Steinbeck's Landscapes

Where Story Meets Place

De: Susan Shillinglaw

From one of the foremost scholars on the subject, comes our most in-depth look at John Steinbeck as a writer deeply connected to the natural world.

Among the many reasons that John Steinbeck has ascended to the highest tier of the American Literary Canon is his championing of the working man.
What we don’t often consider, however, is that his vision as a writer was fundamentally ecological, looking at man and nature holistically. To understand people, you had to know something about the trees and flowers they planted, the soil they tilled, the geography that shaped their consciousness—the animating spirit of place.

Steinbeck's Landscapes highlights the environments that the Noble Prize winning author cherished and explored throughout his life and career, and examines the iconic stories those rivers, valleys, plants, animals, and weather patterns inspired. The result is a new and fuller understanding of Steinbeck’s work, and how nature serves to reflect, cast a harsh light upon, or magnify the action. As this fully illustrated treasure shows, for Steinbeck, the world around us fundamentally shapes human experience and the human spirit. All life is connected.

Reseñas de la Crítica

“John Steinbeck is lucky that fate selected Susan Shillinglaw to tend the garden of his legacy. She has listened to the wind in the trees, and felt the dirt underneath the feet of his characters. She has eaten the mushrooms on the ground and touched the squirmy intertidal critters of his heart’s home. This is a lovely and wise book because no one knows Steinbeck’s world better than Susan Shillinglaw.”—John Straley, author of Big Breath In and former Alaska Writer Laureate