"Yesterday" by W S Merwin

W. S. Merwin

William Stanley Merwin was born in New York City on September 30, 1927. He was raised in Union City, New Jersey and Scranton, Pennsylvania, as the son of a Presbyterian minister, and began writing hymns as a child. Merwin's mother had grown up an orphan, and later lost her brother and her first child; Merwin's father was raised in a hard and violent home. The grief from these tragedies, the inherited violence, and the surrounding poverty, run throughout Merwin's poetry, across a career that spans five decades.

Merwin attended Princeton University on a scholarship, where he was a classmate of Galway Kinnell, and studied poetry with the critic R. P. Blackmur, and his teaching assistant, John Berryman. After graduating in 1948, he spent an additional year at Princeton studying Romance language, a pursuit that would later lead to his prolific work as a translator of Latin, Spanish, and French poetry.

Merwin soon married his first wife, Dorothy Jeanne Ferry, and began writing verse plays and working as a tutor to the children of wealthy families. He traveled throughout Europe, and in 1950 took a position in Majorca, Spain as an instructor to the son of Robert Graves. While there, he met Dido Milroy, who he eventually married after ending his first marriage. His relationship with Dido became deeply influential, and helped propel him into literary circles and find work as a translator.

Merwin's first collection, A Mask for Janus (1952), was selected by W. H. Auden for the Yale Series of Younger Poets. The formal and ornate collection was praised by Auden for its technical virtuosity, and bore the influence both of Graves and the medieval poetry Merwin was translating, in its focus on classical imagery and myth.

After leaving Majorca, Merwin remained in Europe, living in London and the South of France for several years. In 1956, he received a fellowship from the Poets' Theater in Cambridge, MA, and moved back to the United States. While in Boston, he entered the circle of writers that surrounded Robert Lowell and decided to abandon his verse plays to concentrate on poetry, seeking a more American vernacular and turning inward, toward more introspective and personal subjects. At this time he also began experimenting with form and irregular metrics.

His books written during this time, Green with Beasts (1956) and The Drunk in the Furnace (1960), both demonstrate the beginning of a significant shift in style and perspective, which intensified in his later work. A New York Times review of The Drunk in the Furnace noted "the earthiness, the grittiness, the humane immediacy that informs the finest of these poems."

Merwin and Dido soon moved back to Europe, and lived in London and the South of France. They became close friends with Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, and witnessed the brutal collapse of their marriage and Plath's eventual suicide. In 1968, Merwin and Dido separated, and he began living for part of the year in New York.

In 1967, Merwin published the critically acclaimed volume, The Lice, followed by The Carrier of Ladders in 1970, both of which remain his most influential collections. Both books use classical legends as a means to explore personal and political themes, including his opposition to the Vietnam War. In 1971, Merwin received the Pulitzer Prize for The Carrier of Ladders. In a letter to the New York Review of Books, he declared his intention to donate the $1000 prize to antiwar causes as protest, because of his objection to the war. Auden responded through his own letter that the Pulitzer judges were not a political party and had no ties to American foreign policy.

In 1976, Merwin moved to Hawaii to study with the Zen Buddhist master Robert Aitken. There he married Paula Schwartz in a Buddhist ceremony in 1983. Merwin settled in Maui, in a home that he helped design and build, surrounded by acres of tropical forest which he painstakingly restored after the land had been devastated and depleted after years of erosion, logging, and agriculture. The rigorous practice of Buddhism and passionate dedication to environmentalism that Merwin devoted himself to in Hawaii has profoundly influenced his later work, including his evocative renderings of the natural world in The Compass Flower (1977), Opening the Hand (1983), and The Rain in the Trees (1988), as well as The Folding Cliffs, a novel-in-verse drawing on the history and legends of Hawaii.

Over the course of his long career, Merwin has published over twenty books of poetry. His recent collections include The Shadow of Sirius which won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize; Present Company (Copper Canyon, 2007); Migration: New & Selected Poems (2005) which won the 2005 National Book Award; The Pupil (2002); The River Sound (1999), which was named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year; Flower and Hand: Poems 1977-1983 (1997); The Vixen (1996); and Travels (1993), which received the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize.

He has also published nearly twenty books of translation, including Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (2004), Dante's Purgatorio (2000), and volumes by Federico García Lorca and Pablo Neruda. His numerous plays and books of prose include The Lost Upland (1992), his memoir of life in the south of France; Summer Doorways (2006), a memoir of his childhood, and The Book of Fables (2007), a collection of his short prose.

Merwin's honors include the Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry, the Bollingen Prize, a Ford Foundation grant, the Governor's Award for Literature of the State of Hawaii, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the PEN Translation Prize, the Shelley Memorial Award, the Wallace Stevens Award, and a Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Writers' Award, and fellowships from The Academy of American Poets, the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Rockefeller Foundation.

