Best known as a novelist - especially for The Grapes of Wrath, his heartfelt portrayal of disenfranchised dustbowl farmers in the 1930s - John Steinbeck nonetheless devoted a good portion of his literary energies to nonfiction. In this study, Warren French looks at the entire body of Steinbeck's nonfiction writing - journalism, essays, travelogues - both in its own right and in its capacity to illuminate the progress, and decline, of Steinbeck's entire writing career.

The topics of Steinbeck's nonfiction evince both his personal interests and, particularly earlier on, the times he lived in. There are his dispatches for the New York Herald Tribune from the European war zone during World War II, collected in Once There Was a War (1959), and his record of the expedition to the Gulf of California with friend and biologist Ed Ricketts to collect samples of marine life (reflecting his passing interest in a science career), published as Sea of Cortez (1941).

And there are travelogues: A Russian Journal (1948), his account of postwar life in parts of Eastern Europe, and Travels with Charley in Search of America (1962), recollections of a cross-country trip taken with his dog Charley, published the same year that Steinbeck won the Nobel Prize in literature.

In what was to be his last major work, America and Americans (1966), a collection of photographs of the country and its people with accompanying commentary by Steinbeck, the prose, though beautiful, gives the impression of a man out of sorts with the world in which he finds himself. America and Americans, French writes, shows Steinbeck to be less a witness to the powerful cultural and social changes transpiring around him in the 1960s than an elegiac vessel from the not-so-distant past.