From Academic Kids
A superhero is a fictional character who is noted for feats of courage and nobility and who usually has a colorful name and costume and abilities beyond those of normal human beings. Since the definitive superhero, Superman, debuted in 1938, the stories of superheroes - ranging from brief episodic adventures to continuing years-long sagas - have become an entire genre of fiction, one that has dominated American comic books and crossed over into other media.
Common superhero traits
There are a range of attributes that are commonly part of a superhero's make up, although they are by no means definitive (see Divergent character examples). Most superheroes have a few of the following features:
- Extraordinary powers and abilities, mastery of relevant skills, and/or advanced equipment. Although superhero powers vary, the ability to fly, superhuman strength, superhuman agility, and enhanced versions of any of the five senses are common superpowers. Many superheroes, such as Batman and The Green Hornet, possess no superpowers but have mastered skills such as martial arts and forensic sciences. Others have access to advanced equipment that imitates superpowers such as Iron Man's various suits of powered armor or Green Lantern's power ring.
- A willingness to risk one's own safety in the service of good, without expectation of reward.
- A special motivation, such as revenge (e.g. The Punisher), a sense of responsibility (e.g. Spider-Man), a formal calling (e.g. Green Lantern), or childhood emotional trauma (e.g. Batman).
- A moral code that is more advanced and strict than that of most people and a tendency to take personal lapses to it very hard.
- A secret identity
- A flamboyant and distinctive costume that usually hides the secret identity. It often has a symbol, such as a stylized letter or visual icon, on the chest. Costumes often reflect the superhero's name and theme, for example Batman resembles a large bat and the design of Captain America's costume echoes that of the American flag.
- An arch enemy and/or a collection of regular enemies that s/he fights repeatedly.
- Is either independently wealthy (eg. Batman) or has an occupation that allows for minimal supervision so their whereabouts do not have to be strictly accounted for (e.g. Superman's civilian job as a reporter or Spider-Man's job as a photojournalist).
- A secret headquarters or base
- A backstory, called an "origin story," which explains the circumstances of the character acquiring his/her abilities, as well as his/her motivation for fighting evil.
Although most superheroes usually work independently, many also work in teams. Some, such as The Fantastic Four and X-Men, have common origins and usually operate as a group. Others, such as the Justice League and The Avengers, are "all-star" groups consisting of heroes of separate origins who also operate individually. Many superheroes, especially those introduced in the 1940s, work with a child or teen sidekick (e.g. Batman and Robin). This has become less common since the Silver Age, as more sophisticated writing and older audiences have lessened the need for special characters for the reader to identify with, and made such obvious child endangerment seem less plausible.
Superheroes most often appear in comic books, and superhero stories are the dominant genre of American comic books to the point that "superhero" and "comic book character" are often used synonymously. Superheroes have also been featured in comic strips, radio serials, prose novels, TV series, movies, and other media. Most of the superheroes that appear in these other media are adapted from comic books, but there are exceptions.
Marvel Comics Group and DC Comics, Inc. share ownership of the United States trademark for the phrase "Super Heroes" as it applies to comics, and almost all of the world's most famous superheroes are owned by these two American companies. For example, DC owns Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman, and Marvel owns Spider-Man, Captain America, and the X-Men. However, throughout comic book history, there have been significant superheroes owned by others, such as Captain Marvel, owned by Fawcett Comics (but later acquired by DC) and Spawn owned by creator Todd McFarlane.
Superheroes are largely an American creation, but there have been successful superheroes in other countries, most of which share many of the conventions of the American model. The most notable examples include Cybersix from Argentina, Marvelman from the United Kingdom, and Japanese tokusatsu series like Ultraman and Kamen Rider as well as anime and manga series like Science Ninja Team Gatchaman and Sailor Moon.
Although superhero fiction is considered a subgenre of fantasy/science-fiction, it crosses into many other genres. Many superhero franchises contain aspects of crime fiction (Batman, Daredevil), others horror fiction (Spawn, Hellboy) and many are similar to "hard" science fiction (X-Men, Green Lantern).
But because the fantastic nature of the superhero milieu allows almost anything to happen, some superhero series cross over into a variety of vastly different genres. For example, in the 1980s series, The New Teen Titans, the Titans faced off against a super villain who controlled a cult in one story, then went off to another galaxy to participate in a space war in the following story, then returned to Earth and became involved in a gritty urban crime drama involving young runaways. The content of each of these stories is quite different, yet the same principle characters are involved throughout the series.
- "Brick": A character with a superhuman degree of strength and endurance and usually an oversized, muscular body, named after the rocky shape of The Thing, e.g. The Incredible Hulk, Colossus, Beast.
- "Blaster": A hero whose main power is a distance attack, e.g. Cyclops, Havok, Starfire.
- "Archer": A subvariant of this type who uses bow and arrow-like weapons that have a variety of specialized functions like explosives, glue, nets, rotary drill, etc., e.g. Green Arrow, Hawkeye.
- "Mage": A subvariant of this type that is trained in the use of magic, which partially or wholly involves ranged attacks., e.g. Doctor Strange, Doctor Fate
- "Martial Artist": A hero whose physical abilities are mostly human rather than superhuman, but whose combat skills are phenomenal, e.g. Daredevil, Captain America.
- "Gadgeteer": A hero who invents special equipment that often imitates superpowers and who has the technical skills to use it to his or her best advantage, e.g. Forge, Nite Owl
- "Speedster": A hero possessing superhuman speed and reflexes, e.g. The Flash, Quicksilver.
- "Mentalist": A hero whose main abilities are psionic in nature such as telekinesis, telepathy and extra-sensory perception, e.g. Professor X and Jean Grey of the X-Men, Saturn Girl of the Legion of Super-Heroes.
- "Shapechanger": A hero who can manipulate his/her own body to suit his/her needs such as stretching, e.g. Mister Fantastic, Plastic Man or disguise, e.g. Changeling, Ela Vista.
- "Substance oriented Bodychanger - A shapechanger who can change his/her body into the equivalent of a mass of a substance that can have variable density such as sand or water. e.g. Sand, Husk.
- "Sizechanger": A shapechanger who can alter his/her size, e.g. the Atom (shrinking only), Colossal Boy (growth only), Hank Pym (both).
These categories often overlap. For instance, Batman is a martial artist and a gadgeteer, and Superman is extremely strong and damage resistant like a brick and also has ranged attacks (heat vision, superbreath) like an energy blaster and can move quickly like a speedster.
Divergent character examples
While the typical superhero is described above, many break the mold. For example:
- Wolverine of the X-Men has shown a willingness to kill and behave anti-socially. Wolverine belongs to an entire underclass of superhero anti-heroes who are grittier and more violent than classic superheroes, often putting members of the two groups at odds. Others include Rorschach, Daredevil, The Punisher, Green Arrow and, in some incarnations, Batman.
- Spider-Man has been portrayed as an every-man hero, often showing poor judgment and being overwhelmed by the responsibilities of both costumed crime fighting and civilian life. After Spider-Man became popular, superheroes generally became more human and troubled so whether or not this makes Spider-Man a divergent character is questionable.
- The Incredible Hulk is usually defined as a superhero, but he has little self-control and his actions have often either inadvertently or deliberately caused great destruction. As a result, he has been hunted by the military and by other superheroes.
- Luke Cage (AKA Power Man) and his partner, Iron Fist, operated a business called Heroes for Hire which charged a fee for their services, though it was occasionally waived in certain circumstances.
- Many superheroes have never had a secret identity, such as Wonder Woman (in her current version) and the members of The Fantastic Four. Others that once had a secret identity, like Steel or Captain America have later made their true identity public.
- Some superheroes have been created and employed by national governments to serve their interests and defend the nation. Examples include Captain America, who was outfitted by and worked for the United States Army during World War II, and Alpha Flight, a superhero team that was created and is usually run by the Canadian federal government.
- Spawn, The Demon and Ghost Rider are actual demons, who find themselves manipulated by circumstance to be allies for the forces of good. Hellboy, on the other hand, is a demon who is virtuous on his own accord.
- Alternatively, The Mighty Thor and Hercules are gods of ancient mythologies reinterpreted as superheroes. Wonder Woman, while not a goddess, is a member of the Amazon tribe of Greek mythology.
- Emma Frost, a member of the X-Men, was a supervillain for several years before she turned to the side of good. Other characters who have treaded the line between superhero and villain include Catwoman, Elektra, Rogue, Venom and Juggernaut.
- Superheros may hide their powers from the public at large whilst not adopting a superhero identity through way of a costume, examples include the television characters Clark Kent in Smallville, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and later incarnations of Starman.
In addition, some parodic super heroes have been introduced. While they keep some of the stereotypical attributes of "classical" super heroes, they introduce features that make them anti-heroes.
- Super Dupont is a super-hero with all the stereotypical supposed characteristics of the typical Frenchman (including a beret)
- Super Liar is a caricature of French president Jacques Chirac turning into a super hero to be able to lie more effectively.
History and evolution of the character type
The origins of superheroes can be found in several prior forms of fiction. Many of their traits are shared with protagonists of later Victorian literature, such as The Scarlet Pimpernel, Arthur Conan Doyle's detective Sherlock Holmes and H. Rider Haggard's adventurer Alan Quatermain. The penny dreadful and dime novel stories of Spring Heeled Jack, Buffalo Bill, Zorro and Tarzan also influenced superheroes. Pulp magazine crime fighters, such as Doc Savage, The Shadow and The Spider, were probably the most direct influence. By modern standards, characters like Doc Savage could well be considered superheroes in their own right, but the appearance of Superman is generally considered to be the point at which the superhero genre truly began.
The rise and fall of the Golden Age of comic books
In 1938, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster introduced Superman in Action Comics #1. Although the character was preceded by the costumed crime fighter The Phantom, featured in comic strips, Superman is still considered the first superhero, introducing many of the conventions that have come to define the term including a secret identity, superhuman powers and a colorful costume including a symbol and cape. His name is also the source of the term "superhero."