He is a former Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and has served as Poetry Consultant to the Library of Congress. In 2010, Merwin was appointed the Library of Congress's seventeenth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry. He currently lives and works in Hawaii.

http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/123

"My father moved through dooms of love" by E E Cummings (poetry reading)

E. E. Cummings (1894 - 1962)

American poet and painter who first attracted attention for his eccentric punctuation, but the commonly held belief that E.E. Cummings had his name legally changed to lowercase letters is erroneous – preferred to capitalize the initials of his name on book covers and in other material. Despite typographical eccentricity and devotion to the avant-garde, Cummings's themes are in many respect quite traditional. He often dealt with the antagonism between an individual and masses, but his style brought into his poems lightness and satirical tones. As an artist Cummings painted still-life pictures and landscapes to a professional level.
Humanity i love you because
when you're hard up you pawn your
intelligence to buy a drink.
(from 'Humanity i love you', 1925)

Edward Estlin Cummings was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His father was a Harvard teacher and later a Unitarian minister. Cummings was educated at Cambridge High and Latin School, and from 1911 to 1916 he attended Harvard, where he met John Dos Passos. Cummings became an aesthete, he began to dress unconventionally, and dedicated himself to painting and literature. He graduated in 1915 with a major in classics.

With Dos Passos and others he published in 1917 Eight Harvard Poets. During the last years of World War I, he drove an ambulance in France. Indiscreet comments in the letters of a friend led to Cummings's arrest and incarceration in a French concentration camp at La Ferté-Macé. Later, he found out he had been accused of treason, but the charges were never proved. This experience gave basis for Cummings's only novel, The Enormous Room (1922), in which he drew acidly funny sketches of the jailers and sympathetic portraits of prisoners. It was followed by collections of verse, Tulips and Chimneys (1923), which contrasted the evils of war to the 'sweet spontaneous earth' and XLI Poems (1925). In the 1920s and1930s Cummings divided his time between Paris, where he studied art, and New York, where he had a child with a friend's wife.

In Paris Cummings met the poets Ezra Pound, Hart Crane, and Archibald MacLeish. His friends also included the philosopher A.J. Ayer, who had a short affair with his wife, Marion Morehouse. She was twelve years Cummings's junior, a former Ziegfield showgirl and one of the leading models of the age. Cummings's friendship with Ayer lasted over twenty-five years. Once Cummings took Ayer to see the legendary stripper Gypsy Rose Lee. "You walk on tightropes as if they lay on the ground," Cummings wrote in a birthday poem to Ayer, "and always, bird eyed, notice more than we notice you notice".

Cummings supported himself by painting portraits and writing for Vanity Fair. Throughout the 1920s, he contributed to The Dial, perhaps America's greatest literary journal. & (1925) and is 5 (1925), inspired by Apollinaire, were written in the poet's new style. The books presented his radical experiments with punctuation and typography, and he used lower letter cases in his own name. In 1930 he Cummings published a sixty-three page volume with no title. Grammatical anarchism, a modern extension of romanticism, was a both result of the poet's hostility to mass society and his attempt to find a new way to write on old subjects: "Since feeling is first / who pays any attention / to the syntax of things / will never wholly kiss you". (from 'since feling is first', 1926) In the line "mOOn Over tOwns mOOn" (1935), which showed the movement of the full moon, the letters became pictorial signs.

Cummings believed that modern mass society was a threat to individuals. "Progress is a comfortable disease," Cummings once wrote. He was interersted in cubism, and jazz, which had not became mass entertainment, and contemporary slang, an unorthodox form of language. In his poems Cummings often expressed his rebellious attitude towards religion, politics, and conformity. "the Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls / are unbeautiful and have comfortable minds / (also,with the church's protestant blessings / daughters,unscented shapeless spirited) they believe in Christ and Longfellow, both dead". (from 'the Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls', 1923) But Cummings also celebrated the joy of life and the beauty of natural world, of which people have unluckily estranged themselves. "anyone lived in a pretty how town / (with up so floating many bells down) spring summer autumn winter / he sang his didn't he danced his did." (from 'anyone lived in a pretty how town', 1940)

In 1927 his play him was produced by the Provincetown Players in New York City. During these years he exhibited his paintings and drawings, but they failed to attract as much critical interest as his writings. Moreover, his ballet Tom, based on Uncle Tom's Cabin, was pronounced undancable, and fourteen publisher had politely turned down his new book, entitled 70 Poems. In 1931 Cummings travelled in the Soviet Union and recorded later his impressions in Eimi (1933), a version of Dante's descent into Hell, in which he saw the Russians as "undead." However, on leaving Russia he also translated Louis Aragon's Le Front Rouge, a poem influenced by Mayakovsky.

