not his home in the small town of Salinas, but there are sufficient points of tangency to certify an overall autobiographical presence. More important, perhaps, is the significance of the sheer presence of parents in the boy Jody’s world, not only as adult figures of support and understanding but as authorities to be dealt with often subversively, to be evaded by strategies of rebellion and escape. In a certain sense, the Red Pony stories are liminal, in that they deal with aspects of a boy’s maturation, but they stop well short of carrying Jody across the threshold into maturity, much as the long-desired pony of the title is taken from him before he has a chance to ride it. Given the conditions under which they were composed, we are not surprised to find the themes of loss and death dominating these stories. But the theme of withheld fulfillment is something else again, and has less to do with the immediate situation than with Steinbeck’s long-sustained world view, which may have had psychological origins but which by 1933, the year he returned to Salinas, was integral to his emerging theory of fiction and inseparable from his scientifically derived theory of human existence.

The device of incompletion is typical of much that Stein-beck would write, and is part-and-parcel of his biologically determined notions about animate life, but it should not be confused with what critics call indeterminacy or ambiguity. Life, observed Melville, one of our most ambiguous authors, does not organize itself into tidy periodicities; that is the role of literature. For Steinbeck, life and literature were reciprocal functions, and he regarded the duty of the author as one of devising fictions that captured the kinds of discontinuity that define life, both animal and human, which is made up of no final terminations, no neat packages of events, just a sequence of happenings productive of other happenings. Much as Jody continually contrives to escape the authority of his parents, so these stories subversively evade the traditional role of literature, which is to shape the raw, discontinuous stuff of life into orderly units chiefly defined by strategies of closure. In sum, art tames disorderly elements and puts them in harness, the fate the red pony escapes through death.

This reading, let me now state, is contradictory to the standard interpretation of these stories, which sees them as leading to Jody’s maturation, as stages in a developmental progress. I will return to that interpretation—and its impossibility—but want first to address Steinbeck’s life and work in general, so as to approach The Red Pony from that perspective. We may start with the irony that these stories, which so handily illustrate Steinbeck’s theories of life and literature, occurred within a turning point in the author’s life that resembles the most convenient kind of literature. The illness and death of his mother, followed shortly by the death of his father, were followed in turn by the sudden and almost unexpected upswing of the writer’s reputation and income, which were not perhaps as welcome as one might expect.

Throughout much of his young adulthood, in college and afterward, the son had struggled to escape his parents’ control, living away from home as much as possible, working at jobs unacceptable to middle-class notions of suitable employment, and only returning to Salinas when financial necessity made homecoming inescapable. This kind of distancing is traditionally associated with the independence essential to creativity—most writers of Steinbeck’s generation insisted on it as a kind of authorial ritual—but in his case the need for independence from his parents had a number of paradoxical dimensions. First of all, he was forced to accept their financial assistance, as well as the house in which he and Carol lived after they were married, in Pacific Grove, within the orbit of both sets of parents. This in turn got the couple close to Monterey, which would provide Steinbeck with the material for his first commercial success, Tortilla Flat (1935), as well as the tutelage of the marine biologist Ed Ricketts, who would be so influential on Steinbeck’s emerging philosophies of life and art. Finally, the deaths of both parents, which gave him absolute freedom from their personal control, came just as he entered that phase in his career when he no longer needed the isolation from their influence. This is precisely the kind of tidy reticulation of circumstances that Steinbeck worked very hard to avoid in his fiction.

But then there are a number of discontinuities between the facts of Steinbeck’s life—or