The Pastures of Heaven

Table of Contents

 

 

 

Born in Salinas, California, in 1902, John Steinbeck grew up in a fertile agricultural valley about twenty-five miles from the Pacific Coast—and both valley and coast would serve as settings for some of his best fiction. In 1919 he went to Stanford University, where he intermittently enrolled in literature and writing courses until he left in 1925 without taking a degree. During the next five years he supported himself as a laborer and journalist in New York City, all the time working on his first novel,
Cup of Gold
(1929). After marriage and a move to Pacific Grove, he published two California books,
The Pastures of Heaven
(1932) and
To a God Unknown
(1933), and worked on short stories later collected in
The Long Valley
(1938). Popular success and financial security came only with
Tortilla Flat
(1935), stories about Monterey's paisanos. A ceaseless experimenter throughout his career, Steinbeck changed courses regularly. Three powerful novels of the late 1930s focused on the California laboring class:
In Dubious Battle
(1936),
Of Mice and Men
(1937), and the book considered by many his finest,
The Grapes of Wrath
(1939). Early in the 1940s, Steinbeck became a filmmaker with
The Forgotten Village
(1941) and a serious student of marine biology with
Sea of Cortez
(1941). He devoted his services to the war, writing
Bombs Away
(1942) and the controversial play-novelette
The Moon Is Down
(1942).
Cannery Row
(1945),
The Wayward Bus
(1948), another experimental drama,
Buming Bright
(1950), and
The Log from The Sea of Cortez
(1951) preceded publication of the monumental
East of Eden
(1952), an ambitious saga of the Salinas Valley and his own family's history. The last decades of his life were spent in New York City and Sag Harbor with his third wife, with whom he traveled widely. Later books include
Sweet Thursday
(1954),
The Short Reign of Pippin IV: A Fabrication
(1957),
Once There Was a War
(1958),
The Winter of Our Discontent
(1961),
Travels with Charley in Search of America
(1962),
America and Americans
(1966), and the posthumously published
Journal of a Novel: The
East of Eden
Letters
(1969),
Viva Zapata!
(1975),
The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights
(1976),
and Working Days: The Journals of
The Grapes of Wrath (1989). He died in 1968, having won a Nobel Prize in 1962.

 

James Nagel is the first J. O. Eidson Distinguished Professor of American Literature at the University of Georgia. He founded the scholarly journal
Studies in American Fiction
and edited it for twenty years; he is the general editor of the
Critical Essays on American Literature
series, published by Macmillan in New York; and he serves as the executive coordinator of the American Literature Association. Among his dozen books are
Stephen Crane and Literary Impressionism, Ernest Hemingway: The Writer in Context,
and
Hemingway in Love and War,
which was selected by the
New York Times
as one of the notable books of the year in 1989. He has published over fifty articles in scholarly journals, and he has lectured on American literature in twelve countries. His current projects include a study of the contemporary short-story cycle and a book about Ernest Hemingway's
The Sun Also Rises.

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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
First published in the United States of America by
Robert O. Ballou, Inc. 1932
New edition, completely reset, published by The Viking Press 1963
Published in a Viking Compass edition 1963
Published in Penguin Books 1982
This edition with an introduction by James Nagel published
in Penguin Books 1995
20

Copyright John Steinbeck, 1932

Copyright renewed John Steinbeck, 1960
Introduction and notes copyright © James Nagel, 1995
All rights reserved

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA
Steinbeck, John, 1902-1968.
The pastures of heaven/John Steinbeck;
with an introduction and notes by James Nagel.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.

eISBN : 978-1-440-67417-4

 

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When
The Pastures of Heaven
was first published in the autumn of 1932, almost no one knew his name. John Steinbeck was not then the established writer he was to become later in the decade with the appearance of
The Grapes of Wrath,
and he was a long way from the celebrity status he was to enjoy with the award of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962. In the early 1930s he was a struggling writer committed to a literary life but still searching for a subject and a style. He found the first in the area he knew best, the farm country near his home in Salinas, California, and the simple people who settled there. This was the subject that was to inform the best of his work and to underlie his reputation as a writer of intellectual substance and social significance. In the writing of a series of stories about this area, he refined his fictional prose and a new method of organization, and he was well on the way to developing the consummate craft of his greatest work.

