Abstract This article reexamines John Steinbeck’s To a God Unknown through the lens of ecophobia, maintaining that the protagonist Joseph Wayne’s rituals of nature worship and the attitude of people around him toward his mystical bond with nature mask a deeper anxiety and fear toward nature’s agency. Drawing on Simon Estok’s theory of environmental fear and hostility, the analysis reveals how Joseph’s acts function as performative domination rather than genuine reverence. The study identifies ecophobia as a settler-colonial response to nature’s autonomy, contrasting Joseph’s coercive rituals with Indigenous and other characters’ reciprocal relationships with the land. Key scenes, including Burton’s Christian ecophobia and the cyclical drought’s eventual devastation, reveal Steinbeck’s critique of anthropocentric delusions. By framing the novel as an ecophobic parable, this article bridges literary analysis with contemporary ecological crises, exposing the destructive consequences of humanity’s fear of nature’s uncontrollable power. The conclusion highlights the novel’s prescient warning: ecological hubris stems not from nature’s malevolence but from its majestic indifference to humanity’s desperate efforts to tame it.

Abstract This article is about activities and exhibits and background information on items that are recent acquisitions and donations at the Martha Heasley Cox Center for Steinbeck Studies at San Jose State University for the year 2024–25.

Abstract This is the yearly update on what is new in the Steinbeck collection as well as information about the Center.

Abstract This article traces the concept of time in Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley.

Abstract John Steinbeck has been the subject of seven biographies. After a brief definition of what constitutes a “literary biography,” these seven biographies are here divided into three classes: non-literary biographies, full-length biographies (which treat Steinbeck’s life as a whole), and books that chronicle an important relationship between Steinbeck and a person who influenced his artistic development. Each biography is discussed in this order. Non-literary biographies include John Steinbeck, Knight Errant: An Intimate Biography of His California Years by Nelson Valjean (1975) and The Intricate Music: A Biography of John Steinbeck by Thomas Kiernan (1979). Full-length biographies include The True Adventures of John Steinbeck, Writer by Jackson J. Benson (1984), John Steinbeck: A Life by Jay Parini (1995), and Mad at the World: A Life of John Steinbeck by William Souder (2020). Biographies that highlight one of Steinbeck’s important relationships include John Steinbeck and Edward F. Ricketts: The Shaping of a Novelist by Richard Astro (1973), and Carol and John Steinbeck: Portrait of a Marriage by Susan Shillinglaw (2013).

Abstract In the centuries since the United States became a nation, much has been written about the American Dream, which is often defined by a longing for home, independence, and security. Some works of John Steinbeck, however, encapsulate the antithesis of this national Dream in portraying the denial or collapse of hoped-for success and happiness. His Of Mice and Men (1937), to illustrate, speaks to failed American aspirations that range from the longing for home, independence, and equal rights, to the need for humane treatment of all. Twenty-four years later, Richard Yates also wrote an acclaimed work depicting the anti–American Dream, his novel Revolutionary Road (1961). These two novels share commonalities that may be analyzed in terms of characterization, themes, and their representation of the sources of the Dream’s oppressors. In Steinbeck’s last work, the nonfiction America and Americans (1966), he describes an America that eerily matches the United States that Yates portrays in his fictional Revolutionary Road. In essence, these two significant novels, Of Mice and Men and Revolutionary Road, written twenty-four years apart and each representative of its times, serve as parallels for capturing the antithesis of the American Dream—an antithesis still prevalent in literature and life.