Of the four gospels, Steinbeck’s favorite was the one written by John. He paraphrased it loftily in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, and he was partial to its name. Mining the books of the Bible for material was standard procedure for writers of his generation, but the Gospel According to John was special. Written after the so-called synoptic gospels of Mark, Matthew, and Luke, the gospel of John is distinctive because it put Jesus’s life story in a new light, building on the narrative contained in the earlier versions while differing in style of writing, selection of events, and point of view about Jesus’s nature and purpose on earth, adding value by looking at Jesus in a new way.

William Souder’s Mad at the World (2020), the first commercially published life of John Steinbeck in a generation, has a similar relationship to its predecessors: Jackson Benson’s The True Adventures of John Steinbeck, Writer (1984) and Jay Parini’s John Steinbeck: A Biography (1994). In biblical terms, Benson is the St. Mark of Steinbeck biography—the first to tell the full life story—and Parini is Matthew or Luke, making adjustments without changing or challenging the basic narrative. Mad at the World, like John’s version of Jesus’s life story, is a major departure, written in novelistic style for a general audience and adding to our understanding of Steinbeck’s nature, psychology, and relationships with others. Reviewer response since the book’s publication on October 13 shows why it needed to be written, and why anger was the right rubric.

The first published reference to anger as Steinbeck’s governing principle appears to have been The Wrath of John Steinbeck, or St. John Goes to Church, the pamphlet privately printed in 1939 by the young friend from Berkeley with whom Steinbeck stayed over Christmas in 1920, when he worked at a department store in Oakland instead of going home to Salinas. The first published review of William Souder’s Mad at the World appears to have been the September 14 review by Donald Coers, author of the 1991 study, John Steinbeck as Propagandist. Coers’s laudatory essay has been widely quoted since it appeared at SteinbeckNow.com, and it credits Benson, quoting John Kenneth Galbraith’s blurb for Benson’s book before detailing Souder’s contribution to the edifice of understanding begun by Steinbeck’s founding biographer, now 90, more than 50 years ago. “Disproving Galbraith’s claim that no new life of Steinbeck would ever be needed,” says Coers, “Mad at the World seems certain to join existing biographies on the bookshelves of present and future Steinbeck fans, especially in America, a country whose history pervades William Souder’s writing, as it did Steinbeck’s.”

Writing for the October issue of BookPage, Henry L. Carrigan made the case for Steinbeck’s continued relevance in layman’s language designed, like Souder’s, to appeal to readers who are less familiar with footnotes than Facebook, and less likely to buy a 1,116-page book weighing four pounds than one that is half as long and half as heavy. “Steinbeck was a born storyteller who was a bit out of step with his times,” said Carrigan, because “many of his social realist novels appeared during the innovations of modernism.” But we live in an age of March madness and post-modernism, and “Steinbeck remains widely read and relevant today, as vibrantly illuminated by Mad at the World.” When The True Adventures of John Steinbeck, Writer was written, Steinbeck needed defending from academics and the critical mafia in New York. Four decades later, Souder is defending against a different kind of disregard: the neglect that results when new readers lose interest in what an old writer has to say.

The problem of reader ignorance and indifference occupied Steinbeck, who insisted that his readers would get out of his writing only as much as they were willing (or able) to put in. Souder is a veteran reporter with experience helping the uninitiated understand science, and he leaves little to chance in this regard, providing fact-filled mini-histories of the individuals and events that most influenced Steinbeck’s life and thought. These include names already familiar to Steinbeck fans—the Wagner brothers and the sisters Kashevaroff, Carlton Sheffield and Carl Wilhemson, Toby Street and Edith Mirrielees, Carol Henning and Gwyn Congers, Ed Ricketts and Joseph Campbell, Elizabeth Otis and Annie Laurie Williams, Ben Abramson and Pascal Covici—along with less familiar figures from Steinbeck’s frequently unsteady orbit: his Stanford girlfriend Katherine Bestwick, the Albee brothers of Los Angeles, and three critics—Edmund Wilson, Orville Prescott, and Mary McCarthy—who resisted his gravitational pull. Equally helpful for those new to Steinbeck, or unfamiliar with history, are the profiles supplied by Souder of movements and men who shaped the context and content of Steinbeck’s writing, from Cup of Gold (1929: Lost Generation, stock market crash, rise and fall of Herbert Hoover) to The Grapes of Wrath (1939: Great Depression, Dust Bowl, rise of Roosevelt, Hitler, and Edward R. Murrow), The Moon Is Down (1942: fall of Norway, rise of Japan), and Travels with Charley (1962: John Kennedy, Cold War, and the Cuban missile crisis).

