‘Timshel’ and goodness: What John Steinbeck (and ‘East of Eden’) can teach America in its 250th year

The United States of America turned 250 this year amidst political upheaval, economic anxiety, and declining trust in institutions. This has left many Americans questioning the meaning of national-level experiments. At such a moment, I pondered over the writings of John Steinbeck, which felt surprisingly contemporary. More than half a century after his death, the author’s works still reflect upon the moral choices that confront the nation today.

In the words of his biographer, Jay Parini, “Steinbeck is one of the great writer-didacts, which means he was a perpetual student of humanity’s ways and means. Like Emerson, the founder of what critic Harold Bloom has called ‘the American religion’, Steinbeck ransacked the natural world for signs of immortality…He was, in Emerson’s great phrase, an instance of a Man thinking, a person whose thought was ongoing, exploratory, and always contingent, situated both temporally and spatially.” Steinbeck’s later writings, such as East of Eden, The Winter of Our Discontent, America and Americans, Travels with Charley: In Search of America, seem relevant, and this relevance prods the capacity to see his land as of promise and peril. He understood his nation as a moral process constantly negotiating between the American Dream and reality.

The spirit of America

In one of his letters to Pascal Covici, his publisher, as...

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