Reviews The True Adventures of John Steinbeck, Writer. ByJackson J. Benson. (New York: The Viking Press, 1984. 1116 pages, $35.00.) It is paradoxical that while John Steinbeck has won the Nobel and Pulitzer Prizes, is the most widely-read serious American author, and is one of the writers whose books are most in demand bycollectors (at antiquarian book sales, they bring more than Dickens), he has during the past four decades been dismissed by New Yorker and Ivy League critics like Edmund Wilson, Alfred Kazin, and Arthur Mizener as unworthy of the serious attention of intellec tuals, as a writer who appeals to less than Grade A minds, as Wilson put it. Some recent anthologies of American literature omit him altogether or intro duce him with condescending comments about his being significant chiefly for sociological reasons. Steinbeck was angered more than hurt by such snobbery, growling in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech that “Literature was not prom ulgated by a pale and emasculated critical priesthood singing their litanies in empty churches — nor is it a game for the cloistered elect . . . Steinbeck himself certainly qualified as an intellectual, one who did extensive research on marine biology, SirThomas Malory, and formal philoso phy, but he preferred working in the field to harvesting the groves ofacademe; his view of the role of the writer was closer to that of Walt Whitman, who wrote, “I was the man, I suffered, I was there.” Thus Steinbeck became actively involved in trying to alleviate the suffering and starvation in Cali fornia during the 1930s, and on several occasions he lived with and worked among the dispossessed Okies as “Migrant John.” As a correspondent during World War II, he flew with the Air Force and served in North Africa and the invasion of Italy, being recommended (but ineligible as a civilian) for the Silver Star for hisbravery under fire with Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.’scommandos. His countless journeys to Mexico resulted in Sea of Cortez, The Pearl, and Viva Zapata!. Three times he toured Russia (whose totalitarianism he de tested), and a few years before his death in 1968, he went to Vietnam. Insatiably curious, Steinbeck was actively engaged in living and drew his best writing from this involvement, so that Jackson J. Benson isjustified in calling his biography The True Adventures of John Steinbeck, Writer. Despite a condescending review in The N ew York Review by a Rutgers professor who finds Steinbeck intellectually inadequate and his biographer guilty of adulation, Benson, a professor of English at San Diego State Uni versity, provides a sensible and balanced view of Steinbeck, written in 232 Western American Literature craftsmanlike prose commendablyfree from academicjargon. Bensonacknowl edges Steinbeck’s limitations and failures both as a person and a writer, find ing him neither a profound nor particularly complex artist but admiring his vitality, his being attuned to the rhythms of life, his “sense of fun, a probing curiosity, and a capacity for wonder.” At its best, Steinbeck’s fiction has a timeless, folk quality about it. When Steinbeck intellectualized, as in the didacticism of Lee in East of Eden or in some of the interchapters of The Grapes of Wrath, he often sounded both pretentious and naive, but his por traits of working people are the best of their kind, and he wrote the most authentic dialogue for them in American literature. One test of a writer’s ongoing vitality is his adaptation into other art forms and into folklore. By this token, Steinbeck, like Mark Twain, has become a part of Americana. More of his books have made outstanding mo tion pictures than those of any other American author, and ballets, folk songs, operas, and two Aaron Copland scores have been created from his fiction. Unlike Hemingway, whose public persona has been called his poorest character, Steinbeck was basically shy and shunned the limelight. The Rutgers reviewer faults him for not associating more with major literary figures, but Steinbeck never cared for celebrity as such and had a difficult time adjusting to his own. He was intensely loyal to his friends and wrote them a voluminous correspondence, from which his widow and Robert Wallsten produced A Life in Letters. Not...