John Steinbeck and Robinson Jeffers: A Special Issue of Steinbeck Review
John Steinbeck once remarked that fellow-Californian Robinson Jeffers wrote some the “greatest poetry since Whitman.” Steinbeck kept a significant collection of Jeffers work both in his personal library and Ed Ricketts’ Lab, where Jeffers was an influential topic in their endlessly varied conversations. When asked about possibility of meeting the poet, Steinbeck declined with a telling degree of reverence: “His poetry is perfect to me, and I don’t think one should get the man mixed up with his work.” Although they did eventually meet—notably when Steinbeck lived in Monterey in 1944—their relationship was one of distant, though friendly, mutual respect.
