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form the artistic soil out of which the novels of the 1930s grew. They are, therefore, so important to Steinbeck’s canon that it is surprising that for so long the critical understanding of them was so mixed.

THE CRITICAL RECEPTION
    The critical response to The Long Valley offers a curious miscellany of praise and condemnation. The initial response among reviews of the book during the year following its publication quickly reveals the mixed opinion.
    Several leading periodicals gave considerable attention to the work. Writing in The New Yorker (September 24, 1938), Clifton Fadiman speculates on the then-popular label for John Steinbeck as a “hardboiled” writer, a characterization derived largely from the popular opinion of Of Mice and Men and In Dubious Battle as works “resistant to emotion.” Fadiman argues on the contrary that in his concern for characters that are “socially submerged,” Steinbeck is “exceptionally sensitive,” and he uses The Long Valley as evidence. In fact, while Fadiman admires several stories as “beautifully written,” he wonders if Steinbeck isn’t “trying just a mite too hard to be sensitive and Open to Beauty.” In particular, he singles out “The Red Pony” as “a heart-breakingly true picture of boyhood.” In what would become a fashionable critical assessment of Steinbeck in later years, Fadiman declares that this is “a writer who so far has neither repeated himself nor allowed himself a single careless sentence.”
    Perhaps the most laudatory of the early reviews is Elmer Davis’s piece in Saturday Review of Literature (September 24, 1938). Davis is sensitive to Steinbeck’s artistic motives: “He writes what he wants to write, instead of letting the expectations of his public push him into a groove.” Davis praises “some of the best writing of the past decade” from a writer without “an ounce of fat in his style.” Moreover, Davis praises the detailed realism of the settings and characters, observing that Steinbeck “sees clear down through these people, and reproduces them in as many dimensions as they have.” The volume, Davis remarks, leaves Steinbeck as “the best prospect in American letters.”
    Other reviews were less enthusiastic. Writing in the Nation (October 1, 1938), Eda Lou Walton opines that “these stories are clever, but they move toward nothing.” Walton lumps the stories with Steinbeck’s novels, which, she observes, similarly fail to “move toward any consistent vision of life or toward any set of values,” and she uses the occasion largely to castigate Steinbeck’s novels to that date. While Walton does single out “The Red Pony” as “the best short story in this new collection,” this story is also defective in that it provides “a totally forced situation” to fit a scheme of symbolism. Since in Walton’s estimation the stories fail to move toward an ideology, they provide “no authentic experience.”
    Writing in The New York Times Book Review (September 25, 1938), Stanley Young just plain did not like the book. Nor did he care much for Steinbeck as a writer. Of the stories, Young announces: “As a group they are neither profound nor passionate stories of great stature—that is they do not illuminate an age or a people either emotionally or intellectually, and they are occasionally flagrantly sentimental, as was Of Mice and Men.” Sentimentality is the primary deficiency of the stories in Young’s estimation, and it colors his appreciation for individual short stories. The vitriolic satire of “Saint Katy the Virgin” thereby merits high praise, while the character of “Johnny Bear” is “as pathetic as the groping half-wit of Of Mice and Men.” Despite his personal prejudices, Young grants some tentative praise to the writer, admiring his “emotional range” and “abiding sympathy for human beings on all levels of experience,” which prompts him to prophesy that “with time and experience and