“Paradox and Dream” is an essay written by John Steinbeck positing his view that Americans a gripped by the paradox of the myths that serve to flesh out the American Dream. We have built these myths about ourselves to which we remain full committed even as it is painfully apparent that few ever live up to them in reality. So deeply embedded is the perspective delineated in this one essay that the fruits of it can be plucked from many of the other essays which Steinbeck composed over the course of his career.
This fruit flowers as full-blown corrosive irony in a 1960 essay titled “Atque Vale” written in response to then-recent significant national events taking place as part of the civil rights movement. With the poisonous irony dripping from brutally satirical pen, Steinbeck explains demonstrates the paradox between myth and reality in American society by noting how African-Americas are clearly expected “to be wiser than we are, more tolerant than we are, braver, more dignified…self-controlled and self-disciplined.” How does he know arrive at this expectation? Because during civil rights protests, confrontations were expected to erupt into violence at the hands of blacks and yet in every case it was the white counter-protesters that initiated violence. The use of such bitterly ironic prose reveals the distinct chasm between the mythic land of America as a beacon for equality and the ugly undoing of those expectations when push comes to non-violence protest.
Perhaps the biggest myth about America busted by Steinbeck in his essays simply cut too close to the bone to dare to unleash upon the public while he was still around to suffer the slings and arrows guaranteed to come his way. “Argument of Phalanx” was written in 1935, but never published in his lifetime despite Steinbeck going on to live until 1968. The great American myth, embodied most notably perhaps in the character of Natty Bumppo of James Fenimore Cooper’s "Leatherstocking Tales" is that of the independent man who single-handedly built his way to living the America Dream.
