Filtering out the mythic anecdotes that have built up around Steinbeck, Parini (The Last Station, 1990, etc.) presents a straightforwardly readable portrait and assessment of one of the last practitioners of the Great American Novel. For one of the most popular American authors worldwide, Steinbeck seemed happier as an aimless young man, surviving off odd jobs, intermittently attending Stanford University, and harboring an intense conviction of his talent, than as a bestselling author, Broadway and Hollywood success, and Pulitzer and Nobel prize winner. Steinbeck's personal life was complicated by his intense need for reassurance and stimulation, at odds with a sometimes withdrawn, rigidly principled nature—a product, Parini suggests, of his loving but forceful mother and distant father. But his friendships with the mythologist Joseph Campbell, the eccentric marine biologist Ed Ricketts, actor Burgess Meredith (who starred in the film Of Mice and Men), and the editor Pascal Corvini were long and deep. Campbell and Ricketts had considerable influence on Steinbeck's larger vision: the latter, in his ``organismal'' approach to man's place in society and on earth, and the former, in his mythic sensibility (though their friendship was cut short by Campbell's affair with Steinbeck's first wife, Carol). Parini also gives Carol Steinbeck due credit for her editorial assistance to her difficult husband and her social activism. Parini underscores Steinbeck's passion for writing, whether journalism during WW II, travelogues of scientific expeditions and journeys across the US and USSR, or a translation of Malory. Rounding out this perceptive biography, Parini judiciously charts the paradoxes of Steinbeck's later years: his happier third marriage complicated by his uneasy relationship with his sons from his second; his progressive disillussionment with postwar America and his equivocal support of the Vietnam war; and the hostile critical reception of his Nobel Prize. Parini's persuasive and lucid biography creates a vivid diptych of a turbulent individual and a neglected paragon of American letters. (16 pages b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Jan. 25, 1995
ISBN: 0-8050-1673-2
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1994
An extravaganza in Bemelmans' inimitable vein, but written almost dead pan, with sly, amusing, sometimes biting undertones, breaking through. For Bemelmans was "the man who came to cocktails". And his hostess was Lady Mendl (Elsie de Wolfe), arbiter of American decorating taste over a generation. Lady Mendl was an incredible person,- self-made in proper American tradition on the one hand, for she had been haunted by the poverty of her childhood, and the years of struggle up from its ugliness,- until she became synonymous with the exotic, exquisite, worshipper at beauty's whrine. Bemelmans draws a portrait in extremes, through apt descriptions, through hilarious anecdote, through surprisingly sympathetic and understanding bits of appreciation. The scene shifts from Hollywood to the home she loved the best in Versailles. One meets in passing a vast roster of famous figures of the international and artistic set. And always one feels Bemelmans, slightly offstage, observing, recording, commenting, illustrated.
Pub Date: Feb. 23, 1955
ISBN: 0670717797
Page Count: -
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1955
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
