Souder documents Steinbeck’s complicated personal life, including his struggles with depression, his three marriages, his friendship with philosopher/biologist Ed Ricketts and his troubled relationship with his children. He smoothly incorporates literary criticism of Steinbeck’s work, though he falters when he insists on defending Steinbeck against critic Edmund Wilson’s astute analysis of the writer’s flaws ... it misses the point that in analyzing Steinbeck’s weaknesses, Wilson was just doing his job. Still, Souder, a gifted writer with a sure grasp of Steinbeck’s time and place, has created a memorable book. The best biographers balance empathy for their subjects with an unblinking accounting of their shortcomings, and Souder succeeds at this tricky business. Mad at the World is a vivid portrait of a complicated man, and John Steinbeck, who prized realism above all things, might have approved.

... painstakingly researched, psychologically nuanced, unshowy, lucid ... Souder, in his own humble style, has brought a deeply human Steinbeck forth in all his flawed, melancholy, brilliant complication.

... [an] admiring new biography ... To Souder...anger was the novelist’s full-throated response to injustice, and it 'had driven him to greatness.' Yet to the reader Steinbeck seems less angry than shy, driven and occasionally cruel—an insecure, talented and largely uninteresting man who blunted those insecurities by writing. Souder’s sympathy for Steinbeck (and Ricketts) is most effective and eloquent in his depiction of the California landscape or of the sea ... Yet he recoils at Steinbeck’s machismo and disregard for the feelings of most women (except his third wife, Elaine) ... the biographer also balks at Steinbeck’s treatment of his sons[.]

Do we need another Steinbeck biography—and if so, is Souder’s the one we need? For this reviewer the answer, at least in the second instance, is no ... What the reader—better yet, let me say this reader—would like to see in a new Steinbeck biography is...an exploration of the self-destructiveness that rescues Steinbeck’s inner chaos from the merely incidental, leaving it so indelibly imprinted on the reader’s felt memory that from this moment on his books read differently. It’s not that Souder needs to psychoanalyze Steinbeck’s behavioral extremities; to the contrary, he merely has to illustrate them with the kind of accumulating depth that lends texture to the prose. This, however, he does not do ... Instead, we get something halting, even insinuating that leaves both Souder and the reader feeling morally puzzled, if not downright suspicious ... What we get instead is intellectual vacancy coupled with a deal of absurd moralizing...and...some really bad writing ... Steinbeck...has somehow eluded Souder’s capacity for deep-down engagement. It would have been interesting to know him better.

William Souder’s bracing Mad at the World: A Life of John Steinbeck vividly portrays the brooding and moody writer who could never stop writing and who never fit comfortably in the society in which he lived ... Mad at the World vibrantly illuminates the life and work of a writer who is still widely read and relevant today.

On one hand Mad at the World is condensed, clear and readable. (Mr. Souder’s previous books include brisk lives of Rachel Carson and John James Audubon.) But it achieves its relative brevity by omitting excerpts from Steinbeck’s journals and letters. What remains are the gloomy externalities of divorce and depression, which inform Mr. Souder’s argument that anger was the animating force behind Steinbeck’s art. There’s a lot to this, and certainly the bitterness toward domestic life in later works like East of Eden and The Winter of Our Discontent is hard to miss. But I’m more persuaded by Mr. Benson’s claim that Steinbeck holds our attention because 'he was a lover of life, rather than a hater of life.'

Mad at the World...chronicles Steinbeck’s riveting 66-year race toward self-destruction. The appetite with which he wrote, fought, traveled, and imbibed makes for a good read. One loses count of his homes, dogs, love affairs, cocktails, personal conflicts, and bouts of loathful self-doubt ... Souder brings to the book an empathetic appreciation of a writer’s angst, the haunting, oscillating fears that his work will never gel, or that it will never be appreciated, or that an eventual success will ruin his drive to repeat it. He captures the feverish toil behind Steinbeck’s work while unflinchingly reporting his irascible, neurotic, and cruel behavior towards editors, critics, friends, wives, and sons ... Souder captures the raucous personality of a prolific and ferocious artist.

Souder’s account of Steinbeck’s youth in Salinas, Calif., vividly evokes the landscape 'between the mountains and by the sea' that nurtured his love of nature, as well as his burgeoning urge to write ... [an] appreciative yet clear-eyed assessment.

The book sags a bit in the back half, compared to the detailed clip Souder sustains through most of it. But that aside, Souder’s biography is a stylistic portrait of a towering American original.

Sadly it’s hard to get a solid sense of Steinbeck from Souder’s book, which is highly readable but, at 368 pages minus notes, feels too slim for such a lot of life, such a lot of work. And Souder, who has also written lives of John James Audubon and Rachel Carson, wastes valuable space trying his hand at Steinbeck-inspired evocations of landscape, or dispensing slightly cheesy wisdom about writers.

... my expectations for Mad at the World were high. It turns out that biographer William Souder, who previously had written books about Rachel Carson and James Audubon, was up for the challenge ... Souder will fill in the blanks and open your eyes to this legendary author’s life and times ... I salute William Souder for taking a beloved and complex character like John Steinbeck and showing why he was so revered by all who knew him. I never really saw any of the 'angry young man' sentiment that the biography’s title might suggest. Instead, I saw a man who was driven and never gave up on his only dream. How fortunate we all have been to have shared in this dream through the many works he left behind.

Souder, biographer of John James Audubon and Rachel Carson, draws a solid, straightforward, and mostly empathetic portrait of Steinbeck’s bootstrap-rise from rural California to cultural fame and complicated fortune ... Souder highlights Steinbeck’s little-appreciated environmental consciousness on land and sea.