Since its publication in April 1961, this “curious” novel has baffled many readers. Carlos Baker’s review for the New York Times sounds a characteristic note of dissatisfaction:

Indeed, the text’s evasive strategies and perplexing characters suggest Steinbeck’s profound unease with Cold War America, where his real fear for his country centered not on Sputnik and Russian armament but on “a creeping, all-pervading, nerve-gas of immorality which starts in the nursery and does not stop before it reaches the highest offices, both corporate and governmental.” Steinbeck sent that observation to his close friend, politician Adlai Stevenson, in November 1959, and the letter was subsequently published in Newsday, sparking a national discussion: The question “Are We Morally Flabby?” was debated by four educators and writers in a February 1960 issue of the New Republic, and the next month Newsday published “Steinbeck Replies.” Steinbeck’s answer was a resounding yes, and more than anything else The Winter of Our Discontent explores the contours of that affirmative response. From 1960, when he composed this novel, to the end of his life eight years later, Steinbeck stood as America’s moral compass, pointing to Americans’ virtues and lapses in three unflinching books: The Winter of Our Discontent, Travels with Charley (1962), and America and Americans (1966).

The freedom to critique one’s country, he felt with increasing urgency, was the role of the artist in a free nation. Trips to the Soviet Union in 1937, 1947, and 1963 as well as charges made by Communist writers that he had moved politically to the right crystallized his independent stance—Steinbeck’s Cold War was a “Duel Without Pistols” (a 1952 article he wrote in Italy after being attacked in a Communist newspaper for not objecting to the “degeneracy and brutality of American soldiers” in Korea). While American citizens and artists could voice opinions freely, he wrote, Communist artists were constrained by orthodoxy. Speak as an American critic he would, to the end of his days. That defiant patriotism informs The Winter of Our Discontent. In effect, Ethan Allen Hawley, his central character, asserts his own freedom to speak out and, in the process, replaces a hollow self with a more authentic self, however morally imperiled. What makes it such a quirky and important book is that it suggests, through Ethan’s voice, the simmering discontent of its time, the cacophony and dislocation of Cold War America, overtly a superpower, internally super powerless.

Steinbeck’s discontent, however, was artistic and cultural, not personal. The year 1950 was a watershed; he moved permanently from California, his birthplace, to New York City in December 1949, and a year later he married his third wife, Elaine Scott. This marriage gave him far more stability than the first two—certainty of love shared with a self-confident woman. Once an assistant stage manager on Broadway (for Oklahoma! when it opened), Elaine stepped into her new marriage with style, energy, wit, and steady love. For their eighteen years of marriage, she kept much of the world at bay. Some qualities of Steinbeck’s happy marriage to Elaine make their way into The Winter of Our Discontent—certainly the solidity of the union (this is, in fact, the only Steinbeck book that opens with a bedroom scene). Ethan’s rather cloying nicknames for Mary are close to Steinbeck’s own for his beloved Elaine, who was “moglie” when they traveled and “Lily Maid” at home. Most important, the steady light that Mary casts for Ethan is Elaine’s for John: “No one in the world can rise to a party or a plateau of celebration like my Mary,” Ethan muses. “With Mary in the doorway of a party everyone feels more attractive and clever than he was, and so he actually becomes.” The marriage of Ethan and Mary is Steinbeck’s most fully drawn portrait of marriage and home life—at least in part an index of his own contentment.

With an equal sense of renewal, this displaced Californian embraced his and Elaine’s new home, New York City, and made it his own: “As far as homes go,” he wrote in a 1953 essay, “Autobiography: Making of a New Yorker,” “there is only a small California town and New York. . . . All of everything is concentrated here, population, theater, art, writing, publishing, importing, business, murder, mugging, luxury, poverty. It is all of everything. It goes all night. It is tireless and its air is charged with energy. I can work longer and harder without weariness in New York than anyplace else.” There is a kind of steely determination expressed in that essay about his new terrain. Steinbeck needed and staked personal stability. His stance as an East Coaster was solidified further when he and Elaine purchased a small house in Sag Harbor in the spring of 1955: “We have a little shack on the sea out on the tip of Long Island at Sag Harbor,” he wrote to his old friend Carlton Sheffield. “It’s a whaling town or was and we have a small boat and lots of oak trees and the phone never rings. We run there whenever we need a rest—no neighbors, and fish and clams and crabs and mussels right at the door step.” Sag Harbor was Steinbeck’s haven and the setting for New Baytown, the village where Ethan lives in one of the old whalers’ houses that, in fact, line Sag Harbor’s Main Street and beyond. Schiavoni’s Grocery, the model for Ethan’s store, has been in that family since the 1950s and still operates in Sag Harbor’s tiny downtown.

