The recent collection of John Steinbeck's works, \America and Americans and Selected Nonfiction,"" brings together the quintessential American author's finest observations. ""America and Americans"" is a rerelease of his last published work while the nonfiction pulls together a vast arc of Steinbeck's journalistic pieces stretching from his hometown of Salinas, Calif., to the jungles of Vietnam to Sag Harbor, New York. Both sections offer a single man as a journalist, father, traveler, war correspondent, farmer, bum and half a dozen other occupations.
Though ""America and Americans"" was originally released in 1966, its message resounds with a clear voice of truth and honesty. Steinbeck's definition of the nation is this: ""America'complicated, paradoxical, bullheaded, shy, cruel, boisterous, unspeakably dear and very beautiful."" America, to Steinbeck, is part of a grand and mysterious dream standing next to a strange and impenetrable paradox.
The paradox permeates every aspect of the American experience. Steinbeck sums up everything that can't possibly belong together by stating: ""We are self-reliant and at the same time completely dependent. We are aggressive and defenseless. ...We are complacent in our own possessions, in our houses, in our education; but it is hard to find a man or woman who does not want something better for the next generation."" All this contradiction ties itself to the dream of America.
""In nothing are we so paradoxical as in our passionate belief in our own myths."" This myth is boiled down to the individual parts of what makes America, America. Steinbeck says, ""We speak of the American Way of Life as though it involved the ground rules for the governance of heaven."" His America has wealth beyond its own ability to comprehend it. It has luxury that cannot be handled. But it is that dream that may save America from its own power and ""the fact that we have this dream at all is perhaps an indication of its possibility.""
John Steinbeck's nonfiction ranges from side-splitting musings to grave declarations. His voice ranges in all pitches and decibels. This work shows a man walking with his longest strides and throwing his head back for his loudest laughter. Steinbeck is dressed up in his finest bib overalls and his mustache is trimmed. He is writing because there is humor to be eroded from his calloused hands and washed onto the fertile plain of his notepad.