When Cummings did not find a publisher for 70 Poems, he got $300 from his mother and published the collection in 1935 under his own imprint, the Golden Eagle Press, but now entitle No Thanks.
------------NO
--------THANKS TO
T----------TO
-Farrar & Rinehart
-Simon & Schuster
--Coward–McCann
---Limited Editions
---Harcourt, Brace
----Random -House
---- Equinox Press
-----Smith & Haas
------Viking Press
-----------Knopf
-----------Dutton
----------Harper's
--------- Scribner's
-------Covici-Friede
(arranged in the form of a funeral urn in the dedication page of No Thanks)

From 1952 to 1953 Cummings was a professor at Harvard. His series of lectures were appeared under the title i: six nonlectures. In 1957 he received a special citation from the National Book Award Committee for Poems, 1923-1954, and in 1957 he won the Bollinger Prize. Cummings was married three times, first to Elaine Orr; the marriage ended in divorce in less than nine months. He then married Anne Minnerly Barton, they separated in 1932. The rest of his life Cummings shared with Marion Morehouse, a photographer and model, whom he met in 1933. They collaborated in 1962 in Marion Morehouse's photographic book, Adventures in Value. Cummings died of cerebral hemorrhage on September 3, 1962, in North Conway.
For further reading: The Magic-Maker by Charles Norman (1958); E.E. Cummings, the Art of His Poetry by N. Friedman (1960); E.E. Cummings and the Growth of a Writer by N. Friedman (1964); E.E. Cummings by B.A. Marks (1965); E.E. Cummings: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. by N. Friedman (1972); E.E. Cummings, a Remembrance of Miracles by B.K. Dumas (1974); Dreams in a Mirror by Richard S. Kennedy (1979); Critical Essays on E.E. Cummings, ed. by G.H. Rotella (1984)

Selected works:
Eight Harvard Poets, 1917 (with others)
The Enourmous Room, 1922
Tulips and Chimneys, 1923
&, 1925
XLI Poems, 1925
is 5, 1926
him, 1927 (play)
by e e cummings, 1930 [published without a title]
CIOPW, 1931
W, 1931
Eimi, 1933
no thanks, 1935
Tom, 1935 (a ballet from H.E.B. Stowe's novel Uncle Toms Cabin)
One Over Twenty, 1937
Collected Poems, 1938
New Poems, 1938
50 Poems, 1940
1 x 1, 1944
Anthropos: The Future of Art, 1945
Santa Claus, 1946
Eimi, 1948
XAIPE, 1950
i, six nonlectures, 1953
Poems 1923-1954, 1954
95 Poems, 1958
A Miscellany, 1958
Adventures in Value: Fifty Photographs by Marion Morehouse, 1962
73 Poems. 1964
Fairy Tales, 1965
E.E. Cummings, a Miscellany Revised, 1965
A Miscellany Revised, 1965
Complete poems, 1968
Three Plays and a Ballet, 1968
Selected Letters of e e cummings, 1969
Complete Poems: 1913-1962, 1972
Poems 1905-1962, 1973
Uncollected Poems (1910-1962), 1981
1981; Etcetera: the Unpublished Poems of e e cummings, 1983
His Whist and Other Poems for Children, 1983
Complete Poems 1904-1962, 1994

http://kirjasto.sci.fi/cummings.htm

"Two Tramps in Mud Time" by Robert Frost (poetry reading)

Robert Frost

Robert Frost (1874-1963), four-time Pulitzer Prize winning American poet, teacher and lecturer wrote many popular and oft-quoted poems including “After Apple-Picking”, “The Road Not Taken”, “Home Burial” and “Mending Wall”;

I let my neighbour know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
“Stay where you are until our backs are turned!”
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of out-door game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, “Good fences make good neighbours.”

At times bittersweet, sometimes ironic, or simply marveling at his surroundings, one can also see autobiographical details in Frost’s works; he suffered devastating losses in his life including the untimely deaths of his sister, two of his children and his wife. He knew the soul’s depths of psychic despair but was also capable of delighting in birch trees ‘loaded with ice a sunny winter morning’. While memorialising the rural landscape, vernacular, culture and people of New England in his traditional verse style, his poems also transcend the boundaries of time and place with metaphysical significance and modern exploration of human nature in all her beauty and contradictions. Though not without his critics, millions of readers the world over have found comfort and profound meaning in his poetry and he has influenced numerous other authors, poets, musicians, and playwrights into the 21st Century.

Robert Lee Frost (named after Southern General Robert E. Lee) was born on 26 March 1874 in San Francisco, California to Isabelle Moodie (1844-1900) teacher, and William Prescott Frost Jr. (1850-1885), teacher and journalist. San Francisco was a lively city full of citizens of Pioneering spirit, including Will who had ventured there from New Hampshire to seek his fortune as a journalist. He also started gambling and drinking, habits which left his family in dire financial straits when he died in 1885 after contracting tuberculosis. Honouring his last wishes to be buried in Lawrence, Massachusetts where he was born, Isabelle, Robert and his sister Jeanie Florence (1876-1929) made the long train journey across the country to the New England town. Isabelle took up teaching again to support her children.

With both parents as teachers, young Robert was early on exposed to the world of books and reading, studying such works as those by William Shakespeare and poets Robert Burns and William Wordsworth. He also formed a life-long love of nature, the great outdoors and rural countryside. After enrolling in Lawrence High School he was soon writing his own poems including “La Noche Triste” (1890) which was published in the school’s paper. He excelled in many subjects including history, botany, Latin and Greek, and played football, graduating at the head of his class. In 1892 he entered Dartmouth, the Ivy League College in Hanover, New Hampshire, but soon became disenchanted with the atmosphere of campus life. He then took on a series of jobs including teaching and working in a mill, all the while continuing to write poetry.


