20 - Burning Bright (the novel, 1950)

Summary

Orville Prescott.

“Books of the Times.“

New York Times,

20 October 1950, p. 25.

For the first time on record a book by a celebrated author is being published in the same week as the production of a play derived from it. Book and play are John Steinbeck's Burning Bright. Its merits as a play behind footlights with actors adding the illusion of flesh-and-blood reality to Mr. Steinbeck's symbolical characters were discussed yesterday by Mr. Atkinson on the theatre page. It is the book, to be read by thousands of persons who will not be able to see the play, which concerns us here. As a book, then, Burning Bright is artificial and peculiar, but moderately effective.

This is the third example of a literary form of Mr. Steinbeck's own invention, the “play-novelette” as he calls it. The others were Of Mice and Men and The Moon Is Down. A play-novelette, says Mr. Steinbeck, “is a play that is easy to read or a short novel that can be played simply by lifting out the dialogue.” It has two justifications in Mr. Steinbeck's mind: “to provide a play that will be more widely read because it is presented as ordinary fiction, which is a more familiar medium,” and to augment “the play for the actor, the director and the producer, as well as the reader.” It gives theatre people “the fullest sense of the intention of the writer.”