The Novels of John Steinbeck

A Critical Study

Howard Levant

328 pages

Published: August 1983

ISBN: 9780826204240

Format:

Paperback

Price: $30.00

BUY

About This Book: Too often, Steinbeck’s work has been studied piecemeal, even when the intention was for a rounded view. In this study, Howard Levant analyzes the patterns in Steinbeck’s work, taking an approach that permits a judgment of each novel in the context of a greater appreciation of the shape of Steinbeck’s long career.
Authors and Editors: Howard Levant received his Ph.D. from Cornell University after having earned his B.A. and M.A. degrees in English from the University of Minnesota. He has written poetry that has been published in Yale Review, Poetry, and Sewanee Review.
Praise For This Book: “This is, at last, a good critical study of all of Steinbeck’s longer fiction. . . . Levant is determined to sidestep the impressionistic and peevish paeans and diatribes of earlier commentators and to apply hard, fixed, and useful critical touchstones to Steinbeck’s books. His concern is chiefly with the harmony, or lack of it, between Steinbeck’s ‘structure’ and ‘materials,’ and more precisely between the writer’s use of panoramic (episodic) and dramatic (tightly related) structure.”—Choice

“Howard Levant has written a good and important book, one which no serious student of Steinbeck’s fiction can afford not to read. In the process, he has advanced Steinbeck studies to a new threshold of sophistication and critical excellence.”—Steinbeck Quarterly

“Levant’s study . . . is perhaps the most unusual book ever written on the novelist, one that stresses his strengths as well as his weaknesses.. . . . What is particularly gratifying about Levant’s book is its iconoclasm.”—Contemporary Literature