The commentary on these and other works by Steinbeck is equally enlightening. Like Souder’s constant attention to history, the steady focus on matters of meaning and structure in Steinbeck’s fiction, along with frequent reference to Steinbeck’s journals and letters, seems perfectly appropriate for a thematic biography with a point of view, like Mad at the World. Reviewers at major newspapers recognized these virtues in Souder’s approach before moving on to express the renewed faith in Steinbeck’s relevance—the point of the book—and renewed appreciation for Steinbeck’s courage in confronting the demons described in Souder’s portrait of a high-functioning neurotic with anger-management issues. Verifying the literary value of Steinbeck’s writing was the biographer’s task in Benson’s day, and Benson more than met the challenge. Documenting the sequence and consequences of Steinbeck’s suffering is the greater task in ours. Souder does so convincingly, charting the dark side of Steinbeck’s empathy and suggesting that, like Jesus, he suffered for our sins more than his own.

A pair of reviews published on October 1 made this point for an international readership. Describing Mad at the World as “smart, soulful and panoramic,” Alexander C. Kafka’s review for the Washington Post heaped praise on Souder for having “chosen a subject on the same continuum” as his two previous books: “John Steinbeck, another loner who, like Audubon and Carson, refined his craft through mature, dogged, self-punishing industry.” Describing Steinbeck as “one of America’s few bona fide literary celebrities,” Sam Sacks of the Wall Street Journal wrote, “Two clashing impulses provide the tension in Mr. Souder’s book: Steinbeck’s deep-seated distrust of success and the unyielding creative passion that brought his success about.”

Brenda Wineapple’s New York Times review of October 6 takes a similar approach to Steinbeck’s (and Souder’s) achievement. On the character and quality issue, however, she remains a doubting Thomas. Steinbeck “might well be one of those once-popular authors whose names we recognize but whom no one reads beyond junior high. Still, his affecting novels about besieged migrant workers and itinerant day laborers may come back into vogue now that the country, if not the world, faces an economic crisis whose proportions have already been compared to, and may far outdistance, those of the Great Depression.” Unconvinced that suffering equals greatness, Wineapple suggests that “to the reader Steinbeck seems less angry than shy, driven and occasionally cruel — an insecure, talented and largely uninteresting man who blunted those insecurities by writing.” (Non-Times subscribers can read her review at the History News Network.)

Reviewing for the October 9 Boston Globe, Wendy Smith disagreed, describing The Grapes of Wrath as “a lodestar for a new generation of writers seeking to make fiction a vehicle for furious protest and a catalyst for change.” Yet “Souder’s appreciative yet clear-eyed assessment concludes that Steinbeck’s goal was more modest: ‘He brought people to life who were otherwise invisible and voiceless — because he could, and because he liked them better than the characters who lived in other writers’ work.’” Writing in the October 9 Minneapolis Star Tribune, Mary Ann Gwin praised Souder’s “vivid portrait of a complicated man,” noting that “the best biographers balance empathy for their subjects with an unblinking accounting of their shortcomings” and concluding that “Souder succeeds at this tricky business” in a way that “John Steinbeck, who prized realism above all things, might have approved.”

