Originally published on Medium.com, 2/4/25
A better-late-than-never appreciation of John Steinbeck’s last novel
The original line from which the title of this piece is bastardized is The Winter of Our Discontent — Shakespeare’s line from Richard the Third and John Steinbeck’s novel of that same name. It was a long stretch from Shakespeare to Steinbeck — about 360 some years — and much less from Steinbeck to today — about 60 some years. What is remarkable is that the themes of these works are still pertinent. You would expect that of Shakespeare, of course, because he’s universal. It was not expected, though, of the Steinbeck book.
Steinbeck published Winter as his last novel in 1961, the year I graduated from high school. It took me until 2025 to read it, but hey!, there was a lot going on in between. For me, though, the book had not lost any immediacy in its messaging when I finally got around to it. The 1960’s and to a lesser extent the 1600’s are still with us in the 2020’s.
I also read some of the critical reception the book got in 1961 and it was rough, maybe one of the reason that Steinbeck never attempted another novel. The reaction was 80/20 negative. The critics carped about the theme, the language, the plotting, and the tone, none of which harked back to the Steinbeck of the 1930’s, when he wrote the Grapes of Wrath. Grapes was his book on the miseries America (abetted by Mother Nature) permitted its movers and shakers to inflict on its poor and hapless citizens. Its tone was dark and grim, its plot cascading from one depressing episode to another, and its language was colloquial.
But the 1930’s was the Great Depression decade when most everyone was hard up. The 1950’s was the Red Scare decade, when Americans vigorously asserted American Capitalism against the threat of Communism. The difference in historical context might explain Steinbeck’s stylistic switches. Capitalism became an ideology the practice of which prodded and still prods business ethics to be a little squishy. It’s an ideology where shareholders are more valued than struggling consumers.
My own personal experience of these two decades was a compressed version of Steinbeck’s history, from his poor California years in the 1930’s to his flush New York years of the 1950’s. Myself, I was a first in the family, impoverished college student in the 60’s, but am now a comfortable retiree in the 2020’s, living off the shares of American businesses I invested in earlier. Capitalism, in short, has been good for me, although I have never myself been a capitalist in the entrepreneurial sense of the word.
But as much as I have personally benefited, huge segments of the American population have not, and the signs are currently strong that they will not in the years I have left here. For many of these people it’s still 1960’s style struggle.
Steinbeck in Winter gave expression to the disparity between the prospects and fortunes of two segments of society — to be trite, the Haves and the Have Nots. But he wrapped the story in the resolve his protagonist, one of the Have Nots, had to become a Have and the moral side steps he walked to make the transition.
What struck me in reading the book was how prescient Steinbeck was in describing his ‘bad guys’ in the novel. His characterizations can easily fit any number of modern day personages. Here are a few examples. I’d be surprised if reading this you can’t identify someone in today’s America who fits the descriptions.
They successfully combined piracy and puritanism, which aren’t so unalike when you come right down to it. Both had a strong dislike for opposition and both had a roving eye for other people’s property.
There is not such a thing as just enough money. Only two measures: No Money and Not Enough Money.
To most of the world, success is never bad. I remember how, when Hitler moved unchecked and triumphant, many honorable men sought and found virtues in him. ….Strength and success–-they are above morality, above criticism. The only punishment is for failure.
Even if there were enough of everything for everyone, and probably there is, the winners would take it away from the losers.
So, my take-away? The American literary critics of the 1960’s got the book wrong, but they got a certain comeuppance soon after when Steinbeck was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1962. The Nobel committee recognized Winter and the rest of his life work as exceptional “for his realistic and imaginative writings, combining as they do sympathetic humor and keen social perception.”
Many of those 1960’s American critics lamented the award, convinced that the Committee had made a bad decision. But critics are monitors of their time. It’s not a stretch, then, to speculate that they didn’t find the book ‘good’ because it took American capitalism to the woodshed at a time when Americans were more inclined to take it to the candy store.
But to be perfectly frank, I doubt I would have found the virtue of Winter back in 1961 either. My family was firmly rooted in the promise of America. All my grandparents, after all, were immigrants who, with one exception, fit into their new country. But all of them bore and bred sons and daughters who survived the Great Depression and found for themselves some semblance of the American Dream. In 1961 I would likely have found the book a downer, strangely un-American. Today, I find it not so much off-kilter as unfortunately exactly right.
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