Frost got his first break as a poet in 1894 when the New York magazine Independent published “My Butterfly: An Elegy” for a stipend of $15. A year later a wish he had had for some time came true; on 19 December 1895 he married Elinor Miriam White (1872-1938), his co-valedictorian and sweetheart from school. They had gone separate ways upon graduation to attend college, and while Frost had left early, Elinor wanted to wait until she was finished before getting married. They would have six children together; sons Elliott (b.1896-1900) and Carol (1902-1940) and daughters Lesley (b.1899), Irma (b.1903), Marjorie (b.1905-1934), and Elinor Bettina (1907-1907).

The newlyweds continued to teach, which Frost always enjoyed, but the demanding schedule interfered with his writing. In 1897 he entered Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, though illness caused him to leave in 1899 before finishing his degree. Despite that, it was one of many institutions that would award him an honorary degree later on. The next ten years, the ‘Derry years’, were trying times for Frost with a growing family to support. In 1900 they moved to a farm bought by his paternal grandfather in Derry, New Hampshire to try poultry farming. The same year his son Elliot died of cholera. Frost suffered greatly from grief and guilt, and compounding this was the loss of his mother to cancer the same year. In 1907 Elinor Bettina died just one day after birth. But the farm was a peaceful and secluded setting and Frost enjoyed farming, tending to his orchard trees, chickens and various other chores. This period inspired such poems as “The Mending Wall” (written in England in 1913) and “Hyla Brook” (1906). The house built in the typical New England clapboard style is now a restored State Historical Landmark.

But it was soon time for a change. In 1911 he sold the farm and the Frosts set sail for England. Elinor was enthusiastic about traveling, even with four children, and they moved into a cottage in Beaconsfield, just outside of London. Then finally it happened; after writing poetry and trying to get noticed by publishers for over twenty years, Frost’s first collection of poetry A Boy’s Will was published in England in 1913 by a small London printer, David Nutt. American publisher Henry Holt printed it in 1915. Frost’s work was well-received and fellow poets Edward Thomas and Ezra Pound became friends, supporters, and helped promote his work. North of Boston (1914) followed. When World War I started the Frosts were back in New Hampshire, settling at their newly bought farm in Franconia in 1915. A year later Robert began teaching English at Amherst College. Mountain Interval was published in 1916 which contained many poems written at Franconia. He was also starting lecture tours for his ever-growing audience of avid readers.

In 1920, Frost bought ‘Stone House’ (now a museum) in South Shaftsbury, Vermont. There he wrote many of the poems contained in his fourth collection of poetry New Hampshire (1923) which won him the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1923. It includes “Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening”;
The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

While he also farmed on the idyllic property with its breathtaking views of mountains and valleys, another project Frost undertook was the founding of the Bread Loaf School of English at Middlebury College in Ripton, Vermont. After his son Carol married Lillian LaBatt (1905-1995) and his grandson Prescott arrived, he gave them Stone House to live in where Carol planted his thousand apple trees. Frost bought a second farm in Shaftsbury, “The Gulley”. At the height of his career, his next collection of poems West-running Brook (1928) was published just one year before another great loss of a loved one hit him; his sister Jeanie died.

By now Frost was a popular speaker and had a demanding schedule of which Elinor, acting as his secretary, organised for him, so he spent a fair bit of time traveling, though still maintaining an impressive output of poetry. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry a second time in 1931 for his Collected Poems (1930), and also in 1937 for A Further Range (1936), and yet again in 1943 for his collection A Witness Tree (1942). All his children were married and he spent much time with them and his grandchildren, though it was not long before the heavy blows of loss struck again; his beloved daughter Marjorie died in 1934 after the birth of her first child, and in 1938 Elinor died of a heart attack. In 1940 Carol committed suicide.

Leaving the Stone House and The Gulley behind, in 1939 Frost bought the Homer Noble Farm in Ripton, Vermont for his summer residence, located near the Bread Loaf School. He occupied the cabin on the property ‘Than smoke and mist who better could appraise, The kindred spirit of an inner haze?’ (“A Cabin in the Clearing”) while his friends and colleagues the Morrisons stayed in the main house. Collected Poems (1939) was followed by A Masque of Reason (play, 1945), Steeple Bush (1947), A Masque of Mercy (play, 1947), Complete Poems (1949), and In the Clearing (1962). At the Inauguration of American President John F. Kennedy on 20 January 1961, Frost recited his poem “The Gift Outright” (1942).

Robert Frost died on the 29th of January 1963 in Boston, Massachusetts. ‘Safe!, Now let the night be dark for all of me. Let the night be too dark for me to see, Into the future. Let what will be, be.’ (“Acceptance”) He lies buried in the family plot in the Old Bennington Cemetery behind the Old First Congregational Church near Shaftsbury, Vermont. His gravestone reads ‘I Had A Lover’s Quarrel With The World’.