But personal and territorial contentment was stirred first by the restlessness that was always his (and Elaine’s, who would pack a suitcase willingly) and second by artistic indirection. Ethan as store clerk, nibbled by small defeats, is, in some respects, Steinbeck as compromised writer once he left his native soil of California. In a 1955 interview with Art Buchwald, Steinbeck admitted that he was “tired of my own technique. . . . I’ve been highly discontented with my own work for some time. In East of Eden I used all my tricks and used them consciously and with finality.” It would not be his only admission of artistic frustration in the 1950s. By the end of the decade, he felt he’d written only “bits and pieces” for fifteen years and during that time had “brought the writing outside.” It was a harsh self-assessment for a decade that included East of Eden; the marvelous essay about his best friend, marine biologist Edward Flanders Ricketts, “About Ed Ricketts” (1951); as well as the frothy bits of fun Sweet Thursday (1954) and The Short Reign of Pippin IV: A Fabrication (1957). But it is also true that his writing of the 1950s was characterized, for the most part, by a deep split in sensibility: He wavered imaginatively between his own journalistic urge to tap into the present—writing a number of articles about contemporary culture, political conventions, and European travel—and his deep emotional ties to California that took him back to his Salinas birthplace and Monterey’s Cannery Row, where he’d spent most of the 1930s. Ethan’s internal dance between past and present is a dark form of Steinbeck’s own.

Like Ethan’s, Steinbeck’s past was a siren call, voices not easily silenced. Shortly after moving to New York City with Elaine, Steinbeck wrote his epitaph for Ricketts, who was killed in 1948. He then considered and abandoned the idea of turning Cannery Row (1945) into a play: “I have finished that whole phase. . . . I’m not going to go over old things any more.” That was written by a man who was about to start East of Eden, a man who would contemplate and begin writing in Paris in 1954 a short-story cycle about Salinas, and a man who would, that same year, turn Cannery Row into Sweet Thursday, a book whose characters seethe with discontent. And having finally laid to rest the Cannery Row material and Ed Ricketts’s ghost with the 1955 Rodgers and Hammerstein musical Pipe Dream, he turned the next year to King Arthur, hero of a beloved childhood saga.

But in fact those Arthurian tales shadowed all his work of the late 1940s and 1950s. Again and again in his search for order and meaning in a postwar world, he was drawn to figures who embodied the gallantry that was Arthur’s, heroic individuals like Sam Hamilton in East of Eden—characters who took a moral stand, born out of justified anger, and found creative solutions: Emiliano Zapata, central figure in the film script he wrote for Elia Kazan’s Viva Zapata! (1952); or Don Quixote, a book he reread and in 1958 recast in an abandoned manuscript, a western, called “Don Keehan,” written with Henry Fonda in mind. In 1947 he wrote a play-novelette about Joan of Arc, “The Last Joan.” He began one about Columbus. He considered writing one about Jesus. “Wyatt Earp, King Arthur, Apollo, Quetzalcoatl, St. George all seem to me to be the same figure,” he wrote in a 1958 letter, “ready to give aid without intelligence to people distressed when the skeins of their existence get bollixed up.” For Steinbeck, gallantry countered Cold War complacency, graft, and mind-numbing materialism. “The western world and its so called culture have invented very few things,” he wrote in 1953. “But there is one thing that we invented and for which there is no counterpart in the east and that is gallantry. . . . It means that a person, all alone, will take on odds that by their very natures are insurmountable, will attack enemies which are unbeatable. And the crazy thing is that we win often enough to make it a workable thing. And also this same gallantry gives a dignity to the individual that nothing else ever has. . . .” The questions facing Steinbeck—and Ethan—are whether gallantry is an outmoded virtue in America, 1960, or whether entering the fray, as Ethan does, might well be a quixotic kind of gallantry.

Ethan’s anguished status in the contemporary world is thus in part Steinbeck’s own. Both are deeply committed to blood-lines, to the meaning of place, home, old friendships—and to probity as an ancestral inheritance. But looking back doesn’t suffice, for a writer, for Ethan Allen Hawley—or for New Baytown itself, a place “whose whole living force had been in square-rigged ships and whales.” And the old Hawley whaling ship, suggestively, has sunk to the bottom of the sea. Memories do not nourish creative action.