DC Comics (which published under the names National and All-American at the time) received an overwhelming response to Superman and, in the months that followed, introduced Aquaman, Hawkman, The Flash, Green Lantern, Batman, his sidekick Robin, and Wonder Woman, the first female superhero and the only significant one for quite some time.
Although DC dominated the superhero market at this time, hundreds of superheroes were created by companies large and small. Marvel Comics, then called Timely, found success with the Human Torch and Sub-Mariner. Cartoonist Will Eisner's The Spirit, featured in a newspaper insert, was also a hit. Quality Comics also found its own niche with its own characters, most notably with the surreal humor of Jack Cole's Plastic Man. The era's most popular superhero, however, was Fawcett Comics' Captain Marvel, who even outsold Superman during the 1940s.
At this time, superheroes largely conformed to the model of lead characters in American popular fiction in the first half of the 20th century. Hence, the typical superhero was a white, middle to upper class, heterosexual, professional, young-to-middle-aged man.
During World War II, superheroes grew in popularity, surviving paper rationing and the loss of many of their creators to service in the armed forces. The need for simple tales of good triumphing over evil may explain the war-time popularity of superheroes. Publishers responded with stories in which superheroes battled the Axis Powers and the introduction of patriotically themed superheroes, most notably Marvel's Captain America.
After the war, superheroes lost popularity. Part of the reason was that the genre at that time was highly formulaic and the reading public began to tire of it outside of the major stars like Wonder Woman, Batman, Superman, and Plastic Man. This shift led to the rise of other genres, especially horror and crime. The lurid nature of this material sparked a moral crusade which blamed comic books for juvenile delinquency. The movement was spearheaded by Dr. Fredric Wertham who argued, among other things, that "deviant" sexual undertones ran rampant in superhero comics. In response, the comic book industry adopted the Comics Code, which allowed for only the tamest superhero stories as originally conceived.
The Silver Age and the beginning of ethnic and gender diversity
In 1956, DC Comics, under the editorship of Julius Schwartz, decided to see if the superhero genre in a modernized science fiction format could be viable. So a new version of The Flash was introduced which became an immediate success. This led the company to revive Hawkman, Green Lantern, and several others - usually with a more modern, science-fiction angle - and to launch the all-star team the Justice League of America.
Empowered by the return of the superhero at DC, Marvel Comics editor/writer Stan Lee and the artists/co-writers Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko, and other illustrators launched a line of superhero comic books, beginning with The Fantastic Four in 1961, which stressed personal conflict and character development as much as action and adventure. This led to many superheroes that differed greatly from the standards created in the 1940s with considerably more dramatic potential. Some examples:
- The Thing, a member of The Fantastic Four, was a super strong, but monstrous creature with rock-like skin, whose appearance filled him with self pity.
- Spider-Man was a teenager who struggled to earn money and maintain his social life in addition to his costumed exploits.
- The Incredible Hulk shared a Jekyll/Hyde-like relationship with his alter ego and was driven by rage.
- The X-Men were "mutants" who gained their powers through genetic mutation and who were hated and feared by the society they sought to protect.
By the late 1960s and early 1970s, superheroes of other racial groups began to appear in Marvel Comics, including Black Panther, monarch of a fictional African nation, Luke Cage, an African-American "hero-for-hire," and Shang Chi, an Asian martial arts hero. Comic book companies were in the early stages of cultural expansion and many of these characters played to specific stereotypes. For example, Cage often employed lingo similar to that of blaxploitation films and Asians were often portrayed as master martial artists.
Strong female characters also gained prominence, beginning in a low key manner with Julius Schwartz's comics having female supporting characters who were successful professionals, although Hawkgirl was largely the only new female superhero as a confident partner for Hawkman. In the early 1960s Marvel introduced The Fantastic Four's Invisible Girl and The X-Men's Marvel Girl as well as The Wasp, but these characters were physically weak and were portrayed primarily as romantic interests of other team members. The 1970s saw these characters become more confident and assertive and the introduction of popular new female heroes, such as Spider-Woman and Storm of the newly revived X-Men. Initially, some characters were preachy radical feminist stereotypes like Marvel's Ms. Marvel and DC's Power Girl until writers grew more accustomed with society's changing attitudes.
1980s "deconstruction" of the superhero and its aftereffects
By the early 1980s, Marvel Comics had introduced several popular anti-heroes including The Punisher, Wolverine and writer/artist Frank Miller's darker version of Daredevil. These characters were deeply troubled from within, tormented by experiences such as the mob-related slaughter of The Punisher's family, Wolverine's battle with mutant animal instincts and Daredevil's rough childhood and continual exposure to slum life.
The trend was taken to a new extreme in the successful 1986 mini-series Watchmen by writer Alan Moore and artist Dave Gibbons, which was published by DC, but took place outside the "DC Universe" with new characters. The superheroes of Watchmen were emotionally unsatisfied, psychologically withdrawn, and even sociopathic.
Another story, The Dark Knight Returns (1985-1986) adapted the trend to a familiar character. The mini-series, written and illustrated by Frank Miller, featured a future Batman returning from retirement. The series portrayed the hero as a madman who takes out his inner rage, drawn from the childhood murder of his parents, in a violent quest to mold society to his will.
Some critics believe that this trend is tied to the cynicism of the 1980s, when the idea of a person selflessly using his extraordinary abilities on a quest for good was no longer believable, but a person with a deep psychological impulse to destroy criminals was. Regardless, both series were heavily acclaimed for their artistic ambitiousness and psychological depth, and led to numerous imitations. Critic Geoff Klock associates the emergence of these anti-heroes specifically with Alan Moore and Frank Miller's examinations of a previously uniterrogated and fascistic will to order and moral certainty that informs the behaviour and actions of characters in the superhero tradition. As such, Moore and Miller's characters are as much pop philosophers as they are hero or anti-hero, and lack the 'a priori' ethical code and morally absolute motivations of their predecessors. But despite these complex literary conceits and deep psychological ambiguities, most artists following in the vein of "DKR" and "Watchmen" specifically emulated the visual style and ultra-violence of the texts without critically addressing their underlying politics and problematic behaviour.
By the early 1990s, anti-heroes had become the rule rather than the exception. Wolverine, The Punisher and Batman were joined by X-Force’s Cable, the X-Men’s Bishop, the Spider-Man adversary Venom, DC Comics’ Lobo and countless others.
Many critics complained these characters missed the essential artistic elements of redemption and tragedy of their inspirations, and were generic and psychologically paper-thin.
The struggles of the 1990s
In 1992, several former Marvel illustrators founded Image Comics, which featured creator-owned characters and became the biggest challenger ever to Marvel and DC's 30 years of co-dominance. Image introduced many popular, new heroes including Savage Dragon, Spawn and Witchblade and teams such as WildC.A.Ts, Gen 13 and The Authority. Many critics complained that the dominance of illustrators at Image made for superficial characters that, while sharing little with the long outdated 1940s model, were not overly complex or innovative and added to the glut of generic anti-heroes.
In 1990s, a counter-trend to that excess occurred where notable talents like Kurt Busiek and Moore, himself, tried to reconstruct the superhero genre with titles like Busiek's Astro City and Moore's Tom Strong that combined artistic sophistication and idealism into a superheroic version of retro-futurism. While nostalgia features prominently in both works, Busiek's title expresses an unambiguous form that yearns for a golden age in which superheroes are wholly altruistic and the world basically good, whereas Moore's title extends his superhero-as-fascist metaphor to encompass the contemporary 'retro' trend. Despite this, Moore is not entirely cynical about the superhero genre, leaving his own progressive take on superhero comics to the feminism-inspired Promethea and its invocation of the non-linear and anti-masculinist tradition of Écriture féminine.
To keep ahead, Marvel and DC made drastic changes to beloved characters. The hugely successful "Death of Superman" found the hero killed and resurrected, a new villain broke Batman's back leading to a replacement Batman, and a clone of Spider-Man vied with Peter Parker for the title. While these stories drummed up publicity, often in the mainstream media, fans began to complain and lose interest. By the beginning of the 2000s, a majority of classic superheroes had returned to their roots.
By the 1990s, ethnic and gender diversity among superheroes was greater than ever before. Many characters in the X-Men, the most widely successful franchise of the time, were female, such as Storm and Rogue, or minorities, such as the Cajun Gambit and the African-American Bishop. There were also a few prominent gay superheroes, such as Alpha Flight's Northstar, Gen 13's Rainmaker and The Authority's gay couple Apollo and The Midnighter.
The genre's dominance in American comic books
The superhero genre has dominated American comic books for half a century. Before the 1960s, there were popular comics in many genres, including funny animal comics, westerns, romance, horror, war stories, and crime, with dozens of publishers small and large. This diversity disappeared rapidly in the 1950s, due to two factors.
The first was a series of highly publicized campaigns against "unwholesome" children's comics, leading to the establishment of the highly restrictive Comics Code Authority. Although the Code severely constrained superhero comics, it completely banned the grittier genres. This wiped out many small publishers, but left the large superhero companies intact.
Secondly, television drew away much of the audience for light entertainment in the late 1950s and early 1960s. By the time publishers moved away from the Comics Code and produced something other than light entertainment, television and movies were far more profitable. However, comics were still able to depict outlandish action-oriented adventures such as superhero tales without expensive special effects and in a higher volume than the movie industry.
Treatment in other media
With the rise of television in the 1960s, superheroes have found success in animated series geared towards children. The late-1960s saw the rise of Filmation's Superman-Batman Adventure Hour, and several attempts at series based on Marvel characters, the most successful of which was Grantray-Lawrence Animation's Spider-Man, featuring the "does whatever a spider can" theme song.
In 1970s Japan, there were anime attempts to emulate the American genre. By far the most successful was Kagaku ninja tai Gatchaman (Science Ninja Team Gatchaman) which produced 3 separate series. The series also established an action idiom of the five member team of specific builds and temperament which was emulated by the live action sentai genre.
