earticle

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This article aims to evaluate John Steinbeck’s ideas in his war propaganda literature in the 1940s and compare them with John Rawls’s political philosophy in The Law of Peoples. Until now, Steinbeck’s fictions and non-fictions joining the American war effort during the World War Ⅱ have been undervalued as being hasty, superficial, mechanical, abstract, and even unrealistic as a solemn sacrifice to the greater cause of patriotism. Nevertheless, the writer did not lose his old concepts and rather developed them into a kind of international pacifism. To demonstrate this opinion, the researchers observe the works—Sea of Cortez, The Moon Is Down, Bombs Away, Once There Was a War, Lifeboat, A Medal for Benny, and A Russian Journal. As a result, these works turn out to materialize Steinbeck’s previous ideas, and especially A Russian Journal is analogous to Rawls’s view in that the international society should respect the peoples’ diversity under the absolute value of human rights. That is, Steinbeck’s group-man idea assumes another bigger entity other than the sum of individuals in a community and non-teleology cherishes what it is rather than what it should be. Meanwhile, Rawls insists that there should be a consolidated norm among the peoples and all the societies should observe the duty of non-intervention. Lastly, this interdisciplinary research shows that Steinbeck’s literature of propaganda is not too cheap or worthless.