Steinbeck Country

Crown Publishers, 1977. Softcover. Very Good. 10x8x0. In Very Good+ condition. A collection of 115 photographs interspersed with prose which portrays the beauty and pathos of the mountains, valleys, waterfront and their inhabitants which Steinbeck knew so well and wrote about with such affection. With photographs of the Gabilon and Santa Lucia mountain ranges which serve as the backdrop for Steinbeck’s moving story about a boy and his horse in The Red Pony. There are wonderful pictures of that “great, wrinkled earthen bowl that the Spaniards called the ‘Corral de Tierra’ and John Steinbeck called the 'Pastures of Heaven.’” There are excellent photographs of the Salinas River which meanders through Steinbeck Country for more than a hundred miles, pictures of the fabulous tide pools where Steinbeck’s Doc once collected the marine invertebrates of the intertidal zones, and shots of the Big Sur country where in a short story called “Flight,” a young Steinbeck character named Pepe grows to manhood. Crouch also presents portraits of those natural elements which alter the landscape in Steinbeck Country: the fearful drought which drives Joseph Wayne’s family from the land in To a God Unknown; the wind which frightens Adam Trask in East of Eden; and the fog which dims the sharp outline of reality in the tragicomic parable Steinbeck called Tortilla Flat. Then, there are Crouch’s portraits of the people of Steinbeck Country: the Mexicans (modem day descendants of Steinbeck’s Joads) who pack the lettuce and pick the fruit of the rich Salinas Valley and whose livelihood seems threatened by a technology which would alter nature to fit the machine; the rich land owners, astute business men who have made the Salinas into one of the most productive valleys on earth; and the wonderful characters who live along Monterey Bay — the Chinese colony, the Sicilian fishermen, and the vagabonds of Cannery Row whom Steinbeck once called “the Virtues, the Graces, the Beauties.” And there are won­ derful plates of the Row itself, once a lively, frantic place which supported a thriving sardine industry, but now silent and empty, except for the tourists Reviews 145 who come each night to fill constricted eating houses which, Crouch notes, look like “upper class English restaurants, Polynesian tiki huts, or hangouts of seedy Chicago hoods.” Steve Crouch was none of California's most recognized photographer-authors. His first book, Steinbeck Country, won a silver medal for literary excellence from the Commonwealth Club of California. He also wrote Desert Country, a work on the deserts of the American Southwest. He was a friend of Ansel Adams and taught at the Ansel Adams Workshop in California.