In 1970s and 1980s American television broadcasting, superhero animated series were constrained by the broadcasting restrictions that activist groups like Action for Children's Television successfully lobbied for. The most popular series in this period, Super Friends, an adaptation of DC's Justice League of America was designed to be as nonviolent and inoffensive as possible. The Plastic Man Comedy/Adventure Show and Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends were similarly tame and Kagaku ninja tai Gatchaman was severely edited for violence in the translation called Battle of the Planets.
Starting with Batman: The Animated Series, which debuted on the Fox Network in 1992, superhero animated series gained a new maturity and respect for the comic books on which they were based. This continued with Fox's X-Men, and Spider-Man series as well as the original series Gargoyles, which, like Batman were geared towards older audiences but accessible to children.
The widely successful Batman: the Animated Series also had a significant influence on American animation. The show featured simple graphics but lavish animation, a style that was replicated in the sequel Batman Beyond, Static Shock and in Cartoon Network’s successful adaptations of DC's all-star Justice League and Teen Titans.
While animated series found immediate success, live action series were often hampered by limited budgets and goofy writing. The 1950s The Adventures of Superman series starring George Reeves - an extension of the popular movie serials - featured very limited and unconvincing special effects. It was, however, hugely popular. Reeves made up for the lack of sophistication in special effects by injecting realism into the fight sequences, using his boxing skills.
The live action Batman series of the late 1960s, starring Adam West and Burt Ward, was a ratings phenomenon. The psychedelically-colored series helped sell color televisions and introduced the characters to millions of viewers, but it was extremely campy and goofy and many comic book experts agree that it had a mostly negative effect on the public's perceptions of superheroes.
Batman led to imitators like Captain Nice and Mr. Terrific but only The Green Hornet starring Van Williams as the Hornet and a young Bruce Lee as his sidekick Kato approached the popularity of Batman.
Over in Japan, TV shows like Ultraman (1966) and Kamen Rider (1971) became the model superhero shows in Japan to this day, spawning countless sequels and imitations, few of which could match their successes. But unfortunately, because of rising standards against violence on American TV, only Ultraman (and a small handful of other shows) ever made it to the US, where they gained a niche following, compared to the wide audience in Japan and many other countries like Hawaii, Brazil, France, Italy and China (see tokusatsu).
By the late 1970s, superhero-ish series, such as The Six Million Dollar Man and its spin-off, The Bionic Woman, found limited success. This led to series which were explicitly superhero shows such as Wonder Woman starring Lynda Carter, which, like the previous decades’ Batman was a huge hit and continues to be a cult classic, despite an overhanging campiness. Children's programming frequently featured superhero characters, such as Shazam!, Isis, Electra Woman and Dyna Girl and Mighty Morphin Power Rangers (based on the Japanese Super Sentai series).
The Incredible Hulk series of the late 1970s, starring Bill Bixby as David Banner and Lou Ferrigno as the Hulk, took a more thoughtful and dramatic approach. The show focused on Banner’s nomadic lifestyle and the curse that being the Hulk had placed upon him. The series was a ratings success and has proven to be the most durable of this period.
The 1980s saw the launch of various live-action superhero series that did not have their origins in comic book lore, but only The Greatest American Hero, a series with a humorous yet respectful tone about a superhero who could barely control his powers, lasted for more than a few episodes.
In 1993, the ABC Network had a success with Lois and Clark, which reformatted the Superman mythos as a romantic drama. This led to several non-traditional approaches to superheroes in live action television shows, such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, featuring a dyed-in-the-wool idealist superhero who exists within a consciously humorous take on the horror genre. 1993 also brought Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, a TV show about five teenagers that were chosen to become superheroes. Based on the popular Super Sentai Series in Japan, Power Rangers, like Battle of the Planets, differed dramatically from its original Japanese counterparts (which were far more violent and had more challenging and complex stories).
Smallville has proven very successful in reinterpreting the characters of Clark Kent and Lex Luthor in their younger years, with a greater focus on their personalities, in a narrative format more familiar to the mainstream television audience. Other recent TV superhero or superhero-ish series enjoying varying degrees of success include: Angel, Alias, Roswell, Dark Angel, and Mutant X.
Almost immediately after superheroes rose to prominence in comic books, they were adapted into Saturday movie serials aimed at children, starting with 1941's The Adventures of Captain Marvel. Serials featuring The Phantom, Batman, Superman and Captain America followed. These films were successful despite their limited budgets, silly plotlines, dialogue, and primitive special effects.
In late 1941, Superman became the first superhero to be depicted in animation, The Superman series of groundbreaking theatrical cartoons was produced by Fleischer/Famous Studios from 1941 to 1943, and featured the famous "It's a bird, it's a plane" introduction. In addition, the Superman-inspired Mighty Mouse was the flagship series of the Terrytoons company.
In the coming decades, the decline of Saturday serials and turmoil in the comic book industry put an end to superhero motion pictures, an exception being 1966's Batman, an outgrowth of the television series.
1978's Superman, directed by Richard Donner, is considered the first, and often the best, modern superhero film. Almost a biopic of the character instead of an action movie, the film won praise for its state-of-the-art special effects, Christopher Reeve's sincere performance as Superman, and John Williams's majestic film score. Superman was an extraordinary success but its three sequels, produced throughout the 1980s, became increasingly silly and less lucrative. Nonetheless, the first two films' production values and respect for the source material influenced most later superhero films.
The 1989 film Batman, directed by Tim Burton, was the first attempt to create a superhero film with the darker mood of recent comic books. Fantastic set designs and acclaimed performances from Michael Keaton as Batman and Jack Nicholson as The Joker made the film a model for many later superhero movies. The Batman series continued throughout the 1990s, grossing millions and drawing several star actors, until the fourth film Batman and Robin (1997) became a huge critical and commercial failure. This film, along with unsuccessful movies based on DC's Steel, and Todd McFarlane's Spawn, made movie studios nervous about superhero movies.
Nonetheless, several movies based on Marvel characters began production in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The company had a minor success with 1998's Blade, but 2000's blockbuster X-Men opened the door once again to highly successful superhero movies and 2002's Spider-Man broke the record for money grossed in a film's opening five days. Sequels, such as 2003's X2: X-Men United and 2004's Spider-Man 2 have also been highly successful.
The X-Men and Spider-Man films led to a widespread revival, which included 2003's Daredevil, Hulk, and League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and 2004's Punisher and Hellboy, all of which met with varying degrees of critical and commercial success.
There were also productions that created original superheroes for their own dramatic purposes. For instance, Unbreakable by M. Night Shyamalan is a dark tale about a man who learns from a mysterious comic book dealer that he is destined to be a superhero complete with superhuman strength, stamina and clairvoyance. Pixar's digitally-animated The Incredibles combined a more comedic, but affectionate, approach with commentary on the superhero genre and its long history.
As of 2005, anticipated superhero films include Batman Begins, a new Batman movie unrelated to any of the previous ones, a new Superman film by X-Men director Bryan Singer, and a handful of additional Marvel-based films, including Fantastic Four.
Popular superheroes have occasionally been adapted into prose fiction, starting with the 1942 novel Superman by George Lowther. Elliot S! Maggin also wrote two popular Superman novels, Last Son of Krypton and Miracle Monday, in the 1970s.
- List of female superheroes
- List of Jewish superheroes
- List of superhero teams and groups
- List of DC Comics characters
- List of Marvel Comics characters
- Evil genius
- Top superhero (and supervillain) hide-outs and bases
- Category: Real-life Superheroes
- Category:Nedor Comics superheroes
- The Great Net Book of Real Heroes (http://www.sysabend.org/champions/gnborh/)
- Guardians of the North! (http://www.collectionscanada.ca/superheroes) a virtual museum tour through the history of Canadian superheroes, hosted by the National Library and Archives of Canada.
- A site devoted to developing superhero fiction online (http://www.superherofiction.com)
- Japan Hero - A site devoted to Japanese superheroes, both tokusatsu and anime. (http://www.japanhero.com/)da:Superhelt


The picaresque novel (Spanish: "picaresca," from "pícaro," for "rogue" or "rascal") is a genre of prose fiction which depicts the adventures of a roguish hero of low social class who lives by his wits in a corrupt society. Picaresque novels typically adopt a realistic style, with elements of comedy and satire. This style of novel originated in 16th-century Spain and flourished throughout Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries. It continues to influence modern literature.
According to the traditional view of Thrall and Hibbard (first published in 1936), seven qualities distinguish the picaresque novel or narrative form, all or some of which may be employed for effect by the author. (1) A picaresque narrative is usually written in first person as an autobiographical account. (2) The main character is often of low character or social class. He or she gets by with wit and rarely deigns to hold a job. (3) There is no plot. The story is told in a series of loosely connected adventures or episodes. (4) There is little if any character development in the main character. Once a picaro, always a picaro. His or her circumstances may change but they rarely result in a change of heart. (5) The picaro's story is told with a plainness of language or realism. (6) Satire might sometimes be a prominent element. (7) The behavior of a picaresque hero or heroine stops just short of criminality. Carefree or immoral rascality positions the picaresque hero as a sympathetic outsider, untouched by the false rules of society. However, Trall and Hibbert's thesis has been questioned by scholars[specify] interested in how genre functions, rather than how it looks on the surface.
The word picaro first starts to appear in Spain with the current meaning in 1545, though at the time it had no association with literature. The word picaro does not appear in Lazarillo de Tormes (1554), the novella credited by modern scholars with founding the genre. The expression picaresque novel was coined in 1810. Whether it has any validity at all as a generic label in the Spanish sixteenth and seventeenth centuries - and Cervantes certainly used "picaresque" with a different meaning than it has today - has been called into question. There is an unending campaign within Hispanic studies about what the term means, or meant, and which works were, or should be, so called. The only work clearly called "picaresque" by its contemporaries was Mateo Alemán's Guzmán de Alfarache (1599), which to them was the Libro del pícaro (The Book of the Picaro).
