The "Green" Steinbeck

John Steinbeck was one of the best-known American novelists of the 20^th century. He won Pulitzer Prize for his master piece The Grapes of Wrath, and Nobel Prize for his outstanding contributions to the field of literature. From this sense, he was a knowledgeable man. Beside, there is a fact that was neglected by the scholars that he was also a "Green" man. That is, he was an ecologist who appealed for the protection of the environment and the harmony of the whole world. When the Great Depression and the ecological crisis Dust Bowl attacked the America, Steinbeck created The Grapes of Wrath, a work that is centered on the societal consequence of one of the great environmental disaster of the decade. Steinbeck concentrates on the plight of migrants fleeing the Dust Bowl, and seeking a new and better life in California, and he conducts a polemic against the people who escalate the disaster by neglecting the balance of the ecology.This thesis introduces the life experiences and his rational way of thinking-non-teleological thinking that greatly influence Steinbeck to become a "Green" man. Then the author answers the question of how "Green" Steinbeck is. Steinbeck holds the convincing, enlightened ecological view which consists of three parts. The first one is about his philosophical reflection on man and nature. For Steinbeck, every individual can not escape from being caught in the paradox that on one hand, he is determined by every unit of the nature, on the other hand, he had free will. That is, man is just a species in nature and never detach from it. Second, Steinbeck was also fascinated with the theory of organism and super-organism, which are also dealing with the relationship between man and nature. Thirdly, he strongly opposed to the anthropocentrism, which was a deep-rooted notion dominating in the western world.Finally, the author decodes The Grapes of Wrath from "Green" perspective in terms of ecocriticism. He does not fail to examine the ecological problems through the novel and spells out the root causes of the environmental disasters. Similarly, he epitomizes three "Green" figures in the novel, Jim Casy, Ma Joad and Rose and Sharon in order to appeal to the balance of the ecology and the unity of the whole world. At last, he refines his polemic against destroying ecology through the "Green" channel—interchapter, because the displays of human's interdependence and interconnectedness with the human and non-human world mostly occur in interchapters. Under the increasingly worsened ecological conditions, Steinbeck's novel will undoubtedly bears realistic and far-reaching significance.