John Steinbeck “The Pastures of Heaven”

John Steinbeck “The Pastures of Heaven”

Lesson 24: Analytical Reading.

The target skills: interpreting the role of factual detail in a bigger context, predicting the role of the opening stories in a collection of stories.

1. John Steinbeck is, at heart, a novelist of the California experience. Born in Salinas in 1902, he grew up in the fertile Salinas Valley, the " Salad Bowl of the Nation, " as it was later called. That sharply beautiful and expansive landscape, where Steinbeck spent hours as a boy roaming the hills, shaped Steinbeck's creative vision. Most of his fiction is informed by the idea that people must be seen in the context of their environments. Early in the 1930s he wrote: " the trees and the muscled mountains are the world--but not the world apart from man--the world and man--the one inseparable unit man and his environment. Why they should ever have been understood as being separate I do not know. "

Can the above-said be referred to the “Pastures of Heaven”, judging by the beginning of the book? Reproduce the essence of the information and supply quotations to support your viewpoint.

2. Bring the following summary of chapter 2 to the end.
Draft-age George Battle comes from New York state in 1863 and sets up a farm in the middle of the valley. His mother dies off Patagonia in her way out. He marries Salinas epileptic Myrtle Cameron who bears him a son. She winds up at Lippman Sanitarium in San Jose. John inherits her epilepsy and religious mysticism. George dies at 65 and John, returned from missionarying, lets the farm go to seed while he chases demons, finally dying of...

3. “Each book is defined by Steinbeck's sensitivity for common man - misfits, striking workers, a lonely ranch wife, migrants who sought prosperity in the golden land”. Steinbeck's California fiction, from apprenticeship novel, To a God Unknown (1932) through his epic treatment of the Salinas Valley, East of Eden (1952) envisions the dreams and defeats of common people as shaped by the magnificent land they inhabit.

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