Just nine months after Frost’s death, Kennedy gave a speech at Amherst College, singing Frosts’ praises and speaking on the importance of the Arts in America. Later he said;
“The death of Robert Frost leaves a vacancy in the American spirit....His death impoverishes us all; but he has bequeathed his Nation a body of imperishable verse from which Americans will forever gain joy and understanding.”

http://www.online-literature.com/frost/

"Tortilla Flat - excerpt" by John Steinbeck (short story reading)

John Steinbeck

(1902-1968)

American novelist, story writer, playwright, and essayist. John Steinbeck received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962. He is best remembered for THE GRAPES OF WRATH (1939), a novel widely considered to be a 20th-century classic. The impact of the book has been compared to that of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. Steinbeck's epic about the migration of the Joad family, driven from its bit of land in Oklahoma to California, provoked a wide debate about the hard lot of migrant laborers, and helped to put an agricultural reform into effect.

"Man, unlike any other thing organic or inorganic in the universe, grows beyond his work, walks up in the stairs of his concepts, emerges ahead of his accomplishments." (from The Grapes of Wrath)

John Steinbeck was born in Salinas, California. His native region of Monterey Bay was later the setting for most of his fiction. "We were poor people with a hell of a lot of land which made us think we were rich people," the author once recalled. Steinbeck's father was a county treasurer. From his mother, a teacher, Steinbeck learned to love books. Among his early favorites were Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, Milton's Paradise Lost, and Le Morte d'Arthur.

Steinbeck attended the local high school and worked on farms and ranches during his vacations. To finance his education, he held many jobs and sometimes dropped out of college for whole quarters. Between 1920 and 1926, he studied marine biology at Stanford University, but did not take a degree-he always planned to be a writer. Several of his early poems and short stories appeared in university publications. After spending a short time as a laborer on the construction of Madison Square Garden in New York City and reporter for the American, Steinbeck returned to California. While writing, Steinbeck took odd jobs. He was apprenticehood-carrier, apprentice painter, caretaker of an estate, surveyor, and fruit-picker. During a period, when he was as a watchman of a house in the High Sierra, Steinbeck wrote his first book, CUP OF GOLD (1929). It failed to earn back the $250 the publisher had given him in an advance.

In Pacific Grove in the early 1930s, Steinbeck met Edward Ricketts. He was a marine biologist, whose views on the interdependence of all life deeply influenced Steinbeck's thinking. THE SEA OF CORTEZ (1941) resulted from an expedition in the Gulf of California he made with Ricketts.

PASTURES OF HEAVEN (1932) and THE LONG VALLEY (1938) were short story collections, in which the Salinas valley played similar mythical role as the imaginary Yoknapatawpha County in Faulkner's works, based largely on his hometown of Oxford, in Lafayette County, Mississippi. In the novel TO A GOD UNKNOWN (1933) Steinbeck mingled Ricketts' ideas with Jungian concepts and themes, which had been made familiar by the mythologist Joseph Campbell. The novel depicts a farmer, Joseph Wayne, who receives a blessing from his pioneer father, John Wayne, and goes to build himself a new farm in a distant valley. Joseph develops his own beliefs of death and life, and to bring an end to a drought, he sacrifices himself on a stone, becoming "earth and rain". Steinbeck did not want to explain his story too much and he knew beforehand that the book would not find readers.

Steinbeck's first three novels went unnoticed, but his humorous tale of pleasure-loving Mexican-Americans, TORTILLA FLAT (1935), brought him wider recognition. The theme of the book-the story of King Arthur and the forming of the Round Table- emained well hidden from the readers and critics as well. However, Steinbeck's financial situation improved significantly-he had earned $35 a week for a long time, but now he was paid thousands of dollars for the film rights to Tortilla Flat.

IN DUBIOUS BATTLE (1936) was a strike novel set in the California apple country. The strike of nine hundred migratory workers is led by Jim Nolan, devoted to his cause. Before his death Jim confesses: "I never had time to look at things, Mac, never. I never looked how leaves come out. I never looked at the way things happen." One of the characters, Doc Burton, a detached observer, Steinbeck partly derived from his friend Ed Ricketts. Later Steinbeck developed his observer's personality with changes in such works as CANNERY ROW (1945), which returned to the world of Tortilla Flat. The novel was an account of the adventures and misadventures of workers in a California cannery and their friends. Its sequel, SWEET THURSDAY, appeared in 1954.

The events of THE RED PONY (1937) take place on the Tiflin ranch in the Salinas Valley, California. The first two sections of the story sequence, "The Gift" and "The Great Mountains", were published in the North American Review in 1933, and the third section, "The Promise," did not appear in Harpers until 1937. With "The Leader of the People," the four sections are connected by common characters, settings, and themes. Through each story, the reader follows Jody's initiation into adult life, in which the pony of the title functions as a symbol of his innocence and maturation. A movie version, for which Steinbeck wrote the screenplay, was made in 1949. Among Steinbeck's other film scripts is The Pearl, the story for Alfred Hitchcock's Lifeboat (1944), and the script for Elia Kazan's Viva Zapata! (1952), starring Marlon Brando.

