Reclaiming John Steinbeck by Gavin Jones
John Steinbeck is a towering figure in twentieth-century American literature; yet he remains one of our least understood writers. This major reevaluation of Steinbeck by Gavin Jones uncovers a timely thinker who confronted the fate of humanity as a species facing climate change, environmental crisis, and a growing divide between the powerful and the marginalized. Driven by insatiable curiosity, Steinbeck's work crossed a variety of borders – between the United States and the Global South, between human and nonhuman lifeforms, between science and the arts, and between literature and film – to explore the transformations in consciousness necessary for our survival on a precarious planet. Always seeking new forms to express his ecological and social vision of human interconnectedness and vulnerability, Steinbeck is a writer of urgent concern for the twenty-first century, even as he was haunted by the legacies of racism and injustice in the American West.
'No American writer is in greater need of reassessment than John SteinbeckWidely read and as widely held in critical disrepute, Steinbeck has at last been rescued by Gavin Jones, whose deep and exacting scholarship is matched by his compassion and an eagerness to explore the connective tissues in Steinbeck's work. A deft and dazzling study of a complex and misunderstood writer's emergence – a term Steinbeck would appreciate – a half century after his passing.' William Souder, author of Mad at the World: A Life of John Steinbeck (W. W. Norton, 2020)
Gavin Jones is the Frederick P. Rehmus Family Professor of the Humanities at Stanford University, where he has taught American literature since 1999. He is the author of Strange Talk: The Politics of Dialect Literature in Gilded Age America (University of California Press, 1999), American Hungers: The Problem of Poverty in US Literature, 1840-1945 (Princeton University Press, 2008), and Failure and the American Writer: A Literary History (Cambridge University Press, 2014).
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9781108928304 |
| Title | Reclaiming John Steinbeck |
| Author | Gavin Jones |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Paperback |
| Publisher | Cambridge University Press |
| Year published | 2026-08-31 |
| Number of pages | 264 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |