Chicanery Row

You are here: Magazine / Chicanery Row

Even John Steinbeck’s ‘nonfiction’ was fictional.

Jan 21, 2013, Vol. 18, No. 18 • By SHAWN MACOMBER

Audio version Single Page Print Larger Text Smaller Text Alerts

“Scholars who liked Steinbeck apparently were too busy looking for deeper meaning in the conversations with a French poodle or a prescient environmentalist” to wrangle with basic questions of veracity, Steigerwald writes. “If they had been more critical, more skeptical, more scholarly, they might have saved me a lot of work.”

True enough. But then again, as Dogging Steinbeck ably proves, the longer the Golden Calf has to fatten, the sweeter the feast after the slaughter.

Shawn Macomber is a writer in Philadelphia.