OF MICE AND MEN (1937), a story of shattered dreams, became Steinbeck's first big success. Steinbeck adapted it also into a three-act play, which was produced in 1937. George Milton and Lennia Small, two itinerant ranchhands, dream of one day owning a small farm. George acts as a father figure to Lennie, who is large and simpleminded. Lennie loves all that is soft, but his immense physical strength is a source of troubles and George is needed to calm him. The two friends find work from a farm and start saving money for their future. Annoyed by the bullying foreman of the ranch, Lenny breaks the foreman's arm, but also wakes the interest of the ranch owner's flirtatious daughter-in-law. Lenny accidentally kills her and escapes into the hiding place, that he and George have agreed to use, if they get into difficulties. George hurries after Lenny and shoots him before he is captured by a vengeful mob but at the same time he loses his own hopes and dreams of better future. Before he dies, Lennie says: "Let's do it now. Le's get that place now."

For The Grapes of Wrath- the title originated from Julia Ward Howe's The Battle Hymn of the Republic (1861)-Steinbeck traveled around California migrant camps in 1936. When the book appeared, it was attacked by US Congressman Lyle Boren, who characterized it as "a lie, a black, infernal creation of twisted, distorted mind". Later, when Steinbeck received his Nobel Prize, the Swedish Academy called it simply "an epic chronicle." The Exodus story of Okies on their way to an uncertain future in California, ends with a scene in which Rose of Sharon, who has just delivered a stillborn child, suckles a starving man with her breast. "Rose of Sharon loosened one side of the blanket and bared her breast. 'You got to,' she said. She squirmed closer and pulled his head close. 'There!' she said. 'There.' Her hand moved behind his head and supported it. Her fingers moved gently in his hair. She looked up and across the barn, and her lips came together and smiled mysteriously."

John Ford's film version from 1940, produced by Darryl F. Zanuck, dismissed this ending-the final images optimistically celebrate President Roosevelt's New Deal. "We're the people that live. They can't wipe us out. They can't lick us. We'll go on forever, Pa, 'cause we're the people," says Ma Joad. Steinbeck himself was skeptical of Hollywood's faithfulness to his material. However, after seeing the film he said: "Zanuck has more than kept his word. He has a hard, straight picture in which the actors are submerged so completely that it looks and feels like a documentary film and certainly has a hard, truthful ring." Orson Welles did not like Ford's interpretation because he "made that into a story about mother love."

Fleeing publicity followed by the success of The Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck went to Mexico in 1940 to film the documentary Forgotten Village. During WW II, Steinbeck served as a war correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune in Great Britain and the Mediterranean area. He wrote such government propaganda as the novel THE MOON IS DOWN (1942), about resistance movement in a small town occupied by the Nazis. Its film version, starring Henry Travers, Cedric Hardwicke, and Lee J. Cobb, was shot on the set of How Green Was My Valley (1941), which depicted a Welsh mining village. "Free men cannot start a war," Steinbeck wrote, "but once it is started, they can fight on in defeat. Herd men, followers of a leader, cannot do that, and so it is always the herd men who win battles and the free men who win wars." Steinbeck had visited Europe in 1937 after gaining success with Of Mice and Men, and met on a Swedish ship two Norwegians, with whom he had celebrated Norway's independence day. In 1943 Steinbeck moved to New York City, his home for the rest of his life. His summers the author spent at Sag Harbor. He also travelled much in Europe.

Steinbeck's twelve-year marriage to Carol Henning had ended in 1942. Next year he married the singer Gwyndolyn Conger; they had two sons, Thom and John. However, the marriage was unhappy and they were divorced in 1949. Steinbeck's postwar works include THE PEARL (1947), a symbolic tale of a Mexican Indian pearl diver Kino. He finds a valuable pearl which changes his life, but not in the way he did expect. Kino sees the pearl as his opportunity to better life. When the townsfolk of La Paz learn of Kino's treasury, he is soon surrounded by a greedy priest, doctor, and businessmen. Kino's family suffers series of disasters and finally he throws the pearl back into ocean. Thereafter his tragedy is legendary in the town. Thematically Hemingway's novella The Old Man and the Sea from 1952 has much similarities with this work.

A RUSSIAN JOURNAL (1948) was an account of the author's journey to the Soviet Union with the photographer Robert Capa. Steinbeck's idea was to describe the country without prejudices, but he could not move freely, he could not speak Russian, and the Soviet hosts, perhaps by the order of Stalin himself, took care that there were more than enough vodka, champagne, caviar, chickens, honey, tomatoes, kebabs, and watermelons on their guest's table.

The director Elia Kazan met Steinbeck when the author had separated from Gwyn and was drinking heavily. "I don't think John Steinbeck should have been living in New York, I don't think he should have been writing plays," Kazan wrote in his autobiography A Life (1988). "He was a prose writer, at home in the west, with land, with horses, or on a boat; in this big city, he was a dupe." Their most famous film project, East of Eden, covered the last part of the book. James Dean made his debut in the film. Kazan originally wanted Marlon Brando to play the role of Cal. He sent Dean to see Steinbeck, who considered him a snotty kid, but said he was Cal "sure as hell". Dean received an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor, but Lee Rogow in the Saturday Review was not satisfied (March 19, 1955); "Kazan has apparently attempted to graft a Brando-type personality and set of mannerisms upon Dean, and the result is less than successful... this artful construction of a performance is not, to get Stanislavskian about it, building a character."

