Steinbeck and Salinger, A Literary Analysis
Two American Authors—Both loved, Both hated
On the subject of censorship, Stephen Chbosky once said, “Banning books gives us silence when we need speech. It closes our ears when we need to listen. It makes us blind when we need sight.” Few know this better than controversial authors John Steinbeck and Jerome Salinger. While America has always prided itself on being the land of the free, the truth is that we do not always enjoy giving everyone a fair voice— sometimes due to religious or moral reasons, political dissension, or even our own discomfort with change. Steinbeck and Salinger’s literary works both undeniably broke the status quo of their time, causing huge criticism and uproar, while simultaneously becoming some of the most beloved works of their eras.
Steinbeck’s simple childhood had a lasting effect on him and became a huge influence in his work. He was born in the small rural town of Salinas, California on February 27, 1902. While attending Salinas High School, he worked as a ranch hand, commonly coming into contact with migrant workers, which highly influenced his future writing. This experience caused him to become familiar to the harsh lives that migrant workers led, and to the darker side of human nature. Steinbeck began his writing career at the onset of The Great Depression with his novel Cup of Gold in 1919 after failing to complete a degree at Stanford University. His parents were extremely supportive of his writing career, funding him with a rent-free cottage for him and his wife, paper for manuscripts, and even loans allowing him to quit his day job and focus all of his energy on his writing.
It was not long until he began to make a name for himself. His 1935 novel Tortilla Flat quickly began to gain widespread recognition and popularity. Steinbeck wrote the book as social commentary regarding the modernistic material selfishness so prevalent within his society; skillfully contrasting the greed of society with the lack of such in a group of immigrant labor workers. He soon followed up by writing even more acclaimed works such as Of Mice and Men (1936) and The Grapes of Wrath (1939), both considered to be some of his greatest works. Both of these works further dealt with the plight of the immigrant workers in California, and of class struggles.
Of Mice and Men which dealt with tough subjects such as idealism versus reality and loneliness in people of all economic classes was adapted for theater a year later. The drama was described by John Mason Brown as, “one of the finest, most pungent, and most poignant realistic productions.” His later writings throughout the 1940’s and 50’s were seen as a decline by many critics, though Steinbeck felt like they were some of his best. The public harshly criticized these works, mainly astonished and appalled that he would humanize the enemy in his war novel, The Moon is Down, which was published during World War II in 1942. His apparent support for communism also brought him large amounts of criticism throughout his later career. Steinbeck led an extremely successful literary career, his body of work speaking for itself as some of the most influential, controversial, and highly read works in America.
Unlike Steinbeck, Salinger was born on the east coast in the urban environment of New York City on New Year’s Day, 1919 — the same year Steinbeck published his first novel. Salinger struggled through school in making friends and achieving high grades; and as such, he bounced around between many different schools; some public, others private, and even a military academy. Not much changed for Salinger after he graduated from high school, he still jumped around quite a bit, spending a few months at a college and writing a few pieces for the school paper before dropping out and going to another. Salinger eventually found himself in the military, serving in Normandy, France as a part of the mission to liberate France from German control. Throughout his time in the military, lasting up to the end of the war in 1945, he continued writing on a portable typewriter that he carried around with him. Though he had dabbled in writing throughout his schooling and the war, his real success as a writer did not take off until after the war. Salinger’s experiences shaped him as a person and became a springboard for many of his characters and settings in his future literary works.
Unfortunately for Salinger, success did not come easy for him. He struggled through writing many short stories and gaining very little recognition from any of them, while also going through an unending cycle of marriages and divorces. This strongly contrasts Steinbeck’s early and almost immediate rise to popularity. Salinger finally began to see some recognition from his series of 7 stories published in The New Yorker between 1946 and 1951. Critic Maxwell Geismar described his fiction stories as having a large appeal towards young, sophisticated, and well-educated youth of the upper-middle-class. One of these stories, A Perfect Day for Bananafish, became a huge success for him and helped him land a long term contract with The New Yorker after editor William Maxwell was impressed with “the singular quality of the story”.
Trying to seek financial stabilization, Salinger sought to sell film rights for his stories, but when he did eventually land a deal and view the finished film, he was devastated and furious about how poorly they had retold his story. After this incident he vowed to never sell any film rights for any of his works ever again. The year, 1951, was a changing point in Salinger’s career; Steinbeck’s publication of The Catcher in the Rye, a book he had worked on for over 10 years, brought forth fiery debates and controversy.
Undoubtedly his most famous work, The Catcher in the Rye deals with a teenage protagonist’s struggle of being expelled from various different schools, especially an elite preparatory school. The novel serves as social commentary through teenage adolescent eyes by expounding of the topics of loyalty, duplicity, and the seeming “phoniness” of adulthood. In many ways, the protagonist closely relates to Salinger; Salinger himself, when asked said, “My boyhood was very much the same as that of the boy in the book… It was a great relief telling people about it.”
