“A room of experience into which I cannot enter”: John Steinbeck on Race

Abstract In her seminal study on intellectuals and the civil rights struggle, Carol Polsgrove castigated “white intellectuals, in the North and South” for their reticence. After Brown v. Board of Education “opened the door to change,” she argues, America's leading intellectuals simply “milled about outside the door, debating amongst themselves how fast America ought to go through it.” Yet what of John Steinbeck? How did the compassionate …