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John Steinbeck — The Story of an American Writer: Vol I
“Steinbeck and Jean-Paul Sartre attempted to respond to this ideological choice and would differ in their political leanings: Sartre was an outspoken critic of American capitalist hegemony, whereas Steinbeck became an avid opponent of the communist bloc…”
An Introduction of Sorts
In 1954 John Steinbeck wrote a piece for Le Figaro, called ‘I Am a Revolutionary’, as a response to an article that claimed he was not a revolutionary.
Steinbeck writes:
“I hasten to inform both the extreme right and that pseudo right which calls itself left that they are both wrong. I am a very dangerous revolutionary.
“The Communists of our day are about as revolutionary as the Daughters of the American Revolution. Having accomplished their coup and established their empire, revolution is their nightmare. They have to hunt down and eliminate everyone with the slightest revolutionary tendency, even those who helped accomplish their own. Where they have absolute power they have established the most reactionary governments in the world, governments so fearful of revolt that they must make every man an informer against his fellows, and layer their society with secret police. And like most insecure organizations, they must constantly enlarge to cover the fact that they are unsound. Any other group following their pattern they would call imperialistic.”
At this period in the Cold War writers took sides, as Dr Bradley Stephen of the University of Bristol describes:
“Steinbeck and Jean-Paul Sartre attempted to respond to this ideological choice and would differ in their political leanings: Sartre was an outspoken critic of American capitalist hegemony, whereas Steinbeck became an avid opponent of the communist bloc. They nonetheless shared a dedication to engaging with the social issues of their time, becoming arguably the pre-eminent proletarian writers of the period and eventual Nobel Prize winners. Sartre believed Steinbeck to be `the most rebellious, perhaps’ of American writers, whilst Steinbeck so admired the French intellectual scene typified by Sartre that he spent nearly a year in Paris writing for Le Figaro. Their pivotal promotion of individual freedom may have nudged them towards…
