Welcome back to Great Americans, a countdown to our country’s 250th birthday. We’re bringing you a writer we love on an American they love, every weekday between now and July 4. Previously, Daniel Akst paid tribute to Elisha Otis, the godfather of the American skyline. Today, Major Garrett writes about John Steinbeck, whose novels echo in our memory “like a favorite family hymn, a true American hymn.” —The Editors
In the mid-1970s, a sturdy, vivid, and largely untroubled American author, by then dead, left a gift for me in my middle school library.
Standing up on its hardback edges atop a table that the librarian, desperate for TV-obsessed boys like me to read anything, had marked “Good and Easy Reads” was John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley in Search of America.
It caught my eye one random Monday because the night before my father, in his imposing way, had made me watch the movie The Grapes of Wrath. My father’s stern tendencies rarely packed the warmth of generosity, but this time was different. The edict opened my eyes, my mind, and my heart to the grandeur of John Steinbeck.
