Steinbeck

Table of Contents

 

 

PENGUIN BOOKS

STEINBECK: A LIFE IN LETTERS

Born in Salinas, California, in 1902, John Steinbeck grew up in a fertile agricultural valley about twenty-five miles from the Pacific Coast—and both valley and coast would serve as settings for some of his best fiction. In 1919 he went to Stanford University, where he intermittently enrolled in literature and writing courses until he left in 1925 without taking a degree. During the next five years he supported himself as a laborer and journalist in New York City and then as a caretaker for a Lake Tahoe estate, all the time working on his first novel, Cup
of Gold
(1929). After marriage and a move to Pacific Grove, he published two California fictions,
The Pastures of Heaven
(1932) and
To a God Unknown
(1933), and worked on short stories later collected in The Long
Valley
(1938). Popular success and financial security came only with
Tortilla Flat
(1935), stories about Monterey's paisanos. A ceaseless experimenter throughout his career, Steinbeck changed courses regularly. Three powerful novels of the late 1930s focused on the California laboring class:
In Dubious Battle
(1936),
Of Mice and Men
(1937), and the book considered by many his finest,
The Grapes of Wrath
(1939). Early in the 1940s, Steinbeck became a filmmaker with
The Forgotten Village
(1941) and a serious student of marine biology with
Sea of Cortez
(1941). He devoted his services to the war, writing Bombs
Away
(1942) and the controversial play-novelette The Moon Is Down (1942).
Cannery
Row (1945), The Wayward Bus (1947), The
Pearl
(1947), A
Russian Journal
(1948), another experimental drama,
Burning Bright
(1950), and
The Log from The Sea
of
Cortez
(1951) preceded publication of the monumental
East of Eden
(1952), an ambitious saga of the Salinas Valley and his own family's history. The last decades of his life were spent in New York City and Sag Harbor with his third wife, with whom he traveled widely. Later books include Sweet Thursday
(1954), The Short
Reign of Pippin
IV: A Fabrication
(1957), Once There Was
a
War (1958), The Winter of Our
Discontent
(1961),
Travels with Charley in Search of America
(1962),
America and Americans
(1966), and the posthumously published
Journal of a Novel: The
East of Eden Letters (1969),
Viva Zapata!
(1975),
The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights
(1976), and
Working Days: The Journals of
The Grapes of Wrath (1989). He died in 1968, having won a Nobel Prize in 1962.

PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
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First published in the United States of America
by The Viking Press 1975
Published in Penguin Books 1976
Reissued in Penguin Books 1989

Copyright John Steinbeck, 1952 Copyright © Executors of the Estate of John Steinbeck, 1969 Copyright © Elaine A. Steinbeck and Robert Wallsten, 1975

All rights reserved

 

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBUCATION DATA
Steinbeck, John, 1902-1968.
Steinbeck: a life in letters.
Includes index.
1. Steinbeck, John, 1902-1968—Correspondence.
PS3537.T3234Z'.5'2 [B] 76-18821

eISBN : 978-1-440-67387-0

 

 

Permission to reprint the letters from John O'Hara appearing on pages 123 and 745 has been granted by United States Trust Company.

 

Frontispiece photograph by Toni Frissell

 

Maps by Libra Graphics, Inc.

 

“In sixty years I've left a lot of tracks,” John Steinbeck wrote in 1962. This is a record of some of those tracks: books written and read, journeys made, places visited, people met and loved and hated, as well as some projects never realized, works begun and abandoned, ideas conceived in multitudes and dying as they were born. It is the record of a questing, weighing, synthesizing, creating mind that never rested—that resented rest, except the kind of rest he found in work. But chiefly and always, it is the record of a man learning his craft.

In his youth the Depression lay heavy on him and his friends, writers, mostly, like himself—unrecognized as yet, too poor to drive far or take a train to see each other. There was only this one way to keep in touch. Actually, he preferred this way because he was diffident in ordinary face-to-face contact. “I write as usual because I have never been able to trust speech as communication of anything except love and desire or hustling.”

“It is a form of talking.” But talking on the telephone appalled him. “I write instead of telephoning because I have never been able to communicate over the telephone.” For that inability we can be grateful because it forced him to write more letters.

And the letter-writing habit, ingrained over the years, became at last inseparable from the work itself. It was his way of warming up: mornings, before he started work, he got the juices flowing by writing letters.

He wrote them on and with anything available—his father's business paper, pages torn from a ledger, hotel stationery purloined on trips—but the most typical was the legal pad and the soft pencil. This became almost a trademark. When a friend opened an envelope and saw the familiar crabbed and nearly indecipherable hand on ruled yellow paper, he knew he had a letter from Steinbeck.

The pencil was his instrument. He was passionate about pencils, about the way they felt between his fingers, about their weight and pressure. He boasted of calluses from holding them. “I sharpen all the pencils in the morning and it takes one more sharpening for a day's work. That's twenty-four sharp points. I can make a newly sharpened pencil last almost a page.”

From time to time, however, he switched to pens, pens of all kinds, each carrying its own mystique. Once in Somerset he fashioned his own pens from the quills of “a grandfather goose.”

His handwriting varied. Typically, it was minuscule. He once congratulated himself on having squeezed more than five hundred words on a postcard. Partly this was Depression-born to save paper, but it soon became a habit—one that from time to time he decided to break. “Trying to write this manuscript big. It's just silly, this tiny writing.” To this end he scrawled or printed, but looking at the whole body of his correspondence, the impression is of a tiny scribble that often needs a magnifying glass to be easily read.

But he lived in the mechanical age, and he could not ignore a machine so fascinating as the typewriter. He wrote enthusiastically whenever a secondhand or new typewriter came into his life and assumed that everyone he told shared his fascination with the touch, the type faces, and the symbols it was capable of.

In the preparation of this book several thousand letters were collected, often six or seven written on the same day, so that it seems a kind of miracle that in addition Steinbeck found time and energy for the twenty-nine titles he published. He kept copies of few of his letters and none of his more personal ones. Our compilation was built around the large collections which we knew existed and which form the backbone of this book: the more than six hundred letters covering a span of forty-odd years to Elizabeth Otis, his friend and literary agent; those that started in the twenties and went through his life to his college roommate, Carlton A. Sheffield; and those to his editor, Pascal Covici. These were the nucleus. The next step was to locate and lure back other letters or photocopies of them. We had two major sources: a list of people who had congratulated Steinbeck when he received the Nobel Prize and another of those who had sent condolences when he died. We wrote them all. We asked for all kinds of letters—serious letters, funny letters, business letters, love letters, good-humored and ill-tempered letters—reflections of the many moods of a moody man.