Customer Reviews

Biography - John Steinbeck: An American Writer [VHS]

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This video is a good, thorough biography of John Steinbeck. I used it in my English class and it engaged my students.

I've never read any of the author's work. Still, I found this informative. Honestly, his life wasn't as interesting as the ones lead by Hemingway or Faulkner. I imagine that this documentary would be great viewing for a high school English course or introductory English course at the college level.
Like Robert Redford, Steinbeck grew up around many Mexican Americans and included them in his work. Southern gothics and imminent Bostonians to the side, Steinbeck was a West Coaster, like Gertrude Stein. Instead of having cheesy reenactments, this documentary often used Californian landscapes as a backdrop. Like most of the Biography series, the interviewees consisted of men and women, biographers and descendants.
This work said that his detractors called him a Communist. Many artists in the mid-20th Century faced this accusation. They either were falsely accused or were punished for past membership in the Party. Here, this work never answers whether Steinbeck was a Communist. Yes, maybe he wasn't fazed by such an allegation. However, the Biography series often waters down its subject's leftism and I wonder if they purposely omitted this information in order to make apolitical or conservative viewers comfortable.

While the editing and filler video are aesthetically suitable, the content remains superficial. As one of the other reviewers pointed out, the narrator tells us Steinbeck was accused of being a Communist, but fails to answer whether he was or not. Did he think society's problems could be adddressed by more government? Where has that EVER worked successfully? The answer is nowhere. So if that was Steinbeck's solution to the problem of unfairness and poverty, it was an unworkable one and consequently he wasn't as perceptive as the elite assume.

It's rather fascinating that the power structure fawns over bleeding hearts who are looking out for the underdog, while they're the very ones in the power positions. I was just left with too many unanswered questions from this superficial treatment of this writer.