Espied on a bookshelf, Jackson J. Benson's weighty account of John Steinbeck looks suspiciously like one of those terribly long biographies that Steinbeck's sister Elizabeth Ainsworth found impossible to read; but the title, The True Adventures of John Steinbeck, Writer (1984), gives one the feeling that this tome may yet prove to be an engrossing experience. And indeed it is, because an adventurer is precisely what Steinbeck was. His life was a quest like that of the legendary King Arthur, whose exploits Steinbeck admired from childhood and whose story he spent many years trying to reinvigorate for a new generation. Benson was the right choice to chronicle the adventures of this belated knight-errant, because Benson himself is one of those rare figures Richard Altick honored in The Scholar Adventurers (1951) as combining the adventurer's creative imagination with scholarly devotion to an unremitting search for truth in the minutest detail.

Yet...