SOURCE: Busch, Christopher S. “Longing for the Lost Frontier: Steinbeck's Vision of Cultural Decline in ‘The White Quail’ and ‘The Chrysanthemums’.” Steinbeck Quarterly 26, nos. 3 & 4 (summer-fall 1993): 81-90.

In the following essay, Busch contends that Steinbeck illuminates “modern personal and cultural degeneration through reference to frontier types” in “The White Quail” and “The Chrysanthemums.”

In the course of his forty-year career, John Steinbeck consistently integrated elements of American frontier history, mythology, and symbolism into his fiction and nonfiction. Steinbeck's fascination with the frontier past germinated during his boyhood in Salinas, at that time a cowtown described by Jackson J. Benson as “a throwback to the frontier towns of a half-century before.”¹ This vital interest in the frontier West remained with him throughout his life, impelling him in American and Americans to validate traditional mythic conceptions of the nation's Western heritage. He writes:

The dreams of a people either create folk...