Most reviewers followed Souder’s lead in raising the pennant and evangelizing for Steinbeck. An exception to the rule was Vivan Gornick, the 85-year-old feminist writer who reviewed Mad at the World for the October 9 issue of New Republic. Presented as a minority report on the value of reading Steinbeck (or Souder), Gornick’s diatribe negatively demonstrated the need for a book like Souder’s, to save Steinbeck from current ideology as well as contemporary ignorance. “The amount of print that has been spilled on Steinbeck would fill an ocean,” complained Gornick, a confirmed agnostic about Steinbeck’s divinity: “memoirs, social histories, dissertations, biographies by the yard. Surely by now the cases for and against him as a significant American writer have been sufficiently made.” To the question “Do we need another Steinbeck biography?,” her answer is no.

An anonymous National Book Review post on October 12 rebutted the charge of insignificance: “Today, the 1962 Nobel Prize winner may be mostly read by high school students, but Souder presents him as a ‘major figure in American literature’ who deserves to be appreciated for his empathy and compassion for the powerless in an inhumane world. Despite his unmistakable admiration, Souder fairly relates Steinbeck’s misogyny, cruelty to his own family, and personal demons of doubt — and the crucially important role his first wife played in his success.” An equally effective counter-argument could be found on the Library of America website a day or two later: “As biographer William Souder shows in his engrossing new book Mad at the World: A Life of John Steinbeck, this long apprenticeship in failure and frustration was the crucible in which Steinbeck’s extraordinary capacity for empathy was forged. Honesty, understanding, and feeling would become the hallmarks of his work, constants even as he experimented with a wide range of forms, styles, and emotional registers. They enabled him, in his greatest work, to give voice to the voiceless, exposing the corrosiveness of power and the perils of social injustice and ecological collapse. At the same time, they did not prevent him from being heedless and sometimes cruel to those closest to him.”

Regional papers did their part, too. Interviewing Souder for the October 10 St. Paul Pioneer Press, Mary Ann Grossman led with kudos for the author: “’Mad at the World’” is the first biography of Steinbeck in 25 years and critics and scholars are loving it”—the the kind of praise few authors are too proud to appreciate. “One of the most enjoyable aspects of William Souder’s biography lies in reading the stories behind the stories,” enthused Hugh Gilmore in the November 18 Chesnut Hill (Pa.) Local: “Souder presents engaging summaries of each book and describes how Steinbeck worked on them, how they were received, and the torments and challenges of their compositions. This is all done with ease and grace and is incorporated into Steinbeck’s life as seamlessly as the stories of his three marriages, two sons, many dogs, raging, dysfunctional family life, and sweet and amusing details.”

Newspapers at both ends of John Steinbeck’s America found room for comments which, like letters to the editor, veered toward the intensely personal. Woody Woodburn exclaimed in the December 18 Ventura County (Ca.) Star that “biographies do not get any better than Mad at the World: A Life of John Steinbeck.” Reminiscing about Steinbeck’s Sag Harbor in a review for the December 23 East Hampton (N.Y.) Star, Lou Ann Walker recalled that “Years ago on a splendid June afternoon, Elaine Steinbeck invited my husband and me to her Sag Harbor home for tea. Gracious, full of good humor, she took us on a tour of the simple one-story wood-frame house, filled with memorabilia. Her husband had been gone for two decades.” Souder’s favorite might be the October 16 post by the poet Stephen Kuusisto at his blog site, Planet of the Blind: Souder’s life of Steinbeck is “quite frankly one of the best biographies I’ve read in years, ranking alongside Richard Ellmann’s ‘Oscar Wilde’”—“a nonfiction bildungsroman about a man who was richly alive with all the triumphs and tragedies inherent in a writing life” of the kind toward which Steinbeck was compelled. “Souder gives us Steinbeck’s blemishes with the light and space to take them in,” concludes Kuusisto. “For my money this is one hell of a compelling book about a writer’s life, the lived life of the unaffiliated places inside.”

