Destination: Steinbeck’s California

Book: A Journey into Steinbeck’s California by Susan Shillinglaw

A Guest post by Dr. Jessie Voigts

One of the very best books I’ve ever read is featured here in our Book Review this week. Published by Roaring Forties Press and authored by Susan Shillinglaw, A Journey intoA Journey into Steinbeck’s California is a treasure. Full of gorgeous photos by Nancy Burnett, artwork of the times, photos of Steinbeck’s contemporaries, and in-depth sidebars of places, people, and events, this book delves deeply into Steinbeck and California.

Author Susan Shillinglaw is a Professor of English at San Jose State University and Scholar-in-Residence at the National Steinbeck Center in Salinas. For eighteen years, she was Director of the Center for Steinbeck Studies at San Jose State University, where she edited the award-winning journal Steinbeck Studies (previously The Steinbeck Newsletter), published twice yearly. She was a consultant to Harpo Productions for Oprah’s website on East of Eden and frequently consults for popular media as well as scholarly projects—most recently for a State Department-sponsored film made by a Georgian (formerly a part of the USSR) television station.

We were lucky enough to sit down and talk with Susan about her book.
Wandering Educators: Please tell us about your book, A Journey into Steinbeck’s California.

Susan Shillinghlaw: The book is a hybrid text, part biography, part analysis and discussion of Steinbeck’s work, part social history, part travelogue.

It was great fun to write and compile (selecting sites to photograph, deciding what information to “box”).

The approach is holistic. I look at Steinbeck’s sense of place and how various locations in California both shaped his writing and how he, in turn, was shaped by the places he inhabited. For Steinbeck, place always concerned the intersection of human history and natural history. It was stimulating to think about how human histories and nature, cultural artifacts and social issues intersected in Steinbeck’s fiction.

A novel like Cannery Row, for example, draws from Steinbeck’s interest in intertidal ecology, his love of local history, his friendship with Ed Ricketts,[Note: Ed Ricketts home and laboratory are open for a tour on his birthday each year. Check the Steinbeck Center in Salinas.] his stint as a war correspondent in World War II, and the local itself—where Pacific meets shore. I hope this book gives that rich sense of Steinbeck living in place. He makes readers feel and “participate” in the California landscape, and I hope that resonance is clear in this book.

WE: The photos and illustrations are intriguing – can you tell us more about that?

SS: To write the book, I revisited Stanford archives and Salinas archives, as well as several local archives: mine was a treasure hunt for local resources and libraries are a great source of information. Many of the period photographs came from these tiny archives that I dug through in Pacific Grove, Monterey, and Salinas.

The contemporary photographs were quite another kind of research. The superb photographer, Nancy Burnett, accompanied me on trips around Steinbeck locales. We spent a day tramping around Salinas, looking for interesting ways to photograph buildings. We strolled through the hills trying to capture the colors of the grasses and the hue of poppies and lupins. Jolly fun to take photos of all the places one knows well.

When we were walking in Pacific Grove one day, a man invited Nancy and me to look at his attic, where festoons of canvas still could be seen, remnants of the original tent that stood in Pacific Grove. Houses were simply built around the tents. We were able to photograph Steinbeck’s house on 11th Street in Pacific Grove, a magical day. A family member gave us a key and told us to photograph anything we wanted—that day we discovered the desk that Steinbeck and Ricketts took to Sea of Cortez, hidden in a shed.

To read the rest of the interview with author Susan Shillinglaw, please see Wandering Educators.

I’m glad that Jessie decided to talk with the author of A Journey Into Steinbeck’s California, because I’m planning to return to Steinbeck when the Great American Road Trip visits California toward the end of the year — or early next year.And if you’re going to California between now and then, I encourage you to pick up this terrific book.

More Steinbeck at A Traveler’s Library: 11 Literary Road Trips; Top 5 American Road Trip Books ; Steinbeck and McMurtry.