Steinbeck was, by his own account, “unwilling to surrender fierceness for a small gain in yardage,” wedging Herculean periods of creativity between bouts of hard drinking, womanizing and eventually, amphetamine abuse. Souder captures the raucous personality of a prolific and ferocious artist. The brutality he exercised on his sons, in particular, would make anyone despise the man. He captures the feverish toil behind Steinbeck’s work while unflinchingly reporting his irascible, neurotic, and cruel behavior towards editors, critics, friends, wives, and sons. Souder brings to the book an empathetic appreciation of a writer’s angst, the haunting, oscillating fears that his work will never gel, or that it will never be appreciated, or that an eventual success will ruin his drive to repeat it. Here, too, are his adventures in combat, migrant camps, and the hills above the Salinas Valley that provided the grit and grist for his tales of men struggling to eke out a meaning alongside their living. One loses count of his homes, dogs, love affairs, cocktails, personal conflicts, and bouts of loathful self-doubt. The appetite with which he wrote, fought, traveled, and imbibed makes for a good read. Mad at the World also chronicles Steinbeck’s riveting 66-year race toward self-destruction. Steinbeck’s well-documented fellow-traveling earned him an FBI file that nixed an Army commission in World War II. Unfortunately, when an American writer comes along who not only recognizes the misfortunes of others, but also the vested interests that mete out that misfortune, he or she can expect to be labeled disloyal, a radical, a Communist. Despising conventionality and chafing at brutality, his protagonists always find a hard-scrabbled dignity as they defy the indifferent authority of foremen, cops, bankers, anyone who has the power to give while preferring to take.

He was another of those mad savants whose petty and felonious torments we must overlook to give his work an impartial audience.įrom his lifelong infatuation with Arthurian legends to his own tales of male wandering and failing, Steinbeck was ever obsessed with mankind’s struggle against abusive power.

Steinbeck’s mania and addictions, while fueling some of the starkest American depictions of the Great Depression and social injustice, also made him a beastly companion. John Steinbeck is no exception to that dictum as 2005 Pulitzer finalist William Souder illustrates in his new biography, Mad at the World. Grappling with the Muses can entail a level of self-absorption that precludes humane behavior toward their closest friends, partners, even their own children. So many of the greatest artistic geniuses are best admired at a lifetime’s length. Mad at the World: A Life of John Steinbeck by William Souder (W.

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