The Western History Association, a professional society for scholars of the American West, was founded in 1961, the year John Steinbeck published his final novel, The Winter of Our Discontent, and wrote the final version of Travels with Charley, the work of “creative nonfiction” that continues to attract readers, and controversy, 60 years after Steinbeck’s road trip in search of an America he said he no longer understood. The Western history organization planned to hold its annual meeting in Albuquerque this year; fortunately for fans of John Steinbeck, having to meet online instead meant that the association’s October 14, 2020 presidential address by David Wrobel is now available to anyone looking for the best video introduction to John Steinbeck’s greatest decade of writing, from In Dubious Battle, “The Harvest Gypsies,” Of Mice and Men, and The Grapes of Wrath to The Moon Is Down and Cannery Row. Watch “Steinbeck Country and the America West” and find out how this writing became a British-born historian’s “window on the American West and nation,” from the New Deal to the Great Society—and how “Jeffersonian agrarian myopia” led to “racial blindness” in The Grapes of Wrath, and “creative fictions” about Oklahoma by the author of Travels with Charley.

Image of David Wrobel courtesy of the University of Oklahoma.