Steinbeck, Race, and Ethnicity A Special Issue of Steinbeck Review
updated:
Friday, February 16, 2024 - 1:35pm
The Steinbeck Review
deadline for submissions:
Monday, April 1, 2024
Like many American authors who rose to prominence in the first half of the twentieth century, John Steinbeck came from an economically privileged Protestant family of European descent and grew up in a socially and religiously conservative environment. Like many of his contemporaries, he distanced himself from his upbringing in his fiction, rejecting the authority of government, of institutions, and of received cultural wisdom. He sided with the poor and dispossessed, he stood with the underdog, and he tried to give the downtrodden a voice through his fiction. His writing indicates that he aligned himself with the ideology of mid-century liberalism and considered himself liberal, progressive, and open minded.