SOURCE: “Liking Steinbeck,” in Virginia Quarterly Review, Vol. 72, No. 1, Winter, 1996, pp. 155-9.

In the following review, Watt offers a positive assessment of John Steinbeck, which he regards as a homage to its subject rather than a work of scholarship.

Steinbeck didn’t much—like Steinbeck. Well into his forties he remained self-dismissive. As a young man his chosen emblem was Pigasus, the flying pig. Sensitive about his appearance—the protruding ears, hulking upper body, Oil Can Harry mustache, and, later, pointy goatee—he likened himself to the devil. “Don’t you go liking people, Jim. We can’t waste time liking people.” Mac issues this warning in the novel In Dubious Battle. “Most people do not like themselves at all,” Steinbeck wrote in his eulogy for friend Ed Ricketts. “They distrust themselves, put on masks and pomposities. They quarrel and boast and pretend and are jealous because they...