Study Guide to The Red Pony and The Pearl by John Steinbeck
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Study Guide to The Red Pony and The Pearl by John Steinbeck

Intelligent Education

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Study Guide to The Red Pony and The Pearl by John Steinbeck

Intelligent Education

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About This Book

A comprehensive study guide offering in-depth explanation, essay, and test prep for selected works by John Steinbeck's, 1962 Nobel Prize in Literature winner. Titles in this study guide include The Red Pony and The Pearl.

As an author of the Civil Rights Era, Steinbeck effectively writes symbolic structures and conveys social criticism in a progressively idealistic tone. Moreover, his proletarian themes strike a universal chord with readers as they battle with moral and complex ideologies. This Bright Notes Study Guide explores the context and history of Steinbeck's classic work, helping students to thoroughly explore the reasons they have stood the literary test of time. Each Bright Notes Study Guide contains:

- Introductions to the Author and the Work

- Character Summaries

- Plot Guides

- Section and Chapter Overviews

- Test Essay and Study Q&As

The Bright Notes Study Guide series offers an in-depth tour of more than 275 classic works of literature, exploring characters, critical commentary, historical background, plots, and themes. This set of study guides encourages readers to dig deeper in their understanding by including essay questions and answers as well as topics for further research.

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Information

Publisher
Dexterity
Year
2020
ISBN
9781645422839
Subtopic
Study Guides
Edition
1
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INTRODUCTION TO JOHN STEINBECK
EARLY DAYS
John Steinbeckā€™s father, who came to California shortly after the Civil War, for many years occupied a position as treasurer of Monterey County; the novelistā€™s mother was a teacher in the public schools of the Salinas Valley. In contrast with the farther-ranging locales found in the fictions of Hemingway and Henry James, the frequent appearance in Steinbeckā€™s novels and stories of the California valleys and their inhabitants underlines the novelistā€™s link with his parentsā€™ involvements. John Ernst Steinbeck, born in Salinas on February 27, 1902, repeatedly demonstrates in his work his sensitivity to nature and to natural processes, so much of which he studied and learned about in the context of the California where he was born and which he loved. His fiction abounds with the paisanos, the migrant laborers, the exploited men and women, the union organizers, and the marine scientists whose affections, concerns and fears the writer had such abundant opportunity to observe. What is more, Steinbeck has made statements about his early years testifying to his experience of literature at homeā€”he mentions Paradise Lost, Crime and Punishment, The Return of the Native, and Madame Bovary among others as works with which he had a very early acquaintance. Here, no doubt, his motherā€™s profession contributed directly to the burgeoning writerā€™s direction. Nor was his father uninvolved in the boyā€™s artistic adventures; Steinbeckā€™s early fiction was written in cast-off accountantā€™s ledgers!
FROM HIGH SCHOOL TO THE FIRST NOVEL
Steinbeck kept very busy in high school. He wrote for the school paper; he belonged to the basketball and track teams; he was elected president of his senior class. When school was out, he spent vacations working as a hired hand on local ranches. After he graduated, and before his entrance to Stanford University, he worked as an assistant chemist in a local sugar-beet factory. His attendance at Stanford was not continuous. He was an English major, attended intermittently over a period of five years, but did not get a degree; he wrote some vagabond stories and poems, commonly satirical, for the college newspaper and magazine. Perhaps as important to his future career as his academic involvement were his periods of employment while he was not attending classes. He worked on ranches and on a road gang, where he learned about verbal and behavioral traits which he later incorporated into his work. In later years he would write to his agents letters justifying unusual aspects of conversational passages in his books by drawing on his memory of such observations. In 1925, having amassed less than half the number of credits required for graduation, Steinbeck left Stanford permanently; he went to New York City to become a writer. His brief stay, unsuccessful and anonymous, interestingly recalls William Faulknerā€™s journey to New York five years before. Of all major 20th century American novelists probably these two made the most consistent and profound use of their provincial environment; both disliked large urban centers. Faulkner too had come to the big city right after brief stays at the local universityā€”the University of Mississippi. Where Steinbeck worked for a brief and unsatisfactory while as a reporter on the New York American, Faulkner spent a similarly short and equally unpleasant time in the book department of Lord and Taylorā€™s department store. And like Steinbeck, Faulkner left New York quickly and went back to his home area; Steinbeck failed in his attempt to publish some short stories in New York and returned home as a deck hand on a ship that crossed the Panama Canal. When he returned to New York City fifteen years later as a famous writer, he still viewed the city unfavorably. In California again, Steinbeck got a job as caretaker of a Lake Tahoe estate; he was fired from that position when a tree fell through the roof. He then worked in a fish hatchery nearby. During this period, amounting to approximately two years, the writer finished his first novel to be published, Cup of God, A Life of Sir Henry Morgan, Buccaneer, with Occasional Reference to History. It was his fourth attempt at a novel, got few reviews and little recognition.
