His achievement is especially noteworthy because he never thought of himself as a naturally gifted artistic genius and rarely believed he had ever “arrived” as a writer. If it is no longer possible to believe naively in the romantic myth of artistic genius, with its heightened capabilities of transcendence and sovereignty, neither is it possible to accept unhesitatingly the contemporary poststructuralist posture—that a writer is a bloodless cipher, utterly determined by unconscious forces of language, race, gender, and class. Better to think of Steinbeck as walking the line between those
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