After retiring, I began to study, teach, and write reflections on several of the most significant American writers of the last two centuries. I started my focus on the first major American writer— Edgar Allan Poe. In 2015, I wrote a Master’s Thesis on Poe and Nineteenth-Century Science. Since then, I have serialized that research in a monthly column on thepoeblog.org and in this column. My research concluded that much of Poe’s writing focused on how nineteenth-century technology was reshaping people’s understanding and misunderstanding of reality. With such profound insights, he prophesied about how technology might impact the future. He was one of the first writers to write fictional stories on outer space and time travel. He was the originator of the modern detective genre, demonstrating through several short stories that a skilled detective using a combination of intelligence, intuition and elementary science could be effective in solving crimes. His influence in this area is so strong that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (Sherlock Holmes), Agatha Christie,, Stephen King, Michael Connelly, and many other detective writers have paid homage to him. Many other readers know Poe as one of the most prominent writers of the Horror genre, and for producing some of the most memorable poems ever written, such as, “The Raven” and “Annabelle Lee.”
After completing my Master’s Degree in English Literature in 2015, I began exploring other literary writers who shaped our understanding of history and culture in the nineteenth century. For example, I found that it would be difficult to gain a better understanding of what it was like growing up in the American South before the Civil War than I could get by reading Mark Twain’s, Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. Similarly, Herman Melville’s, Moby Dick, provided me with very deep insights into the dynamics of whaling and the psychological tensions of a crew and captain who had been at sea for too long. Next, I focused on several writers who were born near the beginning of the Twentieth Century, whose works clearly portrayed significant aspects of life and culture in their times. I received an energized understanding of what was going on in the Roaring 20’s by reading F. Scott Fitzgerald’s early short stories and The Great Gatsby. I thought that no better writer expressed the issues that soldiers faced after returning home from World War I as well as the excesses of the “Lost Generation” of Americans living in Paris than did Ernest Hemingway. After scrutinizing the works of these important literary and historical authors, it was natural for me to turn next to John Steinbeck, who was also born in the early twentieth century and wrote extensively about some of its most significant cultural and historical trends.
Like many students, I had read some of Steinbeck’s works when I was in high school and college. But I had never focused on them as much as I did when I began teaching about them as an older, retired person. Interestingly, My first Steinbeck teaching experience was on Travels with Charley, which was one of Steinbeck’s last book (1962). This book was particularly relevant to me and my other retired students at the Osher Institute Class of the University of Richmond, who read, or read the book before my Spring 2017 classes. As in our book study, Steinbeck was retracing several of the places he had visited as a younger man but had not had the time to re-explore in his later years. He traveled the country with his dog, Charley in a camper named Rocinante, named after Don Quixote’s horse. Interestingly, he was not recognized during his journey except by a few people in his hometown. He wrote in Charley: “A journey is a person in itself, no two are alike. We find after a struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us.”
Through the course of his trip, he learned much about how he and America had changed and remained the same since he started writing about it in the 1930’s. Many of us who discussed Travels with Charley also learned a great about ourselves through Steinbeck’s insights, interactions with nature, vivid characters, and explorations of American history at the cusp of the 1960’s Civil Rights movement. I have written a Litchatte about this book when I first taught it about a year ago. With a little effort, perhaps you can hopefully find my article on this site? After this class, my students requested that I teach other classes on Steinbeck’s books. Subsequently, this semester (Spring 2018), I am leading studies on both Of Mice and Men and The Grapes of Wrath, which I introduced by a class on Ken Burns’ PBS video on the Dust Bowl. These two books offer a lens reflecting on a sad period of American history in the 1930’s, which Steinbeck used as a contextual backdrop as he created realistic characters who were trying to escape the ravages of the depression and survive the harsh and dangerous migrant work camps. My students have already asked me to teach East of Eden and any other Steinbeck books I enjoy in the future. I am now considering what I should read and discuss next. Any suggestions? Look for other columns from me in the near future on both Poe and Steinbeck, and perhaps some others.
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