THE SALINAS VALLEY
This valley, ā€œSteinbeck country,ā€ runs roughly north and south, paralleling the California coast about thirty miles from the shoreline. The southern end of the valley, divided into large fields, grows lettuce, broccoli and other vegetables; cattle feed on nearby hill slopes. The town of Salinas itself, Steinbeckā€™s home town, ten miles from Monterey Bay, is the county seatā€”somewhat urbanized, but essentially involved with the growers, cattlemen and workers of the area. The lettuce-growing complex has been the scene of severe labor-management disputes; before the second World War a strike by the local workers was ruthlessly put down. During this period normal judicial processes were suspended, violence characterized some aspects of the struggle, and after a month the union lost. The region in general features interestingly divergent social groups. The picturesque harbor includes fishermen and cannery workers from various backgrounds, Japanese, Portuguese and Italian, involved largely with the sardine trade. In addition, survivals from old Spanish mission days draw interested tourists. Carmel is not far; artists and writers have found it a congenial home and find its lack of rigid social rules inviting.
A TERRAIN OF EXTREMES
Carey McWilliams has underlined idiosyncratic aspects of the vineyards, orchards and ranches in the area. While the old tradition of individualā€™ initiative and adventure still remains, as embodied in the lifestyles of fishermen, aspects of bohemian socialization and some traits of ranch hand behavior, vegetable growing and cattle raising are highly collectivized. These industries are big business and feature a distinct separation between ownership and management. Freeman Champney points out that the region has been typically a terrain of extremesā€”poverty and riches, economic upper class and mobile, untutored working people. The area lacked a stable middle class, and all the continuous, responsible communal concern that such a class often has. The reader will note the relevance of these sociological observations when he examines Of Mice and Men. Another environmental feature of the greatest importance to the development of Steinbeckā€™s thinking is the proliferation of marine life in the Bay. With Edward Ricketts, a marine biologist and close friend, Steinbeck in 1941 published Sea of Cortez, a journal of travel and research in marine biology. This study summed up some aspects of the novelistā€™s long-standing interest in animal behavior and scientific objectivity. Its particular relevance will be discussed in the Critical Commentary.
THE SECOND NOVEL
In 1930, at the age of twenty-eight, Steinbeck married. He went to live in Pacific Grove; his father gave him $25.00 a month and a small house. He wrote 30,000 words of a novel, and a thriller, Murder at Full Moon. The latter, a piece of hack work done in the hope of earning some quick cash, he was unhappy with. He withdrew both from his agents. His next important work, published in 1933, was To a God Unknown, a novel in which Steinbeck suggests the deep-lying need of man for ritualistic and magical behavior. Neither of the first two published novels made money but Steinbeck kept on; he was also writing short stories, planning some articles based on a tentative 400-mile horseback trip in Mexico, and working intermittently on odd jobs. The first of his stories to be printed were the first two parts of The Red Pony, in the North American Review of November and December 1933. The trip to Mexico was cancelled because of the pressure of writing, and Steinbeck worked at odd jobs until 1936-1937.
PAISANOS AND PROPERTY; THE THIRD NOVEL
Steinbeckā€™s third novel found an appreciative audience and made money. Tortilla Flat was published in 1935, received an award, was produced as a play and was sold to the movies. Consistent to his pattern, Steinbeck in this book drew upon incidents he had observedā€”in this case episodes stemming from the lives of workers in the sugar-beet factory where he had worked years before. In the life of his paisanos, described in a mock-epic style, the novelist emphasizes values subtly critical of middle-class morality. The characters lie, forgivably, steal, forgivably, and continually rationalize, forgivably; these traits, commonly defined as unworthy in a middle-class context, are not presented as heinous in the culture depicted. Steinbeck does not so much support his charactersā€™ attitudes, poor diets and uncleanliness as he deplores the larger societyā€™s consuming and corrupting concern with property and the inimical values derived from owning property. Steinbeck suggests that the loyalty and spontaneity characteristics within his subcultural group cannot exist within the middle class American culture. Consistent with a good deal of later criticism of Steinbeckā€™s work, Edmund Wilson, the influential critic, stated that the paisanos were such rudimentary creatures that they existed nearly on an animal level. Such statements, referring also to Of Mice and Men, can be neither easily refuted nor easily supported. For some critics, Steinbeck is a maudlin sentimentalist; for others he writes as a compassionate and tragic novelist.
IN DUBIOUS BATTLE