One aspect of Ethan’s nostalgia in particular lends poignancy to The Winter of Our Discontent: his betrayal of his childhood friend Danny, now a drunkard. In offering a thousand dollars to “help” Danny dry out at a sanatorium, Ethan also betrays him by giving money that might cure but might also allow Danny to drink himself to death. Giving money to friends had been one way that Steinbeck tried to connect with those whose lives seemed less bountiful than his own—and his efforts to nurture Monterey Herald journalist and would-be novelist Ritchie Lovejoy (to whom he gave his 1940 Pulitzer Prize money from The Grapes of Wrath so that Lovejoy could complete his own novel, which he never finished), to help his Stanford University roommate Carlton Sheffield earn a Ph.D. (which he never earned), and to support Ricketts’s marine-biology supply business (which was always precarious) had not ended particularly well. Lovejoy resented Steinbeck’s gesture, Sheffield and he were estranged for years, and Ricketts simply bowed out in death. The love and guilt associated with these close friends was part of Steinbeck’s psyche—that and a suspicion that somehow they had retained in poverty an integrity he’d sacrificed with success. “You drift toward peace and contemplation,” he wrote Sheffield, “and I drift toward restlessness and violence.” And Danny tells Ethan that he is “better off” than Ethan, a mere clerk. Possibly Steinbeck’s discomfort over removing Ricketts’s name from the 1951 publication of The Log from the “Sea of Cortez” (published as Sea of Cortez in 1941) found its way into Ethan’s guilty treatment of Danny. But even if that reading seems a stretch, it’s certainly true that the Steinbeck-Ricketts friendship is echoed in the brotherly bond between Danny and Ethan and in the question that Ethan articulates: Is he his brother’s keeper? Danny knows Ethan to the core; Danny is shrewd and lonely; Danny haunts Ethan’s dreams—and in one dream Danny and Ethan embrace with a kiss of betrayal. All of these can be traced back to Steinbeck and Ricketts’s deep and complex friendship.

Looking to his California past increasingly chafed Steinbeck the writer, however. The first of at least three identifiable “shocks” that propelled him toward writing Winter came by way of a French journalist’s query in 1953: “Isn’t it true that American writers are abandoning the present for the past?” The question came as “a shock of recognition,” Steinbeck admitted. “It has occurred to me that we may be so confused about the present that we avoid it because it is not clear to us,” he wrote to his agent, Elizabeth Otis, while on vacation in Paris. “But why should that be a deterrent? If this is a time of confusion, then that should be the subject of a good writer if he is to set down his time. For instance, the effect on young people of the McCarthy hearing is going to be with them all their lives. The responses to this spectacle, whatever they are, are going to be one of the keys to our future attitudes toward everything. If such things are not written as fiction, a whole pattern of presentday thinking and feeling will be lost.” Although he would not “try” for another six years, the problem of how to confront American issues in fiction niggled at him. A few months later, now in Italy, he told an Italian reporter that “the novel in America is on a plateau. Outside of the neurotic crowd, none of us are digging into or writing about our present life or trying to look into the future. Instead, we are seeking refuge elsewhere than America or going into the past. I don’t know exactly why this is. It might be laziness, since it’s easier to go to historical sources for your material. It might be terror or fear of some to call the shots as they see them. And it might be a listlessness before a big event . . . a revolution of the human mind against collective pressure.” His immediate solution, he declared, was to write about what was most exciting in the postwar world: outer space. That project never saw fruition.

In the late 1950s, not outer but inner space engaged his full attention, one last siren call from his past—this the most compelling—Arthurian gallantry. He had cherished a copy of The Boy’s King Arthur since he was nine. Arthur was Steinbeck’s Rosebud: “The Bible and Shakespeare and Pilgrim’s Progress belonged to everyone. But this was mine,” he wrote in an introduction to the manuscript (published posthumously). “It was a cut version of the Caxton Morte d’Arthur of Thomas Malory. I loved the old spelling of the words—and the words no longer used. Perhaps a passionate love for the English language opened to me from this one book.” In 1956 the embroidered language and “remembered music” of this “magic book” brought him back to his childhood passion and the lovely and fertile Salinas Valley, where he grew up; to the shale cliffs that soar above the Valley’s Corral de Tierra—Arthur’s keep in the eyes of a dreamy lad; to archaic words and the cadence of language; and to his admiration and love for his little sister, Mary, once his very own squire. Before he translated a word of text, he wrote the dedication to Mary, lines that bring both brother and sister back home: “from this hour she shall be called Sir Marie Steinbeck of Salinas Valley—God give her worship without peril John Steinbeck of Monterey Knight.”

In many ways Sir John Steinbeck’s three-year immersion in the Arthurian matter, from late 1956 to 1959, was his way to remain tucked away from the present, something he admitted. But in fact the project insistently drew him to his own times. As his understanding of Malory’s world increased, so did his awareness that the Middle Ages were not so very different from contemporary angst: “My subject gets huger and more difficult all the time,” he wrote to Malory scholar Eugene Vinaver in 1959, when he was living in Somerset trying to complete his manuscript called “The Acts of King Arthur.” “It isn’t fairy stories. It has to do with morals. Arthur must awaken not by any means only to repel the enemy from without, but particularly the enemy inside. Immorality is what is destroying us, public immorality. The failure of man toward men, the selfishness that puts making a buck more important than the common weal.” The letter itself moves seamlessly from his struggle to understand the Middle Ages to his present dismay, the nagging sense that he, like Malory, lives in a world where the center will not hold: “we are as unconsciously savage and as realistically self-seeking as the people of the Middle Ages.” Perhaps one reason he could not finish the Malory project, which he reluctantly shelved in late 1959, was that he could not hold back the tidal wave of his own time.