Lazarillo de Tormes and its sources
While elements of Chaucer and Boccaccio have a picaresque feel and may have contributed to the style, the modern picaresque begins with Lazarillo de Tormes, which was published anonymously in 1554 in Burgos, Medina del Campo, and Alcalá de Henares in Spain, and also in Antwerp, which at the time was under Spanish rule as a major city in the Spanish Netherlands. It is variously considered either the first picaresque novel or at least the antecedent of the genre.
The protagonist, Lázaro, lives by his wits in an effort to survive and succeed in an impoverished country full of hypocrisy. As a picaro character, he is an alienated outsider, whose ability to expose and ridicule individuals compromised with society gives him a revolutionary stance. Lázaro states that the motivation for his writing is to communicate his experiences of overcoming deception, hypocrisy, and falsehood (desengaño).
The character type draws on elements of characterization already present in Roman literature, especially Petronius' Satyricon. Lázaro shares some of the traits of the central figure of Encolpius, a former gladiator, though it is unlikely that the author had access to Petronius' work. From the comedies of Plautus, Lazarillo borrows the figure of the parasite and the supple slave. Other traits are taken from Apuleius's The Golden Ass. The Golden Ass and Satyricon are rare surviving samples of the "Milesian tale", a popular genre in the classical world, and were revived and widely read in renaissance Europe.
The principal episodes of Lazarillo are based on Arabic folktales that were well-known to the Moorish inhabitants of Spain. The Arabic influence may account for the negative portrayal of priests and other church officials in Lazarillo. Arabic literature, which was read widely in Spain in the time of Al-Andalus and possessed a literary tradition with similar themes, is thus another possible influence on the picaresque style. Al-Hamadhani (d.1008) of Hamadhan (Iran) is credited with inventing the literary genre of maqamat in which a wandering vagabond makes his living on the gifts his listeners give him following his extemporaneous displays of rhetoric, erudition, or verse, often done with a trickster's touch. Ibn al-Astarkuwi or al-Ashtarkuni (d.1134) also wrote in the genre maqamat, comparable to later European picaresque.
The curious presence of Russian loan-words in the text of the Lazarillo also suggests the influence of medieval Slavic tales of tricksters, thieves, itinerant prostitutes, and brigands, who were common figures in the impoverished areas bordering on Germany to the west. When diplomatic ties to Germany and Spain were established under the emperor Charles V, these tales began to be read in Italian translations in the Iberian Peninsula.
As narrator of his own adventures, Lázaro seeks to portray himself as the victim of both his ancestry and his circumstance. This means of appealing to the compassion of the reader would be directly challenged by later picaresque novels such as Guzmán de Alfarache (1599/1604) and the Buscón (composed in the first decade of the 17th century and first published in 1626) because the idea of determinism used to cast the picaro as a victim clashed with the Counter-Reformation doctrine of free will.
16th and 17th centuries
The autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini, written in Florence beginning in 1558, also has much in common with the picaresque. Another early example is Mateo Alemán's Guzmán de Alfarache (1599), characterized by religiosity. Guzmán de Alfrache is a fictional character who lived in San Juan de Aznalfarache, Seville, Spain.
Francisco de Quevedo's El buscón (1604 according to Francisco Rico; the exact date is uncertain, yet it was certainly a very early work) is considered the masterpiece of the subgenre by A. A. Parker, because of his baroque style and the study of the delinquent psychology. However, a more recent school of thought, led by Francisco Rico, rejects Parker's view, contending instead that the protagonist, Pablos, is a highly unrealistic character, simply a means for Quevedo to launch classist, racist and sexist attacks. Moreover, argues Rico, the structure of the novel is radically different from previous works of the picaresque genre: Quevedo uses the conventions of the picaresque as a mere vehicle to show off his abilities with conceit and rhetoric, rather than to construct a satirical critique of Spanish Golden Age society.
Indeed, in order to understand the historical context that led to the development of these paradigmatic picaresque novels in Spain during the 16th and 17th centuries, it is essential to take into consideration the circumstances surrounding the lives of conversos, whose ancestors had been Jewish, and whose New Christian faith was subjected to close scrutiny and mistrust.
In other European countries, these Spanish novels were read and imitated. In Germany, Grimmelshausen wrote Simplicius Simplicissimus (1669), the most important of non-Spanish picaresque novels. It describes the devastation caused by the Thirty Years' War. In Le Sage's Gil Blas (1715) is a classic example of the genre, which in France had declined into an aristocratic adventure. In Britain, the first example is Thomas Nashe's The Unfortunate Traveller (1594) in which a court page, Jack Wilson, exposes the underclass life in a string of European cities through lively, often brutal descriptions. The body of Tobias Smollett's work, and Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders (1722) are considered picaresque, but they lack the sense of religious redemption of delinquency that was very important in Spanish and German novels. The triumph of Moll Flanders is more economic than moral.
The classic Chinese novel Journey to the West is considered to have considerable picaresque elements. Having been written in 1590, it is contemporary with much of the above — but is unlikely to have been directly influenced by the European genre.
18th and 19th centuries
The English-language term can simply refer to an episodic recounting of the adventures of an anti-hero on the road. Thomas Nashe's novel The Unfortunate Traveller is often cited as one of the earliest examples of an English picaresque novel. Henry Fielding proved his mastery of the form in Joseph Andrews (1742), The Life of Jonathan Wild the Great (1743) and The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling (1749), though Fielding attributed his style to an "imitation of the manner of Cervantes, author of Don Quixote," rather than of any particular picaresque novel; Cervantes wrote a short picaresque novel, Rinconete y Cortadillo part of his Novelas Ejemplares (Exemplary Novels).
Voltaire's French novel Candide (1759) contains elements of the picaresque. An interesting variation on the tradition of the picaresque is The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan (1824), a satirical view on early 19th-century Persia, written by a British diplomat, James Morier.
Charles Dickens, who was influenced by Fielding, wrote his first six novels in the picaresque form, with Martin Chuzzlewit (1844) being the transitional novel to his later more serious and mature works. Another novel with elements of the picaresque is the English The Luck of Barry Lyndon (1844) by William Makepeace Thackeray.
Some modern[need quotation to verify] novelists have used some picaresque techniques, as Gogol in Dead Souls (1842–52). Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) was consciously written as a picaresque novel.
20th and 21st centuries
Rudyard Kipling's Kim (1901) combined the influence of the picaresque novel with the modern spy novel. Pío Baroja's novel Zalacain the Adventurer, published in 1909, used the picaresque format in the context of the Carlist Wars. The illustrated book The Magic Pudding (1918), by Australian author Norman Lindsay, is an example of the picaresque adapted for children's literature.
The Enormous Room is E. E. Cummings' 1922 autobiographical novel about his imprisonment in France during World War I on unfounded charges of "espionage", and it includes many picaresque depictions of his adventures as "an American in a French prison". Jaroslav Hašek's The Good Soldier Švejk (1923) is an example of the picaresque technique from Central Europe.
Kvachi Kvachantiradze is a novel written by Mikheil Javakhishvili in 1924.This is, in brief, the story of a swindler, a Georgian Felix Krull, or perhaps a cynical Don Quixote, named Kvachi Kvachantiradze: womanizer, cheat, perpetrator of insurance fraud, bank-robber, associate of Rasputin, filmmaker, revolutionary, and pimp.
The Twelve Chairs (1928) and its sequel, The Little Golden Calf (1931), by Ilya Ilf and Yevgeni Petrov became classics of the 20th century Russian satire and basis for numerous film adaptations. J.B. Priestley made use of the form in his The Good Companions (1929) which won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction. Many other novels of vagabond life were consciously written as picaresque novels, such as Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer (1934)..
Camilo José Cela's La familia de Pascual Duarte (1942). John A. Lee's Shining with the Shiner (1944) tells amusing tales about New Zealand folk hero Ned Slattery (1840–1927) surviving by his wits and beating the Protestant work ethic. Saul Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March (1953) is a picaresque novel with bildungsroman traits. So too is Thomas Mann's Confessions of Felix Krull (1954), which like many novels emphasizes the theme of a charmingly roguish ascent in the social order. George MacDonald Fraser's novels about Harry Flashman (1969) combine the picaresque with historical fiction. Günter Grass's The Tin Drum (1959) is a German picaresque novel.
Hunter S. Thompson's "gonzo journalism" (1970) can be seen as a hybrid of fictional picaresque with memoir and traditional reporting. The picaresque elements are especially prominent in Thompson's less journalistic, more literary and psychotropically themed works, such as, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1971) and The Great Shark Hunt (1979).
Recent examples include Under the Net (1954) by Iris Murdoch, Thomas Berger's Little Big Man (1964), Jerzy Kosinski's The Painted Bird (1965), Vladimir Voinovich's The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin (1969), Rita Mae Brown's Rubyfruit Jungle (1973), John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces (1980), Angela Carter's Nights at the Circus (1984), Isabel Allende's Eva Luna (1987), Edward Abbey's The Fool's Progress: An Honest Novel (1988), Helen Zahavi's Dirty Weekend (1991), C. D. Payne's Youth in Revolt (1993), Christian Kracht's Faserland (1995), Umberto Eco's Baudolino (2000), Neal Stephenson's Quicksilver (2003), and Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger (Booker Prize 2008).
Some science fiction and fantasy books also show a clear picaresque influence, transported to a variety of invented worlds—for example, The Dying Earth series of Jack Vance, Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, Harry Harrison's The Stainless Steel Rat series, James H. Schmitz's The Witches of Karres, and L. Sprague de Camp's Novarian series. The genre-bending fiction of Gene Wolfe combines strong elements of the picaresque with a catalog of other forms of fiction—bildungsroman, memoir, mythic poem, classical drama, modernist fiction, and others. This is the case particularly in his Book of the New Sun, the tale of Severian the Torturer's rise to the monarchy in a remote future world that is probably Earth. More recently, Scott Lynch's The Gentleman Bastard Sequence fantasy novels have been described as fine examples of the subgenre.
