Vietnam Dispatches

Vietnam Dispatches brings together John Steinbeck's final series of war reportages.

Previously unpublished in France, this work gathers the chronicles written from 1966 for Newsday magazine by the man who received the Pulitzer Prize in 1940 for The Grapes of Wrath and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1962.

John Steinbeck, aged 64, is already an ailing and weary man — he would die two years later — when he sets off to cover the conflict tearing America apart. Yet even though he knows war well (he had followed the boys in Europe in 1943 for the New York Herald Tribune and been wounded in North Africa), he is unsettled by what he finds: a war with "no front, no rear", as he writes.

Boarding the gunboats that crisscross the deltas, flying aboard Huey helicopters, he also finds his son — a future writer himself — who has chosen to enlist. Is this one of the reasons why Steinbeck, in his dispatches, supports the war being waged by America? While privately expressing reservations about this dangerous adventure, he closes ranks behind the policy pursued by President Lyndon Johnson, something for which many intellectuals would hold him to account. He who had championed the weak and the oppressed, "the social writer" who in his time was suspected of being a communist, had turned bellicose — but was above all "desperate that these wonderful troops were not delivering a swift victory".

The prolific translator of major names in Anglo-Saxon literature (Bret Easton Ellis, Ernest Hemingway, Jack Kerouac, Francis Scott Fitzgerald), Pierre Guglielmina recently translated, for Les Belles Lettres, Francis Scott Fitzgerald's Une vie à soi (Goût des idées, 2011).