{"id":17104,"date":"2012-04-12T04:29:17","date_gmt":"2012-04-12T09:29:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/utnews.utoledo.edu\/?p=17104"},"modified":"2012-04-09T13:52:24","modified_gmt":"2012-04-09T18:52:24","slug":"steinbecks-last-battle-ut-profs-book-chronicles-writers-vietnam-reports","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news.utoledo.edu\/index.php\/04_12_2012\/steinbecks-last-battle-ut-profs-book-chronicles-writers-vietnam-reports","title":{"rendered":"Steinbeck’s last battle: UT prof\u2019s book chronicles writer’s Vietnam reports"},"content":{"rendered":"

Late in 1966, American novelist John Steinbeck \u2014 64 years old, Nobel laureate, chronicler of underdogs in lauded works that included The Grapes of Wrath<\/em> and Of Mice and Men<\/em> \u2014 went to Vietnam as a correspondent. As a journalist, he probably couldn\u2019t have chosen a more propitious time: The Vietnam War was entering the national consciousness. Within a year, the number of American troops in Vietnam would approach 500,000, with U.S. casualties topping 15,000. (Nearly 110,000 would be wounded.) \t<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Dr. Tom Barden and his new book, \u201cSteinbeck in Vietnam"<\/p><\/div>Steinbeck\u2019s public support for the conflict was less well-timed. Anti-war rallies were spreading across America; the first march on the Pentagon was just around the corner in 1967, the same year that Vietnam Veterans Against the War was formed. The erstwhile subversive was labeled a warmonger; his reports helped fuel an already incendiary era.<\/p>\n

The flare was a brief one; by 1968, Steinbeck was dead, and his accounts of the war went into archival limbo, lost to the general public. <\/p>\n

Until now. Dr. Tom Barden\u2019s Steinbeck in Vietnam<\/em> (University of Virginia, 2012) offers for the first time a complete collection of the dispatches Steinbeck wrote as a war correspondent for Newsday magazine. <\/p>\n

Barden, dean of the UT Honors College and a longtime Steinbeck scholar, drew on the Steinbeck collection at Princeton, the papers of Harry F. Guggenheim at the Library of Congress, the Pierpont Morgan Library\u2019s Steinbeck holdings, and the archives of Newsday. His introduction and extensive notes for the book give the social, political and personal backstories.<\/p>\n

\u201cSteinbeck always wanted to be where the action was,\u201d Barden said. \u201cEven The Grapes of Wrath<\/em> was based on journalistic fieldwork he did, spending time with and talking to the Okies in California. In World War II, he lived in Army Air Corps barracks with a crew of airmen and published an account of their training and missions titled Bombs Away.<\/em> In the 1950s, he went to the Soviet Union for the U.S. State Department and filed a series of essays.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo his going to Vietnam as a reporter wasn\u2019t atypical for him. But as his wife told it, the real draw was that his two sons were there.\u201d<\/p>\n

Steinbeck\u2019s sons, John IV and Thom, already had served long enough in the military to lose their initially rosy view of the war by the time their father arrived in Vietnam, Barden noted. It would become a divisive element in their relationship when the elder Steinbeck \u2014 who would lose his own enthusiasm for the war \u2014 did not go public with his doubts.<\/p>\n

Within a month of his arrival, however, Steinbeck admitted, \u201cThis war in Vietnam is very confusing not only to old war watchers but to people at home who read and try to understand … This war is not like any we have ever been involved in.\u201d<\/p>\n

Despite his age, Steinbeck was determined to execute his mission as a reporter. \u201cOne goal he had was to challenge his fellow writers and counter the growing consensus that the war was going badly,\u201d Barden said. \u201cA theme he hit on often was \u2018at least I\u2019m here seeing it for myself,\u2019 even though General [William] Westmoreland was his tour guide.\u201d<\/p>\n

As a Vietnam veteran, Barden, whose service began in 1970, knows firsthand the conflict\u2019s trajectory after Steinbeck\u2019s departure: \u201cI can sympathize with his desire to have the war be noble and winnable, but by my time there, that was clearly not \u2018the way it was,\u2019 as Walter Cronkite used to say. Everyone I talked to when I arrived agreed that the mission was to wind the thing down with as few casualties as possible and get out.\u201d<\/p>\n

Already garnering critical praise, Steinbeck in Vietnam<\/em> both covers a crucial chapter of American history and completes the published Steinbeck canon.<\/p>\n

\u201cI wouldn\u2019t argue that [the dispatches] are comparable to The Grapes of Wrath, <\/em>or even Travels With Charley,<\/em> but they are Steinbeck\u2019s last works and even though they were written on the fly in hotel rooms and were little more than field notes with offhand political opinions thrown in, many of them still work in a literary sense,\u201d Barden said. <\/p>\n

\u201cThey have the spell-casting power of Steinbeck\u2019s great works of fiction. They have his trademark immediacy and passion.\u201d <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dr. Tom Barden’s new book, “Steinbeck in Vietnam,\u201d is a complete of the dispatches the author wrote as a war correspondent for Newsday magazine.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,7],"tags":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.utoledo.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17104"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.utoledo.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.utoledo.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.utoledo.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.utoledo.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17104"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/news.utoledo.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17104\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.utoledo.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17104"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.utoledo.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17104"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.utoledo.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17104"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}