Certainly he could not after his return to America in October 1959, following an eight-month sojourn in Arthur’s territory of Somerset, England. Two additional “shocks” awaited him and turned him from Malory’s dilemmas to America’s in 1960. One was psychic and physical—his failure to complete the Malory translation. He had to face the fact that he was “not good enough nor wise enough to do this work.” Being able to write only scattered “acts” nearly brought on his own morte. In November 1959 he landed in a New York City hospital with, he said, the porthole open to the other side. But the gravely ill writer was not quite ready to “break his brushes.” The “shock therapy” of illness made him, he said, “take back command.” That meant, for this writer, to launch other “experiments,” as he called each book throughout his long career. In the first few months of 1960, he would write The Winter of Our Discontent; plan his trip around America with Charley, “Operation America”; and drive his camper truck out of Sag Harbor in September to take the pulse of his country.

Indeed, America itself, the country’s plight and its potential, was the final shock that centered Steinbeck. In Somerset, wrestling each day with his writing, tramping over land that Arthur’s foot may have trodden, Steinbeck lived imaginatively and physically in another era. Discove Cottage had walls two feet thick and had “sheltered 60 generations,” Steinbeck wrote his editor, Pascal Covici. In his garden he found shards of ancient pottery. He plucked dandelion greens to cook. He wrote with a quill pen. “I feel that I belong here,” he told Covici. His deep contentment in a rural simplicity was doused by the icy bath of America, October 1959. Like a latter-day Crevecoeur, seeing America for the first time, Steinbeck took the measure of his country upon his return: “For a long time I had not been reading any papers, even English newspapers,” he wrote in March 1960, well into writing Winter. “And then suddenly, every morning, the front pages of the American papers with the breakfast coffee. The front pages and much of the insides were reports of rigging, cheating meat inspectors, fuel oil cheats, payola, charges of false advertising, false representation, drug company jet-propelled markups, government and state contract thefts, and this against what used to be called crimes—rape, mugging, murder, burglary, delinquency. It was staggering after the lapse of time.”

In the background of Winter are those headlines and more— the drawn-out proceedings of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), for example, that he felt had deeply tainted the country. In a 1957 essay, “The Trial of Arthur Miller,” he takes Congress to task for ignoring a man’s private morality. A few years earlier, in 1952, he had stood by filmmaker Elia Kazan when he named names before HUAC; even though Steinbeck despised the committee’s actions, he defended Kazan’s “courage” in acting according to his conscience. As the critic Clifford Lewis notes, Ethan as “betrayer and informer” may owe something to Kazan’s clouded stance.

In addition, the quiz-show scandal that wound to its grim conclusion in November 1959 haunts the pages of Winter, as scholars Robert and Katherine Morsberger have convincingly shown. For fourteen weeks in late 1956 and 1957, literate and well-connected Charles Van Doren dazzled America with his brilliance on the quiz show Twenty-One, one of the most popular programs of the late 1950s. Van Doren “kept on winning,” notes Eric Goldman in The Crucial Decade—and After: America, 1945-1960, “downing corporation lawyers or ex-college presidents with equal ease on questions ranging from naming the four islands of the Balearic Islands to explaining the process of photosynthesis to naming the three baseball players who each amassed more than 3,500 hits.” But Van Doren had been coached, fed answers—a charge he denied for months under growing pressure in 1959. On November 2, 1959, however, the “new All-American boy,” as magazines had crowed earlier, appeared before the Special Subcommittee on Legislative Oversight in the House of Representatives and confessed to cheating on the show and lying to cover up his deception. “I was winning more money than I had ever had or even dreamed of having,” he said under oath. “I was able to convince myself that I could make up for it after it was over.” His response anticipates Ethan’s own duplicity: “my objective was limited,” declares Ethan, “and, once achieved, I could take back my habit of conduct. I knew I could.”