- Thrall, William and Addison Hibbard. A Handbook to Literature. The Odyssey Press, New York. 1960.
- Best, O. F. Para la etimología de pícaro, in Nueva Revista de Filología Hispánica, Vol. 17, No. 3/4 (1963/1964), pp. 352-357
- Merriam-Webster's collegiate dictionary By Merriam-Webster, Inc p.936
- Spanish loanwords in the English language: a tendency towards hegemony reversal By Félix Rodríguez González p.36
- Daniel Eisenberg, "Does the Picaresque Novel Exist?", Kentucky Romance Quarterly, 26, 1979, pp. 203-219, http://users.ipfw.edu/jehle/deisenbe/Other_Hispanic_Topics/does_the_picaresque.pdf, retrieved 2014-08-30
- Seán Ó Neachtain (2000). The History of Éamon O'Clery. Clo Iar-Chonnacht. p. 6. ISBN 978-1-902420-35-6. Retrieved 30 May 2013.
- Harriet Turner; Adelaida L Pez De Mart Nez (11 September 2003). The Cambridge Companion to the Spanish Novel: From 1600 to the Present. Cambridge University Press. p. 15. ISBN 978-0-521-77815-2. Retrieved 30 May 2013.
- Cruz, Anne J. (2008). Approaches to teaching Lazarillo de Tormes and the picaresque tradition. p.19 ("The picaro's revolutionary stance, as an alienated outsider who nevertheless constructs his own self and his world").
- Textual confrontations: comparative readings in Latin American literature by Alfred J. Mac Adam, p.138
- Chaytor, Henry John (1922)La vida de Lazarillo de Tormes p.vii
- The life of Lazarillo de Tormes: his fortunes and adversities (1962) p.18
- Martin, René (1999) Le Satyricon: Pétrone p.105
- Fouad Al-Mounir, "The Muslim Heritage of Lazarillo de Tormes," The Maghreb Review vol. 8, no. 2 (1983), pp. 16-17.
- James T. Monroe, The art of Badi'u 'l-Zaman al-Hamadhani as picaresque narrative (American University of Beirut c1983).
- James T. Monroe, translator, Al-Maqamat al-luzumiyah, by Abu-l-Tahir Muhammad ibn Yusuf al-Tamimi al-Saraqus'i ibn al-Astarkuwi (Leiden: Brill 2002).
- S. Rodzevich, "K istorii russkogo romantizma", Russky Filologichesky Vestnik, 77 (1917), 194-237 (in Russian).
- Boruchoff, David A: “Free Will, the Picaresque, and the Exemplarity of Cervantes’s Novelas ejemplares,” M L N [Modern Language Notes] 124, 2 (2009), pp. 372-403.
- For an overview of scholarship on the role of conversos in the development of the picaresque novel in 16th- and 17th-century Spain, see Yael Halevi-Wise, “The Life and Times of the Picaro Converso from Spain to Latin America” in Sephardism: Spanish Jewish History in the Modern Literary Imagination (Stanford UP, 2011)
- Paulson, Ronald Reviewed work(s): Rogue's Progress: Studies in the Picaresque Novel by Robert Alter, The Journal of English and Germanic Philology, Vol. 64, No. 2 (Apr., 1965), p.303
- Schmidt, Michael. The Novel: A Biography'. Cambridge:Belknap Press. 2014.'
- The title page of the first edition of Joseph Andrews lists its full title as: The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews, and of His Friend Mr. Abraham Adams. Written in Imitation of the Manner of Cervantes, Author of Don Quixote.
- Rinconete y Cortadillo y la Novela Picarseca. José García López. Publisher: http://www.h-net.org/ 1999 Available online: http://www.h-net.org/~cervant/csa/articf99/garcia.pdf
- Striedter, Jurij. Der Schelmenroman in Russland: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des Russischen Romans vor Gogol, Berlin 1961
- Chosen by Time magazine and Modern Library editors as one of the greatest English-language novels of the 20th century. See Under the Net.
- As expressed by the author "With Baudolino, Eco Returns to Romance Writing". The Modern News. 11 September 2000.
- Sanderson, Mark (4 November 2003). "The picaresque, in detail". Telegraph (UK). Retrieved March 16, 2010.
- Krake, Kate (23 January 2012). "The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch(2006)- Book Review". Pop Cultured. Retrieved March 14, 2012.
- Alexander A. Parker: Literature and the delinquent: The picaresque novel in Spain and Europe, 1599-1753.
- Cruz, Anne J. (2008) Approaches to teaching Lazarillo de Tormes and the picaresque tradition
- Robert Alter (1965) Rogue's progress: studies in the picaresque novel
- Garrido Ardila, Juan Antonio El género picaresco en la crítica literaria, Madrid, Biblioteca Nueva, 2008.
- Garrido Ardila, Juan Antonio La novela picaresca en Europa, Madrid, Visor libros, 2009.
- Meyer-Minnemann, Klaus and Schlickers, Sabine (eds) La novela picaresca: Concepto genérico y evolución del género (siglos XVI y XVII), Madrid, Iberoamericana, 2008.


A bust of John Steinbeck located on Cannery Row in Monterey, California, the setting of his 1945 novel Cannery Row.
|Born:||February 27 1902
Salinas Valley, California, United States
|Died:||December 20 1968
New York, New York, United States
|Magnum opus:||The Grapes of Wrath|
John Ernst Steinbeck (February 27 1902 – December 20 1968) was one of the best-known and most widely read American writers of the twentieth century. A winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962, he wrote Of Mice and Men (1937) and the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Grapes of Wrath (1939), both of which examine the lives of the working class and migrant workers during the Dust Bowl and subsequent Great Depression.
Steinbeck often populated his stories with struggling characters, and his fiction drew on real historical conditions and events in the first half of the twentieth century. His body of work reflects his wide range of interests, including marine biology, politics, religion, history, and mythology.
Seventeen of his works, including Cannery Row (1945), The Pearl (1947), and East of Eden (1952), went on to become Hollywood films (some even multiple times), and Steinbeck also achieved success as a Hollywood writer, receiving an Academy Award nomination for Best Story in 1944 for Alfred Hitchcock's Lifeboat.
Steinbeck was a socialist who, like many intellectuals of his era, idealized the working class and accentuated class divisions in his writings. His depictions of class conflict and exploitation of the poor were informed by genuine empathy toward victims of social injustice, yet provoked controversy. The social realism, psychological insight, and vividly drawn protagonists of his most influential work, The Grapes of Wrath, had a lasting impact on public attitudes toward migrant laborers and has been compared to Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, which significantly influenced popular attitudes toward slavery in Southern culture.
John Ernst Steinbeck was born in Salinas, California, of German American and Irish American descent. Johann Adolf Großsteinbeck (i.e. Grossteinbeck), Steinbeck's grandfather, changed the family name from Grossteinbeck to Steinbeck when he migrated to the United States. His father, John Steinbeck, Sr., served as the Monterey County Treasurer while his mother, Olive (Hamilton) Steinbeck, a former school teacher, fostered Steinbeck's love of reading and writing. During summers he worked as a hired hand on nearby ranches.
Steinbeck graduated from Salinas High School in 1919. He then attended Stanford University intermittently until 1925, then departing to New York City without graduating to pursue his dream as a writer. However, he was unable to get any of his work published and returned to California.
Steinbeck's first published novel, Cup of Gold, based on the privateer Henry Morgan's life and death, was published in 1929. The novel centers on Morgan's assault and sacking of Panama City, sometimes referred to as the "Cup of Gold," and the woman "fairer than the sun" reputed to be found there.
Steinbeck followed this with three further novels between 1931 and 1933. The Pastures of Heaven, published in 1932, consisted of twelve interconnected stories about a valley in Monterey, California, which was discovered by a Spanish corporal while chasing runaway American Indian slaves. In 1933 Steinbeck published two works; The Red Pony is a short 100-page, four-chapter novella, which recollects memories from Steinbeck's childhood. To a God Unknown follows the life of a homesteader and his family in California.
Steinbeck achieved his first critical success with the novel Tortilla Flat (1935), which won California Commonwealth Club's Gold Medal. The book portrays the adventures of a group of young men in Monterey who denounce society by enjoying life and wine before U.S. Prohibition in the 1920s. The book was made into a film of the same name in 1942, starring Spencer Tracy, Hedy Lamarr, and John Garfield.
Steinbeck began to write a series of "California novels" and Dust Bowl fiction, set among common people during the Great Depression. These included In Dubious Battle in 1936, Of Mice and Men in 1937, and The Grapes of Wrath in 1939.
Of Mice and Men is a novel written in the form of a tragedy play. The story follows two traveling ranch workers, George and the dim-witted but physically powerful itinerant farmhand Lennie, trying to work up enough money to buy their own farm. It encompasses themes of racism, loneliness, prejudice against the mentally ill, and the struggle for personal independence. Along with Grapes of Wrath, East of Eden, and The Pearl, Of Mice and Men is one of Steinbeck's best known works.
Of Mice and Men was critically acclaimed and the stage adaptation of the work was also a success, starring Broderick Crawford as Lennie and Wallace Ford as George. However, Steinbeck refused to travel from his home in California to attend any performance of the play during its New York run, telling Kaufman that the play as it existed in his own mind was "perfect," and that anything presented on stage would only be a disappointment. Steinbeck would ultimately write only two stage plays (his second was an adaptation of The Moon Is Down).
The novel was made into a movie three times, in 1939 starring Burgess Meredith, Lon Chaney Jr., and Betty Field, in 1982 starring Randy Quaid, Robert Blake and Ted Neeley, and in 1992 starring Gary Sinise and John Malkovich.
Steinbeck followed this success with The Grapes of Wrath (1939), based on newspaper articles he had written in San Francisco, and considered by many to be his finest work. The novel won the Pulitzer Prize in 1940 even as it was made into a famous film version starring Henry Fonda and directed by John Ford.
