John Steinbeck’s Valley of the World Revisited: A Photo Essay
“I would like to write the story of this whole valley, of all the little towns and all the farms and the ranches in the wilder hills. I can see how I would like to do it so that it would be the valley of the world.” [Steinbeck: A Life in Letters]
Story and photographs by David A. Laws
In The True Adventures of John Steinbeck, Writer, Steinbeck’s biographer Jackson Benson explains that “scene and setting assume a far heavier burden of meaning in his work than in the fiction of most other novelists.” 1n 2001, I explored Monterey County’s Steinbeck Country seeking landscapes that matched quotations from his stories to photograph for a presentation at the Steinbeck Centennial Conference the following year.
Twenty years later, I retraced my steps and took new photos. I found new residential estates spilling out into the fields, technology-enhanced agriculture making ever more efficient use of the valley floor, vineyards consuming former produce and cattle country, and giant windmills churning out megawatts of electric power. But, just as I had discovered more than 50-years after the writer first described…
