Peter Shaw comments that “he features of the valley at once determined the physical fate of his characters and made symbolic comment on them.” Steinbeck’s studies at Stanford University in California, where he became interested in biology, led him to take an evolutionary view of human society. He grew up in the Salinas Valley and used it as the setting for many of his works, including “Flight.” He used this familiar terrain as a setting in which to test his characters’ relationship to their environment. John Ernst Steinbeck was born on February 27, 1902, in Salinas, California. Although Steinbeck’s romantic portrayals of dignified and noble common folk are now seen by some as simplistic, his works continue to appeal to critics and readers of the present day, supporting Steinbeck’s enduring reputation as one of the most important twentieth-century American writers. Winner of the 1940 Pulitzer Prize in literature for his novel The Grapes of Wrath, the 1937 New York Drama Critics Circle Award for his theatrical adaptation of his novella Of Mice and Men, and the 1962 Nobel Prize for literature, Steinbeck enjoyed popular as well as critical success during his lifetime and beyond. Steinbeck’s sympathy for the struggles of the peasant against the forces of nature and wealthy landowners, which forms the basis for The Grapes of Wrath and many of his other works, is apparent in this story. His energetic narrative style gives “Flight” its suspense and dramatic power. In writing the story, Steinbeck drew on his own experiences growing up in the Salinas Valley to give a vivid portrayal of the arid, rocky mountains east of the valley, which are filled with wild animals and danger. Critics have interpreted the story as a parable of the journey from youth to manhood. On his first trip alone to town, he kills a drunken man in an argument and flees to the mountains, only to succumb to thirst, infection, and the bullets of his pursuers. He wants very much to be considered a man. ![]() It is the story of young Pepe Torres, an unsophisticated youth from an isolated farm along the California coast. “Flight” is generally considered one of Steinbeck’s best works of short fiction, written at the height of his career. The book appeared just three years after Steinbeck first received critical acclaim for his novel Tortilla Flat and one year before the publication of what many consider his greatest work, The Grapes of Wrath. ![]() ![]() John Steinbeck’s short story “Flight” was published in 1938 in The Long Valley, a collection of stories set in the Salinas Valley in California.
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