In the following essay, Etheridge deems the Cain and Abel myth as central to the stories in The Red Pony.

In the following essay, Shaw relates the origins and offers a thematic and stylistic analysis of the four stories that comprise The Red Pony.

In the following essay, French delineates the defining characteristics of the short-story cycles The Pastures of Heaven and The Red Pony.

In the following essay, Ditsky explores the depiction of women in several stories from The Long Valley.

In the following excerpt, Simmonds elucidates the main thematic concerns of the stories in The Long Valley.

In the following essay, Mann perceives the Cain and Abel myth as a notable aspect of the stories of The Pastures of Heaven.

In the following essay, Spilka views “The Murder” as “a splendidly sexist example of social attitudes in fiction that reflect and extend our sanctioned prejudices about domestic violence, and it deserves more attention on those demonstrable grounds.”

In the following essay, Timmerman discusses the function and significance of the squatter's circle as a symbol of patriarchal authority and unity.

In the following essay, Busch contends that Steinbeck illuminates “modern personal and cultural degeneration through reference to frontier types” in “The White Quail” and “The Chrysanthemums.”

In the following essay, Schmidt offers a reappraisal of “Breakfast,” contrasting the story with a similar passage found in Steinbeck's novel The Grapes of Wrath.

In the following essay, Hearle asserts that the “discourses that are dialogically opposed to one another in The Pastures of Heaven represent variations on two competing perspectives—rural and urban—on the pastoral.”

In the following essay, Owens draws attention to Steinbeck's effort to evoke sympathy for the Joad family without sentimentalizing their plight. According to Owens, Steinbeck incorporates panoramic interchapters to offset over-identification with the Joad family.

Like William Faulkner and Willa Cather, John Steinbeck wrote his best fiction about the region in which he grew up and the people he knew from boyhood…. Far more extensive than Faulkner's county or Cather's homeland, the Steinbeck territory covers thousands of square miles in central California, particularly in the Long Valley, which extends south of Salinas, Steinbeck's hometown, for over one hundred miles and lies between the Gabilan Mountains on the east and the Santa Lucia Mo...

[Steinbeck's] first nine works were markedly different one from another in matter and tone and style. He shifted sharply and with a show of ease from costume drama to fantasy at once earthy and lyric to knockabout farce to abrasive naturalism to argument none too successfully disguised as narrative, proving that he could do more or less creditably in a number of fictional forms, even if in none did he demonstrate the mastery and finesse of indisputable greatness. But though his books might show contr...

In one of the little essays Steinbeck did for the Saturday Review in 1955, "Some thoughts on Juvenile Delinquency," he writes as follows concerning the relationship of the individual to the society in which he lives: "… I believe that man is a double thing—a group animal and at the same time an individual. And it occurs to me that he cannot successfully be the second until he has fulfilled the first." The nice organic relationship which Steinbeck here postulates nea...

In the following excerpt, Meyer considers the Edenic myth in the stories of The Pastures of Heaven.

Two very basic questions about ["The Leader of the People"] upon which its critics have been unable to agree are the identity of the main character and the nature of the change or development, if any, which he undergoes. (p. 423) There is, of course, much to be said for Grandfather's importance in the story. His arrival at the ranch precipitates at least indirectly all of the important subsequent action. Also, the nature of each of the other characters is in large part determined by his...

In the following essay, Hughes analyzes the relationship between “How Mr. Hogan Robbed a Bank” and the novel The Winter of Our Discontent and explicates the reasons for the story's critical success and the novel's failure.

Of the great religions, Manicheism generates the most suspense. In it, the contending principles of good and evil, God and Satan, light and darkness, soul and body are so evenly matched that for long periods darkness is actually triumphant over light. In Christianity, the rebellious angels rise up but are easily defeated in battle and contemptuously cast down into hell. One never gets the impression that Satan is a serious threat to God or that he has any real chance of prevailing. In Manicheism, he is not ...

[Nothing] more clearly indicates the allegorical nature of [The Pearl] as it developed in Steinbeck's mind from the beginning [as the various titles attached to the work—The Pearl of the World and The Pearl of La Paz]. Although the city of La Paz may be named appropriately in the title since the setting for the action is in and around that place, the Spanish word provides a neat additional bit of symbolism, if in some aspects ironic. In its working title, the novel tells the story of The Pearl...

Steinbeck critics have either ignored "The Murder," refusing it even the attention of condemnation, or treated it very gingerly because on the surface it is an enormously disturbing story with a theme and action seemingly allied to the John Wayne mystique that only a dominated woman and a dominant man will be happy together. Quite short, the story can be summarized still more briefly. After the death of his parents, Jim Moore marries and brings to his California valley ranch Jelka Sepic, repud...

[Mr. Steinbeck's] virtuosity in a purely technical way has tended to obscure his themes. He has published eight volumes of fiction, which represent a variety of forms and which have thereby produced an illusion of having been written from a variety of points of view…. [Attention] has been diverted from the content of Mr. Steinbeck's work by the fact that when his curtain goes up, he always puts on a different kind of show. Yet there is in Mr. Steinbeck's fiction a substratum whic...

Steinbeck's approach to the novel was interesting because he seemed to stand apart at a time when naturalism had divided writers into two mutually exclusive groups, since the negation of its starved and stunted spirit came more and more from writers who often had no sympathy with realism at all, and were being steadily pulled in the direction of surrealism and abstractionism…. (p. 393) Steinbeck, standing apart from both the contemporary naturalists and the new novel of sensibility that one fi...

More than a mere allegory, "Flight" reveals characteristics of myth and tragedy. A myth is a story that tries to explain some practice, belief, institution, or natural phenomenon, and is especially associated with religious rites and beliefs. The natural phenomenon, for Steinbeck, is not the facts of nature, with which historical myths deal; rather, it is … the development of innocent childhood into disillusioned manhood. The myth that Steinbeck wrought also contains another quality of ...