Looking For Steinbeck'S Ghost

“The story of Jackson Benson’s labors is one of those great rarities of the academic world: a scholarly book one can actually enjoy reading in bed. Looking for Steinbeck’s Ghost has all the unpretentious charm and candor of Richard Altick’s 1950 classic accounts of literary detective work: The Scholar Adventurers. Like Altick’s book, Benson’s should be required reading, both for delight and instruction . . .” —Donald V. Coers, The Texas Review, Fall-Winter 1989

"In this intimate, first-person account, Benson shows all the requisite skills of a novelist. Part adventure story, part mystery, part comedy of errors—Ghost is hard to put down." —Western American Literature

". . . it offers instructive commentary on the pitfalls of the biographer's craft, as the author interviews the novelist's ex-wives, digs for lost correspondence, evaluates evidence and tracks down material on the migrant worker who supplied Steinbeck with much of his information for The Grapes of Wrath. A professor of English at San Diego State University, Benson is sometimes acerbic in recounting his dealings with rival biographers, publishing lawyers and copy editors. He notes that Steinbeck preached ecology and condemned a false sense of progress as early as the mid-1930s, but disagrees with critics who feel Steinbeck's fiction declined after the populist The Grapes of Wrath, arguing that they unfairly want his novels to fit their own left-leaning political scheme." —Publishers Weekly

“For any reader remotely interested in the trials and tribulations associated with writing . . . a biography, this book is a must.” —Mike Nobles, Tulsa World, May 26, 2002

“Benson’s account is not only a fascinating glimpse of the art of biography but also the simpler story of the chain of accidents that can cause a person to commit fifteen years of his life, albeit unwittingly at first, to a single and often frustrating scholarly project.” —John Ditsky, University of Windsor Review, 1989