While very highly enjoyed, Salinger also received much criticism regarding his book. The book’s forthrightness regarding sensitive and immoral activities as well as its generous use of obscenities caused it to become a target for many conservatives. In the 1970’s, the novel was the most frequently censored book across the nation, while simultaneously being the second most frequently taught novel (following Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath) in public high schools across America. Salinger’s later writings were similar to his pre-The Catcher works, they gained him some popularity, but not much. At this point in his life, he began strongly practicing Zen Buddhism which influenced some of his writings.
By 1953, Salinger began to withdraw from the public, after apparently despising the fame that he received from The Catcher in the Rye. He largely stayed recluse-like until he died of natural causes in 2010. While he did not have huge success for much of his literary career, nor have a large body of critically-acclaimed works like Steinbeck, it would be a major fallacy to say that his work did not have a large impact on society. In short, Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye stands as one of the most controversial and enlightening works of all American literature.
Both Steinbeck and Salinger’s works feature unique literary aspects that set them apart from other works. Focusing on Steinbeck, Mays puts it well saying:
John Steinbeck uses realistic depictions of working people in authentic settings to politically charge his work. When examined through a working-class lens, we find a wealth of working-class themes embedded in the social commentary that runs throughout his work.
It was Steinbeck’s use of ordinary people fighting against dehumanizing social forces that made his novels great. A common aspect of Steinbeck’s literature was his way of showing ordinary people struggling through internal inhumane tendencies to create lives of meaning and character for themselves. His constant contrasting of ways of life became pivotal to his collection of works, showing the struggle between “innocence and experience, between primitivism and progress, and between self-interest and commitment to human community.” Additionally, Steinbeck frequently used symbolism in his literature to represent things or ideas, such as his use of land as a symbol for class-consciousness in Of Mice and Men. A shared aspect between Steinbeck and Salinger were their deep social commentary. Steinbeck’s social commentary was about economic classes, where as Salinger’s social commentary was one of age groups — specifically the social decadence of teenagers.
Salinger’s social criticism extended from adolescents into areas such as the gaudy nature of city-life, gender stereotypes, and the rigidity and failure of the education system. Of all aspects of The Catcher in the Rye, one of the most interesting and most telling would be the main character’s intention to become a deaf-mute. “So repulsed is he by the phoniness around him that he wishes not to communicate with anyone”, Lomazoff writes about the work. It was Salinger’s way of making the main character seem innocent and literalness in his point of view and his misconceptions of adulthood that made this work different and set it apart from others works. One of the most distinguishing factors of Salinger’s writings was his language — it was energetic, contained realistically sparse dialogue, and was extremely radical for its time. Many critics saw it as, “the most distinguishing thing about his work.” Steinbeck and Salinger are great examples to us today of how one can use the basic fundamentals of literature and intertwine their own voice and social commentary to create a great American classic.
Most significantly of all were Steinbeck and Salinger’s legacies as writers. While their work had been, and still continues to be, debated, glorified, and criticized, it is certain that their work did something that most authors never achieve — they both broke the status quo of society. The National Steinbeck Center remembers Steinbeck’s legacy by saying about him, “[he] championed the forgotten and disenfranchised while affirming the strength of the human spirit. His life was as rich and provocative as the Salinas Valley he immortalized in his writing.” In 1962, Steinbeck received the high honor of being awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. While Salinger never received a Nobel Prize for his writing like Steinbeck, his impact is felt far and wide even today. Countless authors and musicians such as John Green, Tomas Kalnoky, and Stephen Chbosky can all point back to him as a source of inspiration and influence in their careers. Paul Alexander remembering Salinger, referred to him as, “The Greta Garbo of literature.” Steinbeck and Salinger’s works are both commonly now regarded as American Classics and commonly appear on high school reading lists. Their works disrupted their society as they knew it during their era, which is a grand and unique achievement of itself, but they have done more than that — Steinbeck and Salinger’s novels continue to disrupt modern society, they continue to change the way people view the world, and they continue to change who we are as people.
In summary, John Steinbeck and Jerome Salinger both broke the boundaries of common literature, and infused their works with deep social commentary that impacted society causing their works to become some of the most simultaneously loved and condemned works of all time. Without criticism or enemies, you stand for nothing. Both of these men, in the face of criticism, proclaimed to the world what they believed to be true regarding society, and doing so, they radically impacted society. Steinbeck and Salinger’s legacies are nicely summed up in this one line, “[Their] works differ widely in scope as well as in quality, but [their] canon as a whole is the record of [two men] that in [their] own time and with [their] own voice defined and gave meaning to the human experience.”