The success of The Grapes of Wrath, however, was not free of controversy, as Steinbeck's leftist political views, portrayal of the ugly side of capitalism, and mythical reinterpretation of the historical events of the Dust Bowl migrations led to backlash against the author, especially close to home. In fact, claiming the book was both obscene and misrepresented conditions in the county, the Kern County Board of Supervisors banned the book from the county's public schools and libraries in August 1939. This ban lasted until January 1941.
Of the controversy, Steinbeck himself wrote, "The vilification of me out here from the large landowners and bankers is pretty bad. The latest is a rumor started by them that the Okies hate me and have threatened to kill me for lying about them. I'm frightened at the rolling might of this damned thing. It is completely out of hand; I mean a kind of hysteria about the book is growing that is not healthy."
The film versions of The Grapes of Wrath and Of Mice and Men (by two different movie studios) were in production simultaneously. Steinbeck spent a full day on the set of The Grapes of Wrath and the next day on the set of Of Mice and Men.
Steinbeck divorced his first wife, Carol Henning, in 1943. He immediately married Gwyn Conger that same year, and had two sons, Thomas Myles in 1944 and John Steinbeck IV (Catbird), in 1946. They divorced in 1948. Two years later, Steinbeck married Elaine Scott, the ex-wife of actor Zachary Scott. They were married until his death in 1968.
In 1940, Steinbeck's interest in marine biology and his friendship with Ed Ricketts led him to a voyage in the Gulf of California, also known as the "Sea of Cortez," where they collected biological specimens. Steinbeck's narrative portion of this collecting expedition (with some philosophical additions by Ricketts) was later published as The Log from the Sea of Cortez, and describes the daily experiences of the trip. The full catalog of the marine invertebrates taken was also published as a biological catalog of the intervertebrate life of the Gulf of California. While it remains a classic in nature studies, it failed to find a popular audience.
Ricketts had a significant impact on Steinbeck as a social traveling companion and fellow researcher on trips to collect biological specimens. Steinbeck even based his character "Doc" in the novels Cannery Row and Sweet Thursday on Ricketts. Steinbeck's close friendship with Ricketts would end when Steinbeck moved away from Salinas when separating from his wife Carol.
During the Second World War, Steinbeck served as a war correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune. During the war, Steinbeck saw action in accompanying some of the commando raids of Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.'s Beach Jumpers program, which (among other things) launched small-unit diversion operations against German-held islands in the Mediterranean. As a war correspondent, Steinbeck would certainly have been executed if he had been captured with the automatic weapon which he routinely carried on such missions. These missions would help to earn Fairbanks a number of decorations, but as a civilian, Steinbeck's role went officially unrecognized. Some of Steinbeck's writings from his correspondence days were later collected and made into Once There Was A War (1958).
During the war, he continued to work in film, writing Alfred Hitchcock's Lifeboat (1944), and the film A Medal for Benny (1945), about paisanos from Tortilla Flat going to war. John Steinbeck later requested that his name be removed from the credits of Lifeboat, because he believed the final version of the film had racist undertones.
His novel The Moon is Down (1942), about the Socrates-inspired spirit of resistance in a Nazi-occupied village in northern Europe, was made into a film almost immediately. It is presumed that the country in question was Norway, and in 1945 Steinbeck received the Haakon VII Medal of freedom for his literary contributions to the Norwegian resistance movement.
After the war, he wrote The Pearl (1947), already knowing it would be filmed, and traveled to Mexico for the filming; on this trip he would be inspired by the story of Emiliano Zapata, and wrote a film script (Viva Zapata!, which was directed by Elia Kazan and starred Marlon Brando and Anthony Quinn.
In 1948 Steinbeck again toured the Soviet Union, together with renowned photographer Robert Capa. They visited Moscow, Kiev, Tbilisi, Batumi and the ruins of the Battle of Stalingrad. He wrote a humorous report book about their experiences, A Russian Journal, that was illustrated with Capa's photos. Avoiding political topics and reporting about the life of simple Soviet peasants and workers, Steinbeck tried to generate more understanding towards the Soviet people in a time when anti-Communism was widespread in the U.S. and the danger of war between the two countries was heightened. In the same year he was also elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Following his divorce of Gwyndolyn Conger, and the sudden, tragic death of his close friend Ed Ricketts, Steinbeck wrote one of his most popular novels, East of Eden (1952). This book, which he considered his best, traces the fortunes of two families of settlers, the Trasksand the Hamiltons—based on Steinbeck's maternal ancestry—and set in rural California in the years around the turn of the century. The novel is roughly adapted from the biblical story of Cain and Abel and follows to trajectory of lives of sharply contrasting values.
In 1952, Steinbeck appeared as the on-screen narrator of 20th Century Fox's film, O. Henry's Full House. Although Steinbeck later admitted he was uncomfortable before the camera, he provided interesting introductions to several filmed adaptations of short stories by the legendary writer O. Henry. About the same time, Steinbeck recorded readings of several of his short stories for Columbia Records; despite some obvious stiffness, the recordings provide a vivid record of Steinbeck's deep, resonant voice.
Following the success of Viva Zapata!, Steinbeck collaborated with Kazan on the theatrical production of East of Eden, James Dean's film debut. Steinbeck found the actor was arrogant, but nevertheless said that Dean was the perfect person to play Cal Trask.
In 1960, Steinbeck bought a pickup truck and had it modified with a custom-built camper top—rare for that day—and drove across the United States with his faithful poodle, Charley. In the sometimes comical, sometimes melancholic book, Travels with Charley: In Search of America, Steinbeck describes his journeys from Maine to Montana to California, and from there to Texas and Louisiana and back to his home in Long Island. In the work, Steinbeck reminisces about his lost youth and lost roots, and both criticizes and praises America on many levels. The restored camper truck is on exhibit in the National Steinbeck Center in Salinas, California.
Steinbeck's last novel, The Winter of Our Discontent, was written in 1961. In many of his letters to friends, he spoke of how this book was his statement on the moral decay of the U.S. culture, and it is quite different in tone to Steinbeck's amoral and ecological description of the innocent thievery of the protagonists of his earlier works such as Tortilla Flat and Cannery Row. The novel was critically savaged and commercially unsuccessful.
In 1962, Steinbeck won the Nobel Prize for Literature for his “realistic and imaginative writing, combining as it does sympathetic humor and keen social perception.” Privately, he felt he did not deserve the honor. In his acceptance speech, he said:
[T]he writer is delegated to declare and to celebrate man's proven capacity for greatness of heart and spirit – for gallantry in defeat, for courage, compassion and love. In the endless war against weakness and despair, these are the bright rally flags of hope and of emulation. I hold that a writer who does not believe in the perfectibility of man has no dedication nor any membership in literature."
Steinbeck's literary background brought him into close collaboration with leftist authors, journalists, and labor union figures, who may have influenced his writing. Steinbeck was mentored by radical writers Lincoln Steffens and his wife Ella Winter, and through Francis Whitaker, a member of the United States Communist Party’s John Reed Club for writers, Steinbeck met with strike organizers from the Cannery and Agricultural Workers' Industrial Union.
Steinbeck complained publicly about government harassment. In a 1942 letter to United States Attorney General Francis Biddle he wrote "Do you suppose you could ask Edgar's boys to stop stepping on my heels? They think I am an enemy alien. It is getting tiresome". The FBI issued ingenuous denials that Steinbeck was not "under investigation." In fact, Steinbeck was indeed the object of intense FBI scrutiny, although not technically "under investigation," a term reserved in FBI parlance for investigation in connection with a specific crime.
Steinbeck was also screened for of his political beliefs by Army Intelligence during World War II to determine his suitability for an officer's commission. They found him ideologically unqualified. In later years, he would be criticized from the left by those who accused him of insufficient ideological commitment to Socialism. In 1948 a women's socialist group in Rome condemned Steinbeck for converting to "the camp of war and anti-Marxism." Then in a 1955 article in the Daily Worker his portrayal of the American Left was criticized.
In 1967, at the behest of Newsday Steinbeck went to Vietnam to report on the war. Steinbeck saw the Vietnam War as a heroic venture, and his sons both served in Vietnam prior to his death. Steinbeck visited one son on the battlefield (at one point being allowed to man a machine-gun watch position at night at a firebase, while his son and other members of his platoon slept).  His sympathetic portrait of the United States Army caused the New York Post to denounce him for betraying his liberal past, while Steinbeck biographer Jay Parini has suggested that Steinbeck's personal affection for Lyndon Johnson, whom he considered a friend, influenced his view of the war. Earlier, in September 1964, Steinbeck had been awarded the United States Medal of Freedom by President Johnson.
Steinbeck was a close associate of playwright Arthur Miller, author of Death of a Salesman and The Crucible. In the 1950s, Steinbeck took a personal and professional risk by standing up for his companion, who was held in contempt of the United States Congress for refusing to name names in the infamous House Un-American Activities Committee trials. Steinbeck called the period one of the "strangest and most frightening times a government and people have ever faced."
John Steinbeck died of a heart attack on December 20, 1968 in New York City. In accordance with his wishes, his body was cremated and an urn containing his ashes were interred at his family gravesite in Salinas. His third wife, Elaine was buried with him in 2004.
Like William Faulkner and Mississippi, Steinbeck was deeply associated with a specific region. Drawing from his experiences in Salinas Valley, California, and the migrations of laborers into California in the 1930s, Steinbeck composed fiction richly informed by local scene, speech, and history. He expressed special empathy for the downtrodden, those deprived of dignity and in extreme want, yet animated by emotions, hopes, and ideals that transcend class. Steinbeck dramatized the social upheaval of the Great Depression and Dust Bowl era, and criticized impersonal economic forces that divided society into haves and have-nots.
Steinbeck has been criticized both for his socialist political leanings and the unevenness of his fiction. In his lesser novels, comic episodes of promiscuity give way to socially dysfunctional behavior that is treated sentimentally, obscuring the moral import of the action. In his greatest works, notably The Grapes of Wrath and East of Eden, Steinbeck explored contemporary social history with insight into human psychology and dramatic storytelling. On the strength of these works Steinbeck became known throughout the world, receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962.