For Steinbeck it was a shabby little episode that reflected “symptoms of a general immorality which pervades every level of our national life and perhaps the life of the whole world. It is very hard to raise boys to love and respect virtue and learning when the tools of success are chicanery, treachery, self-interest, laziness and cynicism or when charity is deductible, the courts venal, the highest public official placid, vain, slothful and illiterate.” It would seem, however, that Steinbeck’s outrage was not shared by a majority of fellow Americans. Although Van Doren was fired both from NBC and from his position as lecturer at Columbia University, others refused to denounce his actions. At the end of 1959, Look magazine surveyed Americans’ values, and the editor concluded that “a new American code of ethics seems to be evolving. Its terms are seldom stated in so many words, but it adds up to this: Whatever you do is all right if it’s legal or if you disapprove of the law. It’s all right if it doesn’t hurt anybody. And it’s all right if it’s part of accepted business practice.” This is a survey that Steinbeck may well have read.

Nor did politics in 1960 offer much solace. Steinbeck’s friend Adlai Stevenson was not running for president— although Steinbeck would start a petition urging him to do so. Instead the 1960 presidential campaign was taking shape between the relatively unknown and vigorous John F. Kennedy and the positively unscrupulous Richard Nixon, whom both Steinbeck and Stevenson agreed two years before was the “greatest danger to the Republic.” Midway through Winter, Steinbeck wrote to Stevenson that “I rather liked Nixon when he was a mug. You knew to protect yourself in a dark alley. It’s his respectability that scares the hell out of me.” With McCarthy, Van Doren, and Nixon in his mind as he wrote, it’s hardly surprising that New Baytown affluence is represented by a smug banker, Mr. Baker, whose superficiality, greed, and duplicity are foils to Ethan’s integrity at the beginning of the book. Mr. Baker epitomizes values of The Affluent Society, a 1958 book written by another of Steinbeck’s friends, economist John Kenneth Galbraith. Baker’s plan to line his own and friends’ pockets with the wealth brought by a New Baytown airport serves as a microcosm for many Americans’ heedless pursuit of affluence, to the exclusion of the needs of undernourished citizens like Danny Taylor—or like impoverished Ethan himself in the opening chapters. This text peels back layers of economic exploitation, historical and contemporary.

Triple shocks administered by ghosts of past, present, and future, then, brought Steinbeck to the book that would chart the “time of confusion” to the day—Winter is set in 1960, and the time sequence in the second part of the novel precisely reflects his own writing schedule in that summer. But if Steinbeck lunged into the present as he began his novel in early 1960, it is also true that The Winter of Our Discontent is deeply tinged by the mighty project that preceded it, the aborted Arthur. Certainly one way to consider The Winter of Our Discontent is as an ironic Malorian-Steinbeckian “act,” featuring a knight of Steinbeck’s own invention, the impeccably credentialed Ethan Allen Hawley. But this American Lancelot is lonely, unsuccessful, cornered—initially unprepared to tilt lances, for his own Knight Templar sword is packed away. Sir Ethan’s military career has concluded, his lady has been won, the grail of life’s possibilities evaporated. Ethan is now simply a clerk in a grocery store, a squire at best.

Detached, always the observer, ironic and self-contained, Ethan is a modern everyman. “The Alone Generation,” read a headline from the late 1950s, assessing postwar temperament. But for Steinbeck, humanity’s lot was always something other than gritty individuality. “I believe that man is a double thing,” he wrote in “Some Thoughts on Juvenile Delinquency,” a 1955 essay, “a group animal and at the same time an individual. And it occurs to me that he cannot successfully be the second until he has fulfilled the first.” Old Cap’n Hawley echoes that sentiment. The Winter of Our Discontent is Ethan’s quest to assert his individuality, however ruthlessly pursued, and then to find the double thing in himself, his deep connection to a group, family and community and friends—an Arthurian circle intact. By the end of his quest, the thread of connection is a frail one at best, but it is there. The talisman in his pocket sends him back to his daughter’s light.

This energetic borrowing from literary sources, all rubbing together, suggests on one hand cultural dislocation—verbal fragments thrown up like flotsam and jetsam on America’s sterile shores, a veritable wasteland. But there is cultural resonance in this richly allusive novel as well. Drawing repeatedly from Shakespeare and company, Ethan interlards his story with textual referents and thus traces parallels and reversals, paradoxes and adaptations. The title of the novel comes from the first speech in Shakespeare’s Richard III, where Richard, at this point Duke of Gloucester, growls that he will plot to darken any “glorious summer” that is possible “now” that the Wars of the Roses have concluded: Ethan is wily Richard, a puppeteer holding the threads of each character’s destiny. The book begins on Good Friday, and Ethan’s temptations are an ironic inversion of the story of the Passion. As John Ditsky has noted, Ethan is both Christ the redeemer and Judas the betrayer. He is also Cain, killer of brother Abel/Danny.

