MK

“In April 1934, by the time Steinbeck thanked Needham for his prescient review in the Los Angeles Times, he was at the threshold of becoming not only the accomplished writer he had started out to be seven years earlier, but a popular one as well. If the remainder of Steinbeck’s career after Tortilla Flat can be seen as an anguished dance with fame, he had here arrived at a transitional moment when his sense of himself as a writer was still driven by the private pleasures of his art. “A couple of years ago,” he confessed in August 1933, “I realized that I was not the material of which great artists are made and that I was rather glad I wasn’t. And since then I have been happier simply to do the work and to take the reward at the end of every day that is given for a day of honest work.” His candor still strikes a resonant chord. To a God Unknown is not considered a great novel, though it is a quirky, memorable one. But because John Steinbeck may have learned more about crafting long fiction from it than from anything else he worked on during that period, this book laid the foundation for later artistic greatness.”
― John Steinbeck, To a God Unknown

“(Joseph’s brooding concern for the wasted land reflects the role of the mythological Fisher King of Frazer’s The Golden Bough and Jessie Weston’s From Ritual to Romance—two works which stand prominently behind T. S. Eliot’s 1922 poem The Waste Land as well as To a God Unknown.)”
― John Steinbeck, To a God Unknown

“It is only recently that we have realised the all-important part played by legendary lore in forming and stamping a nation’s character. A people’s character and a people’s heritage of tradition act and react upon each other, down the ages, the outstanding qualities of both getting ever more and more alike — so long as their racial traditions are cherished as an intimate part of their life. But the people’s character gets a new direction on the day that there comes into their life any influence which lessens their loving regard for the past.”
― Seumas MacManus, The Story of the Irish Race: A Popular History of Ireland

“When reading this unusual novel, then, with its oddly unsettling and sometimes strained combination of Christian and pagan, sacred and profane attributes—its earthiness and surreality, violence and pastoralism, pantheism and anthropomorphism, naturalism and lyricism—it is helpful to remember that Steinbeck invested his essential self in it, which is to say, he wrote it more like an extensive poem, or extended dream sequence, than like a traditionally mimetic or realistic novel. “I have the instincts of a minstrel rather than those of a scrivener,” he informed Grove Day in late 1929. Thus, while To a God Unknown has an urgent, breathless fairy-tale quality, and is, as critic Howard Levant asserts, more “a series of detached... scenes” than “a unified... organic whole,” it is not an incoherent concoction—“a rambling and improbable history,” as Warren French calls It—that flies in the face of all sensible literary convention. During its long gestation through different versions and multiple drafts, Steinbeck worked hard to create a palpable factual dimension that gives this otherwise arcane book a recognizable texture in regard to its geographical setting and landmarks (the moss-covered rock actually existed in the northern California town of Laytonville), its unusual characters (some of whom, such as the seer, Steinbeck claimed were based on living persons), and in its feel for telling details of nature and social life in Monterey County in the early part of this century.”
― John Steinbeck, To a God Unknown