"His place in [U.S.] literature is secure," reviewer Charles Poore wrote in the New York Times. And it lives on in the works of innumerable writers who learned from him how to present the forgotten man unforgettably."
Many of Steinbeck's works are often included on required reading lists in American high schools, as well as in other countries, notably in Canada and the United Kingdom. In the United Kingdom Of Mice and Men is one of the key English Literature texts used by the examining body. A study by the Center for the Learning and Teaching of Literature in the United States found that Of Mice and Men was one of the ten most frequently read books in both public high and independent schools.
All links retrieved September 8, 2016.
1951: Lagerkvist | 1952: Mauriac | 1953: Churchill | 1954: Hemingway | 1955: Laxness | 1956: Jiménez | 1957: Camus | 1958: Pasternak | 1959: Quasimodo | 1960: Perse | 1961: Andrić | 1962: Steinbeck | 1963: Seferis | 1964: Sartre | 1965: Sholokhov | 1966: Agnon, Sachs | 1967: Asturias | 1968: Kawabata | 1969: Beckett | 1970: Solzhenitsyn | 1971: Neruda | 1972: Böll | 1973: White | 1974: Johnson, Martinson | 1975: Montale
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My name is Olivia Saracho and I’m at the University of Maryland at College Park, and I’m a Professor of Education.
Okay. Literacy – you know, first of all, literacy of reading, it’s for enjoyment and information and we want children to be able to enjoy and be able to acquire information. We want them to know that literacy is for meaning, and we want them to be able to learn how to read in a natural context. And the best way to get all of that is doing a play – doing a play session because they are able to learn and internalize it, and experience it, and act it out, and – and so that everything comes in and makes meaning to them and they are able to understand it. Within play you can also incorporate reading and writing concepts. For example, if they’re playing in the dramatic play area, if you put in writing materials so they can write a shopping list. If they’re playing in the block area they can – they can – they can create or build block cities, or they can create a mural of their neighborhood and they’re able to write down the streets or – or label the little cities that they ride, so all – all of that can be incorporated. Another example is Bernard talked about a sink – sink and float, and so that you can also include a checklist where they put – they put an item in the water and they can check off whether it sinks or it floats, and later on they can discuss about it so that when they have their discussion during sharing time or during their evaluation they can look at their chart and talk about. So that – literacy can be incorporated in a lot of these play centers.
They’re part of their lives. What you want it is you want – what you want is you want them to become independent readers and the way they become independent readers is by knowing that this is part of their lives and by using play it becomes a natural context and they see the importance of reading and the functions of reading so that when they – when they see a word or – or – or they start playing they know why it’s important for them to read.
I think it’s – it’s suppose to be the same because what you want is when you bring a second language learner or second English – second language speaker, that person brings a culture that is very different from the one in the school and when you bring in their culture into the play area, such as having culture boxes, and actually bringing in their setting, their family setting, into the play area that becomes natural and also becomes a natural context. And so if they can associate even just the family names – you want them to learn, for example, you talked about phonics and letters, so they can start associating the names of the – the family members with the letters that they’re learning in school.
Exactly. So learning the word tortilla, you know, it’s not just tortilla. You know, and that it begins with the same sound as ‘t’, you know, and so that – that there will be – there will be – the letters are the same either – they’re similarly the same, except if you’re having Asian children then the – yeah, the characters are different.
Well the first thing I would suggest to you, you need to find out about the community and the culture and what are the things that are important to them, and then after you do that then you start bringing those things and bringing them – bring those up in – in to – in to the classroom. And, you know if you are a preschool teacher I would talk to the principal and just say, “Why don’t we tell these – these teachers and tell them a little bit about their community during their inservice or the week of working day. Why don’t we make culture boxes that – that resemble their – that resemble their neighborhood.” If nothing else, they could start with murals that – that go around the house that are very similar around their schools so that they have – they make a mural of their street, uh, the bakery, anything that’s important to them.
Okay, what is it is that even – even though – even if they’re not second language learners, every culture or every area in – in the city is very different and you need to – and if you want them to read or you want them to learn you want them to learn concepts. They have to bring something and they have to feel good themselves and they have to know that they’re neighborhood is good. And you start by bringing that into the classroom and start from the known into the unknown so that once that – that you bring that in this is something they actually know. You know, the bakery or – or um – you know, or the – the grocery store, the gasoline, or anybody that they actually know and then you start teaching their names so they start seeing their letters, they can start associating that with other kinds of letters, and other kinds of names, and they look at context, they look at pictures. And they can even bring pictures of their store or something like that so that you can start showing about it and talking about it, having a lot of interactions. And this is a way of brining the children together because they all belong to the same community.
I’m not sure I know what to say but (interruption) okay. Let me just say – let me just share this. Uh, when I was doing – when I was doing a study of culture, one of the things that I found is, for example, if the children come in into an environment they have never seen. First of all, if they’ve never been – if they have never been in school it’s something that – that – that they don’t know and they go through 4 stages. The first stage is bewilderment. And so you bring them into a place where there – there are all these strange things and there’s this language they don’t understand. They go through a stage of bewilderment. Then the next stage that they go through is rejection because they see that whatever you have in the classroom, charts for example, you start teaching about nutrition and you have charts, you have the bread, you have the milk, and there you sit tortillas and beans and – and cheese. So then they see the chart that this is – and then what’s the worst thing that you can say is “What did you have for breakfast?” And what are – what are the children going to say? Even if they had beans and tortillas they’re going to say, “I had break and milk” because that’s what is acceptable. So then the – the next stage would be rejection. And then once you start bringing things, as soon as they start feeling comfortable, they might – but they may never get to the third step, which is assimilations. And that is, when they go home they might like the music, they might like the beans that they’re eating, so they will eat them at home, but they will never tell it. And so what they do is they put – what we call it is they put patches on them, and if you’re really – what we’re really would like for the second language teachers to be actually – we want them to take them to the fourth stage where it’s actually they – children become acculturated. And that’s where they can function in one language, in one culture, and another. Where they can easily go and make the transition from one to another, but they actually feel good about both of them.
I’m very excited about cognitive styles because it’s really a way of receiving a situation, a way of responding to people, a way of solving problems. And although it involves the intellectual, uh, line it goes beyond Pershay because it includes the effective domain and it also includes the personality of the child. For example, we call them feel dependent and feel independent, and in reality what it is – it’s – a field independent child is really a social child and some children are very social and some children are – feel independent, which have been very analytic. And for the longest time (unintelligence) started in the basement of Brooklyn Hall in – in the 1930’s and (unintelligence) and what he did is he started in a class – in a room. An in order for them to find out whether people were social or analytic he would sit them in a chair and put a crooked char, and so then the – the more the individual would put it in a straight line then the more – the more analytic that person was, and the less – the less – the more crooked chair was it was the more – the more, um, the more social that person was. And so it’s – as he developed his research he became to know that people who are more analytic look for detail and they had – they was more analytic. And so for the longest time we always wanted children to be – feel independent because they had analytic, they could do math, and they could do very well academically. And so we looked down at the social – at social children and we really didn’t focus on them. But the problem is – and if you look – if you look around your colleagues you will find that there are some people who are very social and yet – and then there are people who are very analytic. They can keep a job because they’re smart and their analytic, but sometimes they get let go because they can’t get – they can’t make good decisions because they can’t get along with people. And so what we actually want is we want students to become flexible in their thinking. They have the social skills and they have the analytic skills so that when the time requires, if they need to work – when they’re working in a situations (unintelligible) their children for life and so when their actually working or they’re actually functioning in a – in society there will be times that they need social skills to be able to do a task, but they also have to be – have analytic skills to be able to analyze the task and do it correctly. So ultimately what I would like is for teachers to learn to become what I like to call – my term is “cognitive flexibility.” I know Ramirez and Costenella, they call it “bicognitive development” because you go into both, but I like to – for them to be flexible. And I also want teachers to be trained to be flexible so that they’re able to deal with both students. I’ve done studies of the match and mismatch of teachers and children and what happens with them and a lot you know (unintelligible) a lot of it will say that they have to be met, but that’s not really society. When you work – when you want – when you’re actually in society their – you’re going to have people who are different from you and we want children to ultimately – we’re preparing children for life, not to be able to past first grade, kindergarten, or high school. Ultimately we want them to be independent people and be successful people.
Okay. Usually people who are analytic are able to do better in literacy and numerousy because they have analytic skills. And so because they have the analytic skills they’re able to decode words, they’re able to attack the word, and they’re able to identify words. So they should be the ones who are actually – can do well. But the problem is that if you look at the theory on cognitive style that they say that if you present material in the social context then the field independent students would be able to – to – to be able to identify the word. So instead of putting these abstract words or these abstract tasks, which is really what we do when we teach reading and we need to be able to become – as teachers we need to become flexible in our thinking so that we can use both with – with – we provide both types of strategies so that they’re social and they’re analytic. And hopefully what we do is we start to teach – we have a social child, we start teaching the child in a social way and once the child feels comfortable then can we – we can bring the analytic way so that the child will be able to identify the words in both – both context.