John Ernst Steinbeck was born on February 27, 1902, in Salinas, California. His father's family, the Grossteinbecks, had come from Germany in the nineteenth century, settling briefly in Jerusalem before moving to Florida and then California, simplifying their name on the journey. The father, whose name was the same as his son's, worked at several occupations, milling flour and serving as treasurer of Monterey County. Steinbeck's mother, Olive Hamilton, came from an Irish family that had settled on a ranch near Monterey before the Civil War, and she had been a schoolteacher prior to her marriage. John and Olive established a home in the Salinas Valley, between the Gabilan Mountains to the east and the Santa Lucia range to the west. This was the area of John Steinbeck's youth and the terrain he was to capture in the best of his early work, especially in
Of Mice and Men,
“The Red Pony,” and his masterpiece,
The Grapes of Wrath.

But there was little in his early life to suggest the status he was later to attain. He was not an outstanding student in Salinas High School, from which he graduated in 1919, but he did have strong personal interests in science and classical literature. His experiences in an Episcopal Sunday school gave him a good background in Scripture, one he was to use in his fiction the rest of his life. At Stanford University his record was less than exemplary; he attended sporadically from 1920 to 1925, taking courses in zoology and the classics and devoting himself to his training in creative writing, the only area in which he excelled. As Jackson Benson has pointed out, Steinbeck is unique in his generation for having studied the craft of writing fiction at a university. But some semesters he dropped out of school and worked as a common laboror, learning the ways of ranch hands and migrant workers, and later returned to Stanford for a semester or two; he left the university without graduating.

He made an unsuccessful attempt to establish himself as a writer in New York City, but he ended up pushing wheel-barrows filled with concrete for the foundation of Madison Square Garden. He returned to California broke but determined to pursue a literary career. His first book,
Cup of Gold,
was an adventure tale about a pirate, inspired in part by the success of Rafael Sabatini's
Captain Blood,
published in 1922 and made into a popular movie in 1925. Steinbeck had attempted to combine the tradition of the buccaneering romance with the Grail legend, but this first novel attracted scant attention. He worked at his next major project for five years, a novel later titled
To a God Unknown,
but this endeavor to meld Arthurian legend into a tale about a California farmer's struggle against the elements was temporarily abandoned.

It was set aside early in 1931 so that he could begin work on a volume of short stories prompted by Elizabeth Ingels's comment that she was going to write a volume of interconnected tales similar to what Sherwood Anderson had done in
Winesburg, Ohio
in 1919. She had grown up in a valley to the west of Salinas called Corral de Tierra, “the fence of earth,” and had the idea of doing a series of stories about the development of a young girl interacting with the strange families of this confined environment. Steinbeck was inspired, for here was a subject closer to home than anything he had thus far attempted, and he quickly adapted Beth Ingels's idea into the project that was to become
The Pastures of Heaven.

His idea for the new book was to remain largely constant throughout its development, although he changed several details and ultimately deleted a few of the original stories. In the spring of 1931 he wrote to his friend Ted Miller to say that he was at work on
The Pastures of Heaven:
“Now this is a series of related stories each one dealing with a family in the Pasturas.” As the manuscripts indicate, his initial idea was to begin with the description of the valley, then move on to stories depicting roughly ten families, then to introduce the Munroes, the key family that would influence the lives of the others in the concluding group of stories. As his work progressed on the first draft, however, he seems to have felt that the separate stories lacked unity, and he decided to introduce the Munroe family at the beginning, immediately after his description of the valley, thus unifying all of the following stories by the interventions of the Munroes. By May 8 he was far enough along to write to his new literary agent, Mavis McIntosh, explaining the basic plan for the volume: