3 - To a God Unknown (1933)

Summary

“To a God Unknown.”

Christian Century, 50

(20 September 1933), 1179.

Already a comparison between Steinbeck and D. H. Lawrence has been suggested. To most readers it will be a misleading comparison, but there is a fierce beauty here which gives it point. To a God Unknown is the story of a young farmer's passion for the soil-a love passing the love of woman-and the growing sense of his own identification with it. The novelist has dealt imaginatively with the mystery of man's relation to the earth and the animals, and with those instinctive and irrational practices by which man has tried to give expression to his consciousness of that relation and to influence his earth-bound destiny. The story might be considered a modern appendix to The Golden Bough.

Margaret Cheney Dawson.

“Some Autumn Fiction.”

New York Herald Tribune,

24 September 1933, “Books” section,

pp. 17, 19.

This strange and mightily obsessed book is for those who are capable of yielding themselves completely to the huge embrace of earth-mysticism. Of all the brands of mysticism, religious or poetic, there is none so vast and awesome as that which arises from the earth and is a passion simply for the miracle of a body that yields, puts forth, grows and dies; which is unconcerned with good or evil, solace or punishment, error or reason. And of all the books written out of such passion, this is the purest expression of it that I have ever encountered.