Yeah. Well, uh, let’s focus on the family literacy. What we did was um – we had um their – we used – we used photographs, so there was discussions of photographs. Families could um family – family trees and so that although there were discussions, they’re interactions. What you want in – in literacy is you want them to develop their analytic skills and so when they start solving situations they start, uh, developing vocabulary. I mean all of these things contribute to literacy and – and one of things, for example, in – in the families either they’re doing – they’re making lemonade. They have to identify the ingredients; they have to write the recipes. There – there’s a sequence in it. Here, let me give you another example. If you – you have the – something that everybody knows it’s “Little Red Riding Hood.” Okay. One of it – the literacy requirements is sequencing. Okay? You can – you can talk – you can tell the story – you don’t necessarily have to tell. A lot of story telling is – is important. You know, the traditions of a family we here storytelling, that’s also a part of literacy. But in doing that you look at the story structure which is, you know, the setting, the characters, and even though it’s – our family is part of that. Or if you take, for example, “Little Red Riding Hood,” you talk about the story and then you put it into sequence. You can also put it into singing. For example, what is the first thing that you do with the “Little Red Riding Hood?” The little girl goes out to the grandmother’s to take the cookies. The next thing is they meet uh – they meet with the Big Bad Wolf. So because you’re dealing with young children you do not – you try to focus on the number of sequences they can do first and then you can put it into a song like (singing) and you can put it into any music, any – “My Bonnie…” – anything that’s – that’s – that’s simple for them. Once they start do – they start getting the sequence of three you can start adding more sequences. For example, you have “The Little Red Hen,” you can add like four. You know (singing). There’s four sequences so you could start adding it. You can do – you can ask them to illustrate it so that you can divide the piece of paper into 3 parts, into parts, and they’re actually doing the drawing. So that’s part of literacy, that’s part of sequencing, and also the characters, the story structure, and doing the elements with that.
Okay, the thing that – the every day activities that they do – they do things. Like when they’re having a family time, you know, maybe they’re eating together. They have a discussion. They share ideas. That’s again storytelling because they’re talking about the day activities. Or “Did you know about Uncle So-and-so, you know, he had surgery or he got – he got fired,” but there’s something that’s going on and there’s something that’s being conceptualized. If – if – if “Uncle So-and-so may have been fired and what he’s going to do about it, he’s got a family,” there’s a solution. There’s problem solving, which is uh – and analyzing “How can we help?” And that’s part of the solution. They also read the TV Guide. You know, they read catalogs. Uh, they look at recipes. They go to church together. What do they do? They – they go through their religious material, they sing songs, and – and – or they look at the bulletin. School menus – you know, they – they get the school menus. All of these are daily activities that happen at home and yet they do it. The thing that we need to do as teachers is we need to bring that into the schools and try to reinforce the concept that’s being taught because the parents do it but they don’t know that they’re doing it. And if we try to help them to plan it so that – either looking at the TV Guide and we’re teaching the letter ‘t’ at school, or they can look for letter ‘t’ on things like TV Guide, you know, and pulling out the fact that TV Guide begins with the letter ‘t’, and so their – that can be reinforced. One of the things that troubles me is that teachers send like flashcards or dull material, and you know, when the children come home they need to have quality time with their parents. And what they need to do is instead of spending time in these drill and practice activities, learning the spelling words, spelling the words, writing the spelling words which is boring and dull, the child has been in this terrible – you know, the classroom the whole day. He wants to come home and one, have fun, and have a quality of – of interaction with – with their family members. So if you provide activities that are fun and their interesting it can reinforce what’s being taught at school and yet at the same time they’re learning and there’s that quality of interaction with their families.
Okay, uh, for you to use in a classroom or for you to use with families? (interruption) Okay. What I prop boxes or something that I love, culture boxes. They’re prop boxes but they’re – they’re with a culture. Something that – that is meaningful to them. Phonetic units. I would start reading a phonetic unit. Something that they – that they – that they might – that would be – that something would be of interest, and you know, once they know the children the children can suggest what they want to do, even something as the bakery. They can visit the bakery. They can talk about the bakery. Then they can come back and they can write about it and they can – and they can write stories about the bakery, have a box, you know, about the bakery, and then let them create their own box about the bakery themselves so that there’s all of that – all of that reading – reading and writing. Now if you’re talking about actually teaching strategies you can – you can start teaching, for example, we’re talking about phonics. You can start talking about phonetical awareness and so you actually start to look like – you know, you hear children saying, “Anna, Anna, Anna, banana.” We can come up with words that’s telling you automatically that they’re listening to sounds, and so you can start bringing in – and you can start brining in riddles like “Mr. Smith,” uh, you know, uh you can start saying – if you were teaching the letter ‘s’, for example, that particular day you can say, you know, “Tomorrow we’re going to visit the bakery and his name is uh – it begins the same sound as the letter ‘s’, and it’s Mr.” you know, you give riddles so they can say, “Smith.” And then they say (unintelligible) start bringing up and you can – you can say, “Well, can you think of other names that begin with the same – the same sound as the letter ‘s’?” They can say “Sally,” they can say, “Sammy,” and they can start coming up with the same thing. You can start telling stories about “Mr. Smith is at the bakery shop. He sells…” – if you’re talking about context or cues and “He sells these types of breads,” and they’d start filling in the blanks, so what you’re starting – you’re starting to initiate actual contextual cues, but you’re doing it in a riddle kind of thing and soon though you start – you start showing them, you know, how to do contextual cues, how to look for clues within words. Then as they start moving along then you can start – if it’s – if it’s um, a croissant that they’re looking for then you can start – and they know the letter sound of – of ‘c’. Then you can say, “He has…” and then put a line, or put a ‘c’, or begin “Can you think of a – of a piece of bakery that Mr. Smith has that begins with the same sound as – as the letter ‘c’,” so they can identify croissant or they can actually see the letter ‘c’, so that you start that way with something that’s meaningful to them. And never, never ask them to read a text or read something that they do not know the language or the meaning of it. Because if they don’t have comprehension it is not reading and you want them to get information and you want them to get meaning.
I would have the same answer as – the same answer as when – when you start teaching reading. Okay? And – and, you know, it use to be that a long time ago it – it – reading would start when they hit 6 – 6 years of age, and so what do we find out now? There is no right age. You do it when they’re ready, when they have the pre-requisite skills, when they have – when they can understand both – both meanings and they can understand one language or the other. And many times – and this is something – this is – I know you’re going to ask me about this at – about what is something that annoys me, but this – this does annoy me to no end because many times just because a child has a Spanish-speaking name, it doesn’t mean that Spanish is his language and the teacher has to find out where – what is the child’s name. You know, my niece, you know, her name is (speaks Spanish) and her language is English, and when they first tried to put her in school they tried to put her in a Spanish-speaking class just because her last name is (speaks Spanish). And I think we have to be very careful about that. She would not be able to learn to – to write in Spanish because that’s not her language. Her language is English. And I think there are different levels where children are. Some are very fluent in Spanish, some are very fluent in English, and some are in between, and some are mixed. So I think that’s a hard – a hard question, but I think the teacher has to be sensitive enough just like teachers of reading have to be sensitive enough that once the children have the pre-requisites skills and they’re able to understand they have to have – they have to have the language, the pre-requisite skills, and they have to be able to have the – in a way the sounds and understand that – what language is which. My ideal situation of a bilingual program is where you have both English-speaking and Spanish-speaking children because children learn more from each other then they do from teachers and if you – if they start providing activities and assignments then they’re able to do the – the language learning of the Spanish and the English together and they know that when they’re talking with Johnny and when they’re talking with Pepe, you know, that – that it’s different and they get together and they learn the language together and they learn reading together.
Well, I feel so strongly about – about – which one? I mean you have to narrow the topic. (interruption) Well – oh, there’s so many. I think the – the main one, I think it’s – maybe this one is one that maybe – we might have spoken – I think the first thing is we need – we as teachers need to accept the, um, the children’s language and culture. And just because they have a language and culture that’s different from the schools we shouldn’t look down at what – at what they’re doing, but we have to respect it and – and uh I think I would like for teachers – if I were teaching a classroom of second language teachers I would like to maybe start with – with good enough definition of culture and – and let them know that – that, you know, it’s culture is different based on clothing, architecture, food, and it all is very good. Yeah, and so we have to be accept – accepted – uh, accepted in our – respectful of the culture and we have to let children know that – that their culture is good enough as – as the schools. And then once we start from there then bringing it in and use – using that as a teaching technique and – and uh – but many times we make the children know that just because their culture is different and the schools is different that it’s not accepted.
The main thing is that I don’t think – I think it’s very integrated within it because child rearing practices are part of child development and just like child rearing practices develop so does – so does, uh, the development of the child, and that’s part of it. And so the relationship is the – based on what the children learn, that’s the way they develop. And – and so – the other thing that – that I think it’s probably also – probably my soap box too is that we as teachers and educators, we need to also understand it’s just like there’s an evolution of everything else. There’s also an evolution of culture. In other words, we’re studying culture that happened many years ago. The culture – society has changed. We are – have technology, we have other – we have television, uh, we have computers. And we also have to understand that when we look at a Spanish-speaking culture or – or a Japanese culture there’s some evolution that has taken place just like Darwin’s evolution of men and I’d like for teachers to know that that’s also related to child development.
Well, for example, in some families the – the – one of the rearing practices is that the older – the older child is responsible. I mean I – that was part of my culture and even though – I mean for a grown up I still feel responsible for my brother and sister and when we were going to school as – as – as young children, uh, because I was the oldest I was – we were away from home –you know, when we were at home we had the protection of our mom and dad. When we were in school it was my responsibility and that was – that was my major responsibility. If my sister got into trouble I had to go out there and protect her and make sure that she was well taken care of, the same thing as my brother. Now we’re growing up, we’re old people, and I still feel the same way and I feel the same responsibility. And even though, you know, we’re independent; we live in different cities but if – if my sister says there’s a problem I would be there in a second. And I still feel that responsibility and they still – still look up to me and they say, “I need help with this. I need help with that. Can you help me with this?”
Okay, what that would mean – for example, one of the things that happens is when the children come into the schools – and this is very much a part of the school, they want people to become independent and become on their own, and they cannot – the thing is that they cannot become independent (unintelligible) for example, they like – children like to help others because that’s part of their culture. You know, there’s Johnny who can’t – who can’t write or is having trouble with reading and there’s – there’s Popito who know – who – that’s part of – of helping each other. One of the cultural, uh, things is that we have to help others and so he’s helping Popito with whatever problem and – and the teacher wants to be able – for – for that student to be able to do it by themselves without the help. And then the other student gets – gets punished for something that’s part of his family.