One of my heroes died the other day. Lost among all the talk about Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett was the news that Steven Wells, the greatest music journalist of his generation, had passed away. One of the things that made him great was his realization that no matter how much you try to intellectualize a work of art, to explain what makes it good, bad, or mediocre, that really doesn’t have a lot of bearing on whether your audience will actually go out and enjoy it. Rather, he preferred to write about how he reacted to songs, how they made him feel, and tried to express that in a universal way.

And then he cursed a lot.

So, all this being the case, when I decided that I wanted to write an article about John Steinbeck, I figured that rather than attempting to wax lyrical upon his literary merits or import, or to present a list (and it would be a long list) of his works, saying which of them were worth picking up, rather, I would tell a little story about how I learned to stop moping around and love John Steinbeck.

In my early twenties, I was living in the South West of England. It was the summer time, and I had stayed in town whilst all my friends had gone home for the school holidays. I had no TV, the phone didn’t work in our house, I didn’t really know anyone in town, and I had a really boring job folding jeans in a clothes store. But, the days were hot and sunny; I could climb out of the back window and sit on my neighbor’s roof drinking cheap red wine and eating french bread, cream cheese and cucumber.

I had, however, also started seeing this girl who was a little crazy. Ok, a lot crazy. So, I spent many an hour without much to do (remember, no TV to dull the pain) just sitting around and obsessing. As I say, I was 21, and I didn’t really have the emotional experience to know how to cope with this sort of thing. At this stage, whilst wandering idly around the house, I picked a couple of books from the bookshelf of one of my friends. She happened to have a few Steinbeck books, and in an attempt to occupy my mind and stave off madness, I set to reading.

Now, one of the things that marks great art is an ability to transport an individual to another place, another time, a different reality, or even a different mood. The three books that I read that day (and I pretty much sat and read them all in one sitting) were the Pearl, the Wayward Bus and Sweet Thursday. Immediately, I was transformed from desperately clawing at the walls, to a dusty, exotic locale on the Californian coast. A place where not a lot happens, the pace of life is slow, and entire novels can be written about a bus that gets lost, or a collector of marine animals. It brought a great feeling of reassurance to me, that not everything had to be solved in an hour; at the time, it felt like my life had been turned around. Looking back now, it might have just been that I was finally growing up and maturing (and not before time), but ever since then, I’ve love John Steinbeck for his emotional simplicity, his presentation of life as something in which things can go right (some people may see this as overly sentimental, but they have no heart), and for the pleasure he takes in the simple beauty of the smallest event.

So yes, that’s why I love Steinbeck. What’s your story?