In 1950 Steinbeck married Elaine Scott, the ex-wife Randolph Scott, a Western star. Steinbeck's son John had problems in later years with drugs and alcohol; he died in 1991.

EAST OF EDEN (1952), the title referring to the fallen world, is long family novel, is set in rural California in the years around the turn of the century. In the center of the saga, based partly on the story of Cain and Abel, is two families of settlers, the Trasks and the Hamiltons, whose history reflect the formation of the United States, when "the Church and the whorehouse arrived in the Far West simultaneously..." The second half of the story focus on the lives of the twins, Aron and Caleb, and their conflict. Between them is Cathy, tiny, pretty, but an adulteress and murderess. "It doesn't matter that Cathy was what I have called a monster. Perhaps we can't understand Cathy, but on the other hand we are capable of many things in all directions, of great virtues and great sins. And who in his mind has not probed the black water?"

Steinbeck wrote thousands of letters, sometimes several a day. To Pascal Covici, his friend, he confessed that he wanted to write the work to his sons, the story of good and evil, love and hate, to demonstrate to them how they are inseparable. His writing process Steinbeck recorded minutely in JOURNAL OF A NOVEL (1969). "But tell me," he wrote to Covici, "have you ever been this closely associated with a book before? While it was being written."

In 1959 Stenbeck spent nearly a year at Discove Cottage in England, working with Morte d'Arthur, the first book he had read as a child. After returning to the United States, he travelled around his country with his poodle, Charley, and published in 1962 TRAVELS WITH CHARLEY IN SEARCH OF AMERICA. His son John wrote in his memoir that Steinbeck was too shy to talk to any of the people in the book. "He couldn't handle that amount of interaction. So, the book is actually a great novel."

THE WINTER OF OUR DISCONTENT (1961), set in contemporary America, was Steinbeck's last major novel. The book was not well received, and critics considered him an exhausted. Not even the Nobel Prize changed opinions. The New York Times asked in an editoria, whether the prize committee might not have made a better choice. Steinbeck took this public humiliation hard. In later years he did much special reporting abroad, dividing his time between New York and California.

For a while, Steinbeck served as an advisor to President Lyndon B. Johnson, whose Vietnam policies he agreed with. At Camp the President asked Steinbeck to go to Vietnam to report on the war. Steinbeck wrote for the newspaper Newsday a series of articles, which divided his readers. The New York Post attacked him for betraying his liberal past.

John Steinbeck died of heart attack in New York on December 20, 1968. In the posthumously published THE ACTS OF KING ARTHUR AND HIS NOBLE KNIGHTS (1976), Steinbeck turned his back on contemporary subjects and brought to life the Arthurian world with its ancient codes of honour. Steinbeck had started the work with enthusiasm but never finished it.

For further reading: The Wide World of John Steinbeck by P. Lisca (1958); John Steinbeck by W. French (1961); John Steinbeck by F.W. Watt (1962); Steinbeck: The Man and His Work, ed. by R. Astro and T. Hayashi (1971); John Steinbeck by J. Gray (1971); Steinbeck: A Life in Letters by John Steinbeck, Elaine Steinbeck, Robert Wallsten (1975); Steinbeck and Covici: The Story of a Friendship by T. Fensch (1979); John Steinbeck by P. McCarthy (1980); John Steinbeck's Fiction by John H. Timmerman (1986); Conversations With John Steinbeck, ed. by Thomas Fensch (1988); John Steinbeck by Jay Parini (1994) John Steinbeck: A Centennial Tributeed. by Stephen K. George (2002)

Selected bibliography:

