemingway, Steinbeck underwent a “long apprenticeship” due to his “failure to see that what he should write about was already inside him.” When he did find success—in dramatic fashion with Tortilla Flat, In Dubious Battle, Of Mice and Men, and The Grapes of Wrath—much of it was due to significant contributions from his first wife, Carol. Steinbeck’s preoccupation with death kept him busy at his desk but with little attention to the quality of his work. By Souder’s account, the vague and indiscriminate grudge Steinbeck carried most of his life may have enabled what would prove to be his enduring attribute as a writer: his understanding and compassion for the downtrodden. “This was the part of the human condition,” writes the author, “he could never abide: the abuse and oppression of anyone by someone more powerful.” Strikingly, however, his empathy didn’t always extend to his intimates. He could be cruel, especially to his first two wives and his sons (both with his second wife, Gwyn). The affable narrator of Travels With Charley, then, isn’t whom we should call to mind when we think of Steinbeck. Souder’s version is much more persuasive.
A lively and perceptive portrait of the artist as a complicated guy.