Indeed, Ethan’s tendency to self-consciously invoke biblical, heroic, patriotic, historic, or mythical referents suggests the complexity of his moral choices, layered as they are by references to other texts. Insistently Steinbeck connects Ethan’s tale to literary and cultural contexts, a copious connectivity not unlike his environmental consciousness of two decades earlier. The ecological holism of Sea of Cortez (“None of it is important or all of it is”) becomes the cultural holism of this last novel: The choices made by a grocery clerk in New Baytown, Long Island, matter within the textual pageant of human anguish—or else nothing matters.

To find his title in Richard III is highly appropriate to the mood of Winter, a tragedy, a melodrama, and a soliloquy all at once. But the taproot of this novel was not in fact Shakespearean drama but an earlier play of his own, “How Mr. Hogan Robbed a Bank, or the American Dream, an unpublished, unproduced, unconsidered play in One Act by John Steinbeck.” The play was never produced (and probably never intended to be), but it does exist in two manuscripts, the other titled “The Bank Robbery,” testifying to the hold it had on Steinbeck’s mind. These two plays undoubtedly shaped the intimate dialogues of Winter. As he was composing both, probably in mid-1955, he wrote to his agent about the importance of dramatic speech: “They say that a life is written in the face but now it seems to me, after listening, that it is even more written in the speech. The background is all there and the fears, the nature of the man in his speech.” In the novel that came five years later, Ethan’s speeches convey all shades of dramatic intensity.

Steinbeck wrapped his novel around the plot of these two drafts and a story that was published out of them, “How Mr. Hogan Robbed a Bank,” appearing in the March 1956 Atlantic Monthly. In this sly tale, Steinbeck’s touch is light—a “comedy,” notes the header, careful guidelines concerning a bank robbery. “How” in the title is thus central, since for a year Mr. Hogan meticulously plans his robbery and executes it with aplomb: “Mr. Hogan was a man who noticed things, and when it came to robbing a bank, this trait stood him in good stead.” His strategy is Ethan’s in the novel. Both depend on the world at large paying little attention to the unexpected. On a Saturday before Labor Day, Mr. Hogan opens the grocery store where he is clerk at 9:00 A.M., and at 9:04 he grabs an Iver Johnson .38 pistol (Steinbeck loved weapons of all kinds, the more unusual the better), shoves a Mickey Mouse mask under his coat, and walks out the door. Whereas Ethan’s planned robbery is foiled, Mr. Hogan’s is not, and at 9:07 ½ he finishes tucking the stolen money under the top tray of the cash register. That night he comes home to dinner and calmly hands each of his children one of the pilfered bills, five dollars each. “What a fine family!” he declares, the word “fine” used three times in the final paragraph. Mr. Hogan’s fine world remains intact.

In Winter, however, bank robbery is no laughing matter but rather the novel’s moral fulcrum; the modern Everyman, Ethan, first abandons righteousness in a willed act of transgression. The bank-robbery scheme is the supreme fiction, a radical reordering of consciousness that makes possible a newly hatched man. Ethan’s “immorality” turns on his own gamesmanship, his technique, his solipsism—seemingly with the ghost of Ayn Rand’s 1957 Atlas Shrugged in the background of Ethan’s single-minded quest. He determines that he will be a contestant in a game of chance—not so very unlike participation on rigged quiz shows that pitted apprised and unapprised contestants against one another. Can Ethan win the jackpot, come what may? His willed depravity is, in this most self-reflective of novels, a work of art. In a long passage in the manuscript of Winter, omitted in the final text, Steinbeck sets forth Ethan’s “reordering,” the mental process that prepares him to rob a bank, act immorally, and do so without blinders. It is worth including the omitted passage in full to understand how Ethan’s plan is linked to the power of language to shape and reshape experience. Ethan addresses his canned goods:

Here Steinbeck strips behavior as he strips language of its vestments: Is it possible, Ethan asks, to act immorally with searing honesty, a seeming oxymoron? But it is that quandary that gives Winter its edge: “I had thought I could put a process in motion and control it at every turn,” he muses late in the book. Some critics have called Steinbeck to task for the bank-robbery plot, since the robbery does not occur and seems unnecessary after Ethan “falls” to a quartet of temptations offered in the first chapter by the banker Mr. Baker, Margie Young-Hunt, store owner Marullo (“look out for number one”), and salesman Biggers. But the essential questions in the novel hinge on that scripted transgression: Does honesty to self, lucidly articulated, trump self-aggrandizement?