In 1936, Steinbeck published the strike novel, In Dubious Battle, which received critical praise, and is written in an objective, detached prose. Accusations of sentimentality find little direct support in this novel, for while the workers are depicted clearly as victims of othersā€™ machinations, the laborers themselves are no saints untouched by violence and meanness. Perhaps the most interesting philosophical aspect of In Dubious Battle involves the role played by an important character, Doc Burton, whose ideas are closely paralleled in Steinbeckā€™s later work, Sea of Cortez, mentioned previously. In that 1941 book the novelist refers to his theory of ā€œgroup-man,ā€ a concept very important to Steinbeck, who attributes to human groups an identity qualitatively different from the mere sum of contributing individual behavior traits. The novelist develops his theory on the basis of an analogy with the observed behavior of marine invertebrates, which seem to operate as a body for the gratification of certain primitive needs.
THE RED PONY
We have noted that the North American Review published two stories which were to become the first two parts of The Red Pony. In 1937, four years later, and one year after the publication of In Dubious Battle, Covici-Friede published a deluxe edition of The Red Pony, which included only 699 copies, each numbered and signed by the author. This first edition contains three sections: ā€œThe Gift,ā€ ā€œThe Great Mountains,ā€ and ā€œThe Promise.ā€ The following year Viking Press put out The Long Valley, a collection of stories. The Red Pony was reprinted in this anthology of Steinbeckā€™s short fiction, but this time it amounted to four parts, including now ā€œThe Leader of the People,ā€ previously unpublished anywhere. (The three sections which made up the original Covici-Friede edition had all appeared before that 1937 publication. For details of first appearance see Bibliography.) In 1945 Viking published The Red Pony in an illustrated edition which again contained all four sections. This long story, or novella, is the story of a young boyā€™s development, his confrontations with violence, loss, and death, written in a prose which recaptures the magical tone of childhood. The fourth section, ā€œLeader of the People,ā€ is not as essentially a part of the novella as the first three, but does find its place in the whole as a kind of philosophical afterword in the form of a narrative. The homogeneity of the entire four-part version is greatly enhanced by the particular quality of the style, which allies a realistic tone with a lyrically poetic direction.
OF MICE AND MEN
This novel deals with ranch workers, two of whom are singled out for particular consideration. Lennie, huge, powerful and moronic, depends utterly on his comrade and guide George for protection and warmth. This novel, Steinbeckā€™s first immediate and nationwide success, nearly did not see the light of a publishing day. The novelistā€™s setter pup ate up about half of the manuscript, and no other draft existed. Steinbeck humorously suggested the poor dog might have been acting critically and merely gave the pup an ordinary spanking. It took months to rewrite the munched material. The Book-of-the-Month Club selected the novel in the year of publication, 1937; Of Mice and Men appeared on the best-seller lists; it was sold to Hollywood, where one producer absurdly suggested to the author that someone else commit the murder for which Lennie is responsible in the novelā€”in order to preserve the audienceā€™s sympathy for the poor brute! Finally independent, Steinbeck traveled to New York where he saw his agent, attended a dinner for Thomas Mann in a borrowed suit and sailed to England, after which he visited the home of his motherā€™s people in Ireland. He then went on to Sweden and Russia.
THE NOVEL BECOMES A PLAY
When he returned to the United States, Steinbeck stayed at a Bucks County, Pennsylvania farm belonging to George Kaufman, the famous musical comedy librettist; there, with some useful suggestions by Kaufman (who was to direct the play) the acting version was finished. It opened on November 23, 1937 at the Music Box Theatre in New York City, to great applause. It elicited very favorable critical response, so much so that the play won the Drama Criticsā€™ Circle Award in a season which also featured such important plays as Our Town and Golden Boy. The citation awarded the play said:
The New York Drama Criticsā€™ Circle awards its prize to John Steinbeckā€™s ā€œOf Mice and Menā€ for its direct force and perception in handling a theme genuinely rooted in American life; for its bite into the strict quality of its material; for his refusal to make this study of tragical loneliness and frustration either cheap or sensational; and finally for its simple, intense and steadily rising effect on the stage.
THE GRAPES OF WRATH
Steinbeck had not waited to see the play produced. As soon as he finished writing the stage version he set out for Oklahoma, where he joined a group of migrant workers. He lived with them in their shanties, and accompanied them to California, working all the way. He stated several times during this period that he had no preconceived theories, social or economic, with which to confront the exploitation and forced mobility typical of the migrant laborers. He was with them to see, to hear, and to experience. He hoped that the projection of his individual adventure onto a larger social pattern would be meaningful. Steinbeckā€™s intense compassion for the poverty and misery of his co-workers did not lead to either sentimentalism or inappropriately ā€œobjectiveā€ stylization. However, the novel penetrated Americaā€™s consciousness like a bomb, and that explosion left relatively little room for sober critical appraisal. The ...

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