SOURCE: “Paupers to Presidents,” in New Statesman and Society, May 6, 1994, pp. 37-8.

In the following review, Binding offers a favorable assessment of John Steinbeck.

Perhaps we all met Steinbeck too young; there can be few readers, particularly in his own America, who have missed having The Red Pony, The Pearl or—for all its unflinching grimness—Of Mice and Men put their way during their schooldays. And so they have tended, as they moved forward into wider reading, to relegate him to some unsophisticated region, a perpetual adolescence of sensibility. Jay Parini reminds us [in John Steinbeck] that many fewer academic studies of Steinbeck appear than of his contemporaries, Faulkner and Hemingway: 20 a year as opposed to 130.

The problem is not a new one; on the contrary, it dates from a comparatively early point in Steinbeck’s career. The Grapes of Wrath (1939) was a huge success with almost...