Bookshop Santa Cruz welcomes Susan Shillinglaw for a reading and signing of her new book Steinbeck’s Landscapes: Where Story Meets Place, an in-depth look at John Steinbeck as a writer deeply connected to the natural world. This event is cosponsored by The Humanities Institute.

“An enthralling portrait of the places that shaped John Steinbeck and his work. Sumptuously illustrated, Steinbeck’s Landscapes pairs the author’s beloved homeland with the books from which it is inseparable. An affecting and deeply evocative book.” —William Souder

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Among the many reasons that John Steinbeck has reached the highest tier of the American literary canon is what we have come to understand as his prescient progressivism: human dignity in the face of industrialization, a celebration of the migrant laborer, and support of the poor and working class versus the owning classes.

His vision as a writer was also fundamentally ecological, looking at man and nature holistically. To understand people, Steinbeck insisted, you must appreciate the environments they inhabit: the local trees and flowers, soil and rocks, invertebrates and frogs. Always in Steinbeck’s books natural and cultural histories overlap with an animating spirit of place.

Steinbeck’s Landscapes is the first major work to focus on Steinbeck as a predominantly environmental writer. It highlights the places that the Nobel Prize–winning author cherished and explored throughout his life and examines the iconic stories they inspired. We learn how the Salinas Valley of his youth shaped East of Eden; how, in Cannery Row, the improbable diversity of human life washed together in a tight community not unlike a Monterey tidepool; and how, in The Grapes of Wrath, various human connections to land and soil inform every page of Steinbeck’s monumental novel.

The result is a new and fuller understanding of Steinbeck and his work, arguing that the resonant power of his prose owes much to this writer’s keen and abiding sense of place.

Susan Shillinglaw, Ph.D., is Professor Emerita of English at San Jose State University, where she taught American and Western literature for 37 years. For 18 years she was Director of the University’s Center for Steinbeck Studies, where she edited a newsletter and organized several international conferences. In 2013 she was honored as SJSU President’s Scholar. From 2015-18 she was Director of Salinas’s National Steinbeck Center.