Indeed, Ethan’s plunge from observer to player energizes him. Drawing from yet another text, Steinbeck alludes to Ed Ricketts’s and his own notions of the survivability of a species. Both men frequently discussed the fact that adversity strengthened a species’ survival quotient. In the 1930s Ricketts wrote an essay entitled “Wave Shock,” arguing that the toughest and most resilient animals are those battered most severely by waves. That concept provided Steinbeck with a metaphor for human existence in a Darwinian world. In another deleted passage from the novel, Ethan muses on his new stance as wily competitor: “I knew I would win and I felt kindly not only toward Marullo but toward the others I knew now I could beat. I felt related to them, a powerful brotherness. . . . Business is combat,” Ethan continues in the manuscript: “Someone must win and someone must lose. Even if there were enough of everything for everyone, and probably there is, the winners would take it away from the losers.” In becoming a player, the Harvard-educated Ethan is bound to prevail in his highly polished, well-considered, and fully articulated matches with the clueless. Ethan is Van Doren, masterful contestant.

Drawing from the world’s library, Steinbeck composed this story with his father as his imagined audience, a quiet, bookish man who had died twenty-five years before. In addressing this manuscript to his father, Steinbeck wrote to a man of absolute integrity—and also a man who had failed at business and was, finally, appointed as treasurer of Monterey County after corrupt actions by a former treasurer. During Steinbeck’s adolescence his father had faltered, the family’s finances darkened. Perhaps Steinbeck’s own filial infidelities are written into this plot: Ethan’s and his own waywardness blend with the manuscript’s “willfulness” so that each sentence is addressed to the man who had taught him what integrity meant. Ethan’s surrogate fathers—Marullo, his boss; Baker, his banker; and old Cap’n, his grandfather—give him questionable ethical advice and act inconsistently, yet Ethan embraces their energy rather than his father’s torpor. In this book the actions of fathers and sons, their integrity and their lapses, signal some kind of patriarchal, cultural collapse.

Finally, the book is dedicated to his older sister, Beth, “whose light burns clear.” Steinbeck’s women often embrace humanistic, life-giving tendencies that men sometimes ignore: Aunt Deborah’s rigid morality, for example, or Ellen’s insistent whisper of good faith, or even Margie Young-Hunt’s brutal honesty, a woman who understands Ethan better than anyone save Danny. Might it be that in establishing these writerly ties to his own family, he grounded his text in the imperiled values of his youth—what was most at risk, in his mind, in 1960s America?

The epigraph to Steinbeck’s novel reads: “Readers seeking to identify the fictional people and places here described would do better to inspect their own communities and search their own hearts, for this book is about a large part of America today.” He throws down the gauntlet for any attentive reader: Participate in the full range of Ethan’s textual echoes, verbal antics. Listen. Take heed.

Ethan’s voice is alternately silly, sermonic, passionate, reflective. He loves puns (“the Morphy law” or wife Mary as his “holy quail”) and conversations with dogs. He taps into his unconscious at “the Place” near the sea. He channels voices from his ancestral and national past, from his morally unsteady present, from a tentatively promising future in his daughter. He sermonizes with canned peaches. Each verbal exchange is loaded with an array of social and mythical attitudes and nuances: “I’ve thought so often,” Ethan muses, “how telling changes with the nature of the listener.” In shifting moods for each auditor, Ethan forces attention to language. Technique becomes a statement of the bewildering attitudes and cultural contexts of the modern world, “a time of confusion.” Ethan’s controlling voice subverts any cultural norm or tradition he engages; he speaks extravagantly because he acts extravagantly in detaching himself from his associates and, at the same time, subverting the very notions they embrace.

A single example. His most intimate discourse is, tellingly, his least convincing, heard in the pillow talk between Ethan and his wife on the opening page, where Ethan calls Mary by a range of sweet endearments, “Miss Mousie,” “chicken-flower,” and “ladybug.” And even as he speaks in this mincing, often wry and witty voice, he mixes in “Pilgrim talk,” religious references to Good Friday; “pirate talk,” acknowledging the ruthlessness of humanity; and, on the second page of the novel, swearwords and bitter phrases that lend testimony to his sense of personal defeat. This language keeps Mary separate. She repeatedly accuses him of catching people in “word traps” or “hiding” in his words. He lies to her about his intentions for her money. And Mary, for her part, is a bit thick: She speaks ungrammatically, and she cannot fathom either her husband’s mind or Margie Young-Hunt’s character.

Throughout the book, conversations are similarly packed with irony and parody. Speeches mask intentions, conveying the uneasiness and essential isolation of each character in the novel. The deliberate shifting of contexts and moods contains both Ethan’s rebellion and his anguish about the morality of “looking out for number one” or claiming that “everybody does it . . . —just read the papers”—phrases that beat ominously throughout the book. Literalizing the book’s verbal dexterity is the mask Ethan has on hand for his planned robbery—Mickey Mouse. A silly mask covering deadly designs is the perfect metaphor for Ethan’s dialogues. He’s a ventriloquist. He’s a trickster—hardly surprising for a hero who gambles his soul.