• CUP OF GOLD, 1929
• THE PASTURES OF HEAVEN, 1932 - Taivaan laitumet (trans. by Liisa-Maria Piila)
• TO GOD UNKNOWN, 1933 - Tuntemattomalle jumalalle (trans. by Marjatta Kapari)
• TORTILLA FLAT, 1935 - Ystävyyden talo (trans. by Jouko Linturi) - film: 1942, dir. by Victor Fleming, starring Spencer Tracy, Hedy Lamarr, John Garfield, Frank Morgan
• IN DUBIOUS BATTLE, 1936 - Taipumaton tahto (trans. by Kai Kaila)
• SAINT KATY THE VIRGIN, 1936
• NOTHING SO MONSTRUOS, 1936
• OF MICE AND MEN, 1937 (also play) - Hiiriä ja ihmisiä (trans. by Jouko Linturi) - opera adapted by Carlisle Floyd, 1970 - films: 1939, dir. by Lewis Milestone, starring Burgess Meredith, Lon Chaney Jnr, Betty Field; 1962 (Ikimize bir dünya), dir. by Nevzat Pesen, screenplay by Orhan Elmas; 1972 (Topoli), dir. by Reza Mirlohi; 1981 (television film), dir. by Reza Badiyi, starring Randy Quaid, Robert Blake; 1992 (television movie), dir. by Gary Sinise, starring John Malkovich, Gary Sinise
• THE RED PONY, 1937 - Punainen poni (trans. by Veli Sandell) - film: 1948, dir. by Lewis Milestone, starring Myrna Loy, Robert Mitchum, Petr Miles
• THEIR BLOOD IS STRONG, 1938
• THE LONG WALLEY, 1938 - Pitkä laakso: novelleja (suom. Tuomas Anhava et al.)
• THE GRAPES OF WRATH, 1939 (the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award) - Vihan hedelmät (trans. into Finnish by Alex Matson) - film: 1940, dir. by John Ford, written by Nunnally Johnson, starring Henry Fonda, Jane Darwell, John Carradine, Charley Grapewin. "Johnson's script also has some advantages over the novel, presenting a simpler, leaner narrative line in place of Steinbeck's often repetitious structure and keeping the biblical simplicity of his dialogue while jettisoning his preachy rhetorical interludes. And what Zanuck and Johnson muted in the screenplay, Ford and cinematographer Gregg Toland compensate for with searingly eloquent imagery." (Joseph McBride in Searching for John Ford, 2001); television film 1991, dir. by Kirk Browning, Frank Galati, starring Gary Sinise
• A LETTER TO THE FRIENDS OF DEMOCRACY, 1940
• THE SEA OF CORTEZ, 1941 (with Edward F. Ricketts, who was model for Doc in Cannerry Row and Sweet Thursday)
• THE FORGOTTEN VILLAGE, 1941 - film: 1941, dir. by Herbert Kline, Alexander Hammid, narrated by Burgess Meredith
• BOMBS AWAY!, 1942
• THE MOON IS DOWN, 1942 (also play) - film: 1943, dir. by Irving Pichel, starring Henry Travers, Cedric Hardwicke, Lee J. Cobb
• HOW EDITH MCGILLICUDDY MET R.L.S., 1943
• STEINBECK, 1943 (ed. by Pascal Covici)
• CANNERY ROW, 1945 - Hyvien ihmisten juhla (trans. by Jouko Linturi) - film: 1982, dir. by David S. Ward, starring Nick Nolte and Debra Winger
• THE WAYWARD BUS, 1947 - Oikutteleva bussi (trans. into Finnish by Alex Matson) - film: 1957, dir. by Victor Vicas, starring Joan Collins, Jayne Mansfield, Dan Dailey, Rick Jason
• THE PEARL, 1947 - Helmi (trans. by Alex Matson) - films: 1946 (La Perla), dir. by Emilio Fernandez, starring Pedro Armendariz, Maria Elena Marques; 2001, dir. by Alfredo Zacarias
• A RUSSIAN JOURNAL, 1948 (photographs by Robert Capa) - Matkalla Neuvostoliitossa (trans. by Olli Mäkinen)
• BURNING BRIGHT, 1950 (also play)
• EAST OF EDEN, 1952 - Eedenistä itään (suom. Jouko Linturi) - film: 1954, dir. by Elia Kazan, starring Raymond Massey, James Dean, Julie Harris, Jo Van Fleet; TV mini-series 1981, dir. by Harvey Hart, starring Timothy Bottoms, Bruce Boxleitner, Jane Seymour, Soon-Tek Oh
• SHORT NOVELS, 1953
• SWEET THURSDAY, 1954 - Torstai on toivoa täynnä (trans. by Jouko Linturi) - musical: Pipe Dream, adapted by Oscar Hammerstein II, with music by Richard Rogers
• THE SHORT REIGN OF PIPPIN IV, 1957 - Päivä kuninkaana (trans. by Jouko Linturi)
• THE CRAPSHOOTER, 1957
• ONCE THERE WAS A WAR, 1958
• THE WINTER OF DISCONTENT, 1961 - Tyytymättömyyden talvi (trans. by Jouko Linturi)
• TRAVELS WITH CHARLEY, 1962 - Matka Charleyn kanssa: Amerikkaa etsimässä (trans. by Liisa-Maria Piila) - television film: 1968
• LETTERS TO ALICIA, 1965
• AMERICA AND AMERICANS, 1966 - Amerikka ja amerikkalaiset (trans. by Jouko Linturi) - television film: 1967
• JOURNAL OF A NOVEL, 1969
• STEINBECK: A LIFE IN LETTERS, 1975
• THE ACTS OF KING ARTHUR AND HIS NOBLE KNIGHTS, 1976
• THE COLLECTED POEMS OF AMNESIA GLASSCOCK, 1976 (as Amnesia Glasscock)
• JOHN STEINBECK, 1902-1968, 1977
• LETTERS TO ELIZABETH, 1978
• contributor: FAMOUS AMERICAN PLAYS OF THE NINETEEN THIRTIES, 1980
• THE SHORT NOVELS OF JOHN STEINBECK, 1981
• THE HARVEST GYPSIES, 1988
• WORKING DAYS, 1989

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