Published in the January 20 – February 2, 2016 issue of Morgan Hill Life

By Marty Cheek

Marty Cheek, publisher Morgan Hill Life

Marty Cheek, publisher Morgan Hill Life

Princess Leah encounters Darth Vader in "Star Wars: A New Hope"

Princess Leah encounters Darth Vader in “Star Wars: A New Hope”

Watching the seventh installment of the “Star Wars” series “The Force Awakens,” I was blown away by J.J. Abrams’ reboot of the classic space-opera continuing the epic saga of the dysfunctional Skywalker family a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.

When the original “Star Wars: A New Hope” came out in 1977, no one had seen anything like it. George Lucas used advanced (at that time) special effects cinema technology to tell an epic myth. And he had help from his own personal Yoda… a mythology expert named Joseph Campbell.

Every epic saga has to start somewhere. Perhaps the “Star Wars” epic begins a long time ago — on Nov. 25, 1874. That’s the day Almira Steinbeck and her six sons arrived by train in the village of Hollister. They came to meet Almira’s husband, John Adolph Steinbeck. One year earlier with hopes of starting a better life in California, he left the family home in Leominister, Mass., to find a job in the town named after William Hollister. A carpenter by trade, John quickly found work. When his wife and children came, the Steinbeck family purchased a 10-acre plot of land and moved into a two-story home on Line Street.

About 1890, the couple’s son Ernst met a beautiful young woman named Olive Hamilton in King City. The two married and built a home in Salinas. On Feb. 27, 1902, their son John Ernst Steinbeck was born. You might say the baby’s arrival was the literary galaxy’s “new hope.”

The young boy grew up on the legend of King Arthur and imagined himself a noble knight among the Salinas Valley farm fields. Like Luke Skywalker on the planet Tatooine, Steinbeck longed for the adventure of exploring what lay beyond his sleepy town. The boy grew into a young man learning to master not a light saber but an ink pen to enlighten the world with stories of the poor and oppressed.

John Steinbeck’s first novel, a pirate adventure titled “Cup of Gold,” was a commercial failure and did not earn back its $250 advance. Frustrated with his lack of success, he kept persisting with his wordsmith dreams, beginning development on his next novel. He set the story in the Gabilan mountains and wrote about a farmer who believed that there was a mysterious force existing in all life throughout the universe that controls everyone’s destiny. He worked on it for five years and found himself empty of inspiration.

The young writer needed a teacher, someone to show him the creative force of epic storytelling. According to biographer Jackson J. Benson in “The True Adventures of John Steinbeck, Writer,” that teacher showed up in Monterey one day in 1931. His name was not Yoda but Joseph Campbell. He had recently finished a world-wide voyage to develop his idea about how all epic myths share a common thread of a series of stages. All human culture is psychically united by a single story structure. He called this idea the monomyth. It would later evolve into “the hero’s journey.”

Campbell found a house called “The Canary Cottage” on 11th Street in Pacific Grove. His next-door neighbor was a marine biologist named Edward Flanders Robb Ricketts who was also a friend of Steinbeck’s. The three men spent time together as beer buddies, talking about philosophy and scientific ideas. Ricketts particularly was fond of the Jungian archetypes of the subconscious and their impact on myth making. The ideas Steinbeck learned from these late-night discussions helped the author overcome his writer’s block. He finished “To a God Unknown.” More importantly, Campbell’s ideas helped him create other literary masterpieces including “Tortilla Flat,” “The Grapes of Wrath,” and “East of Eden.”

Benson suggests Campbell in turn was influenced by Ricketts and Steinbeck. “Although Campbell was the mythologist, he feels he may have learned more from Steinbeck about the relevance of myth than vice versa. He soon discovered that as far as the fiction writer was concerned, nature power was the generator of myth. Later in reading Steinbeck’s fiction, he had the impression that some of the mythic images in it maybe have come out of their discussions.”

Campbell grew famous as an authority on myth and human cultures. In 1949, his book “The Hero With a Thousand Faces” was published to describe in detail the three stages of the hero’s journey: Departure, Initiation, and Return. Among the first film artists to be influenced by Campbell was a young student at the University of California, Los Angeles. In the late 1960s, George Lucas was on his own hero’s journey — one that would forever change the universe. He directly credits Campbell’s ideas for influencing the mythology of “Star Wars.”

These space adventure films provide a faithful model for the mythic structure, including the war within a family dynamic. Abrams, the director of the newest “Star Wars” films, also credits Campbell for influencing him on many of his projects including the TV show “Lost.”

OK, I’ll admit it’s a stretch. But perhaps millions of “Star Wars” fans would never have spent a fun few hours watching the space-opera saga if John Steinbeck’s grandfather had never made his cross-country journey to the village of Hollister in the 1870s.