Susan F. Beegel is the editor of The Hemingway Review and Visiting Assistant Professor of English at the University of Idaho.  Susan Shillinglaw is Director of the Steinbeck Research center and Associate Professor of English at San Jose Sttae Univesity.  Wesley N. Tiffney, Jr., is Director of the University of Massachusetts Nantucket Field Station and a field biologist specializing in human land use history and ecology.

"What has been needed for some time has been an approach to Steinbeck on his own terms, valuing him for what he did say, rather than what he should have said. . . . It has taken three decades since his death for a collection of essays on the writer and his relationship to the natural world to appear. Each of the editors writes an introduction to the book, from the perspective of a literary scholar who is new to Steinbeck (Beegel), from the perspective of a Steinbeck specialist (Shillinglaw), and from the perspective of a field scientist (Tiffney). This pattern is carried out throughout the collection by the various contributors who are also non-specialist literary scholars, Steinbeck specialists, or scientists. The essays are well done and some are exceptional, but what raises this book above so many anthologies of criticism on a single author is once again the rich variety of approaches, which are, nevertheless, brought together into a unified whole."

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