Steinbeck in Vietnam: Dispatches from the War

Resumen del libro

In December 1966 when the Vietnam War was beginning to dominate Americas political landscape, novelist and Nobel laureate John Steinbeck went to Vietnam as a reporter for Newsday. Over the next year he wrote over 80 pieces about the war. Because these articles are not presented here in a historical context, readers will find them an eerie flashback, opinions frozen in time, but opinions that viscerally reflect the deep political chasm that the war created in America. Steinbecks writing is vividly descriptive, evoking place and circumstance for instance, the Central Highlands of Vietnam are compared to the Texas Panhandle; Hong Kong is the Neiman Marcus of the Far East; and he calls the new warfare without battalions and linear goals, the drifting phantasm of a war. But Steinbecks ruminations about the wisdom of the Vietnam War, the bitterness with which he describes the antiwar bias he discerns in some American media, and his endorsement of the domino theory as a reason to intervene in Vietnam feel naive in retrospect. Nonetheless, Steinbecks ability to capture the day-to-day conduct of the war and its destructive force is sometimes shockingly immediate.

Biografía del autor

John Steinbeck (1902-1968) realizó diversos oficios (peón agrícola, empleado de laboratorio, albañil y vigilante nocturno) para costearse sus estudios en la Universidad de Stanford. Su obra constituye un gran fresco de los conflictos sociales y económicos de la vida rural del Sur de los Estados Unidos y una permanente búsqueda de valores en un mundo crecientemente deshumanizado. En 1962 fue galardonado con el Premio Nobel de Literatura.