Scott Bradfield’s November 28 review for The Spectator was less uncritical. An accomplished author and academic with the enviable assignment of living and writing in London, Bradfield is 65, and he knows his Steinbeck and his literary lives. “William Souder’s Mad at the World is the first significant biography of Steinbeck since Jackson L. Benson’s much longer 1984 volume, The True Adventures of John Steinbeck, Writer,” he began. “It is readable, admiring and compact, and provides a narratively energetic look at a man who suffered many of the same weaknesses as his characters — for booze, benzedrine, depression and bad marriages. But also like his characters, Steinbeck got up every day to test himself all over again, by writing a new book or embarking on a new adventure.”

“Souder writes well,” continued Bradfield, “and this is a good place to start reading (or rereading) about Steinbeck,” adding the kind of complaint about the book’s size that one might expect from an academic with ancient loyalty to Benson: “Mad at the World sometimes feels a bit too terse and cursory, especially in the last 50 pages, and falls short of communicating a strong sense of the complicated, emotional life of a very complicated, emotional writer.” The example of excessive brevity marshaled for the occasion is the notorious incident involving Hemingway, O’Hara, and Steinbeck’s walking stick. “Souder’s version of the same story is reduced to this: ‘Hemingway had interrupted the otherwise dull evening by breaking a walking stick over his own head to prove he could.’” As Stephen Kuusisto might explain, any good bildungsroman will emphasize the early years, when the hero’s experience, character, and neurosis are being forged from the materials of daily life.

In 1988, Jackson Benson published Looking for Steinbeck’s Ghost, an entertaining collection of essays and anecdotes about his 15-year struggle to write the 1984 life of John Steinbeck that became the bible of Steinbeck studies. In it, Benson describes the obstacles put in his way by members of the Steinbeck family, and he admits that a subject’s childhood is the hardest thing to get right when writing a biography. The author of an earlier life of Ernest Hemingway, Benson became John Steinbeck’s official biographer without intending to be, or asking for the job. Years later, Jay Parini—the author of an early life of Theodore Roethke—had Elaine Steinbeck’s help in writing the second “authorized” life of her late husband. Twenty-five years after Parini, William Souder had the benefit of his labor and Benson’s, along with the pioneering work of Richard Astro (on Steinbeck and Ricketts), Robert DeMott (on Steinbeck’s reading and journal-writing), and Susan Shillinglaw (on Carol Henning and her marriage to John Steinbeck). By 2016, when he started his research on Steinbeck’s life story, Steinbeck’s widow, sisters, and sons were gone. This, too, was an advantage for a biographer who came from the newsroom, where the whole truth is everything, and who wrote biographies of two figures—Rachel Carson and James John Audubon—who excelled in fields other than fiction.

An astute student of the Bible, Steinbeck was attracted to the author of the fourth gospel for literary reasons. Like a good novelist, St. John balances description with dialogue in his narrative, and he starts with an idea about his subject—Jesus is Christ—that colors his perspective, guides his construction, and informs his selection of events from Jesus’s life. Driven by what Souder characterizes as a pathological urge for privacy, Steinbeck would have preferred to have the same anonymity as John, whose identity is unknown. The alternate version of Jesus’s birth, adulthood, and death in John’s gospel appealed to Steinbeck. It inspired the poetry of his Nobel acceptance speech, just as it did the prose of that 1939 pamphlet about the righteous wrath of a latter-day St. John, age 18.

It’s unclear whether the biblical John studied Matthew, Mark, and Luke before writing his version of events. It is clear that he was writing his story for a different audience—a contemporary audience—just as William Souder has done for present and future fans of Steinbeck who may or may not get around to Benson. Today we still read the other gospels even if, like Steinbeck, we might prefer John’s prose style and plot line. If the early reviews of Mad at the World are right, Souder’s life won’t replace Benson on the shelf of essential books about Steinbeck. Non-professorial readers may prefer Souder’s narrative compression, conversational style, and helps with history, but scholars may feel wedded to Benson and resist the change. By presenting a compelling and convincing account of Steinbeck’s struggle with the world and his own demons, Souder has earned his place. Benson still has first position. But he will have to move over.

Photograph of William Souder, with Sasha, by Liz Souder.