Decades ago, as communists and suspected communists were being blacklisted and debates spread over the future of American democracy, John Steinbeck — a resident of Paris at the time — often found himself asked about the headlines from his native country.
Steinbeck was closely associated with his native California, the setting for all or most of “The Grapes of Wrath,” “Of Mice and Men” and other fiction. But he lived briefly in Paris in the mid-1950s and wrote a series of short pieces for Le Figaro that were translated into French.
“Anyone even remotely familiar with Steinbeck’s works knows that he never shied away from taking on controversial topics,” Andrew F. Gulli, managing editor of The Strand, writes in a brief introduction. The Strand has unearthed obscure works by Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and many others. Gulli calls Steinbeck’s column in the French publication a timely work for current concerns about democracy.
“He stated in the 1960s that the role of an artist was to critique his country,” says Susan Shillinglaw, who directs the Center for Steinbeck Studies at San Jose State University. “In resisting, we keep our democracy hard and tough and alive, its machinery intact. An organism untested soon goes flabby and weak,” he wrote.