This is clearly not the world evoked in The Grapes of Wrath, where an order existed outside the text, even if temporarily disrupted within. In The Winter of Our Discontent, there is no such order apparent. We don’t know Hawley—intentionally; can’t identify a voice that is authentically his—intentionally; and have difficulty judging whether his action is reprehensible or unavoidable—intentionally. Appropriately, it’s his son’s plagiarized essay, a written and performed amalgam of cultural dialogues, that finally brings Ethan to a nasty confrontation with his own tactics. His son’s inauthentic voice, in effect, is more extravagantly out of whack than his own. Checkmate.

Critics did not find much to love in Ethan, a difficult character to get a bead on. Resistance came first from those closest to Steinbeck: His wife, Elaine, didn’t like the cloying tone of Ethan’s speech; his agent, Elizabeth Otis, hated the novel, even after being instructed by Steinbeck to read it as a “unit” because it was a “whole thing in time, place, and direction.” And his editor, Pascal Covici, greeted it with a lackluster sigh.

Steinbeck withstood the opprobrium from his own circle and, as suggested, rewrote parts of the text; he omitted bits of Ethan’s windy speeches and cut the suggestion of incest between Ethan’s children, Ellen and Allen—undoubtedly intended to further illustrate depravity of contemporary life. But after the novel was published and reviews were decidedly mixed, he sank into a deep depression—an emotional trough that yawned deeper than any previous ones of his career, perhaps because the writerly stakes had been so very high: Create or die. Few critics seemed to comprehend the risks he’d taken with Ethan’s voice. Several judgments in particular must have stung. The New Republic declared the book “a failure.” Time—the magazine that had never given him a particularly positive review— quipped that the book “sounds curiously like late-middle-aged petulance.” The New York Herald Tribune resisted the “implausibility at the heart of it,” and Orville Prescott of the New York Times disliked the “manner of the writing,” which he found “jocular, gay and flippant.” He concluded, “Satire, if it is to draw blood, inspire feelings of guilt and contrition, cannot afford to seem too light and playful.”

Indeed, critics dealt out a good number of aughts and shoulds, suggesting repeatedly that a book with a moral theme must assume a weighty tone. “This book whimpers where it should bang,” intoned the critic for America, while Melvin Maddocks of the Christian Science Monitor asserted that since Steinbeck’s “natural hero is the primitive,” he should not stray to “man as a social creature.” And Granville Hicks of the Saturday Review thought Steinbeck’s book “superficial. He says nothing, for instance, about the fact that our whole economy depends on the production and consumption of more and more unnecessary goods, and he says nothing about the part that advertising plays. . . .” That seems so wildly beside the point that one wonders if he read the novel at all. Quite a few critics, in fact, seemed eager to rewrite the book. Writing for the New York World Telegram, John Barkham said that the “narrative is an example of the approach oblique where the approach direct was needed.” What would have grated in that review was the accompanying notion that Steinbeck had betrayed his own reputation by being inconsistent. For the whole of his long career, John Steinbeck resisted consistency. Each book was an “experiment” in his eyes, and with each, he felt, reviewers wanted him to turn back to some previous triumph—usually his work of the late 1930s.

Not all reviews were soggy, however. In a blurb published on the dust jacket of the first edition, Saul Bellow said that Steinbeck had returned to the “high standards” of Grapes, and he advised critics who “said of him that he had seen his best days” to “prepare to eat crow.” Newsweek concurred: “Steinbeck in his old, rare form.” And so did William Hogan of the San Francisco Chronicle: “I am happy that one of my old heroes is back swinging his talent at a subject that makes him mad.” Steinbeck as social critic was the man America wanted, even if the critique was served raw; popular McCall’s magazine ran it in four parts, and Reader’s Digest Book Club selected it a month after publication.

But in spite of these endorsements, Winter would be his last fictional swing. John Steinbeck never wrote another novel. Stung by negative reviews, he was further battered by his own country’s response to the October 1962 announcement that he had been awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. The spokesman for the Nobel Prize committee, Dr. Anders Osterling, had included this last novel on the list of those that had swayed the committee’s decision, for the Swedish Academy felt that Steinbeck had an “unbiased instinct for what is genuinely American, be it good or wicked.” The acclaim of the world, however, did little to silence American voices of disapprobation—at least in Steinbeck’s own mind. The writer who, since his first novel in 1929, had experimented again and again with fictional techniques, structures, and voices was nearly drowned by human voices.

But not quite. He did not stop writing in 1960. In his last eight years of life, John Steinbeck composed two thoughtful and engaging works of nonfiction, Travels with Charley and the somber and prophetic America and Americans, as well as a series of articles about Vietnam. For Steinbeck, as for Ethan, as for all his wounded heroes, the light does not go out. Hope for human creativity and belief in empathetic engagement remain steady flickers throughout John Steinbeck’s long career as a fiercely engaged American artist.