John Steinbeck may not be known for his work as a nature writer, at least in the sense of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, or Annie Dillard, but much of his work develops characters in relation to their environment and implicitly argues for a clearer understanding of how humans might best live within the limits of their natural surroundings. He belongs to that group of twentieth-century writers that includes Wallace Stegner, Edward Abbey, and Terry Tempest Williams, all of whom were influenced by Steinbeck's ability to evoke artistically the American landscape as part of the human condition. To be human, for Steinbeck, was to be a part of the larger ecological scheme, to be a living being linked to all life and to the earth itself. In many of his novels, stories, and nonfiction pieces, Steinbeck challenges his readers not only to acknowledge this link...