The Grapes of Wrath Read Free Page A

accomplishments.
    II
    Behind this most public of American novels stands a reclusive writer. John Steinbeck was born in Salinas, California, on February 27, 1902, to respectable middle-class parents: John Ernst Steinbeck, Monterey County treasurer, and Olive Hamilton Steinbeck, a former schoolteacher. Steinbeck attended Salinas High School, where he was an undistinguished student, then enrolled sporadically at Stanford University from 1919 to 1925. There, as an English-journalism major, he took a short-story writing class from Edith Mirrielees and was published in Stanford’s undergraduate literary magazine, but he never finished his degree. He held a variety of temporary jobs during the next four years (laborer and cub reporter in New York City, resort handyman and watchman in Lake Tahoe), eventually publishing his first novel,
Cup of Gold
, in 1929. The novel scarcely sold, but Steinbeck’s choice of vocation was sealed. He never again held a traditional nine-to-five job. Beginning in 1930, with the support and encouragement of his parents and especially of his wife, Carol Henning Steinbeck, whom he had married thatyear, writing became Steinbeck’s daily occupation and continued so through lean and flush times for the remainder of his life. When Steinbeck died on December 20, 1968, he had managed to support himself and his families (he was married three times and had two sons and one stepdaughter) exclusively on his writing income, primarily from the thirty books of fiction, drama, filmscripts, and nonfictional prose he published between 1929 and 1966.
    Cup of Gold
, a swashbuckling historical romance based on the life of seventeenth-century Welsh buccaneer Henry Morgan, gave no indication that Steinbeck would eventually be capable of producing a graphic novel with the startling originality, magnitude, compassion, and power of
The Grapes of Wrath
. What transpired in those ten years is as arresting an example of determined, self-willed artistic growth as we have in American letters, for in the nine volumes of prose (mostly fiction) he produced in the 1930s, Steinbeck simply got stronger and stronger as a novelist. His achievement is especially moving because he rarely thought of himself as a natural genius and rarely believed he had ever “arrived” as a writer. This typical self-assessment is recorded in
Working Days
(Steinbeck’s journal is the hermetic story behind the making of
The Grapes of Wrath
, the writer’s private text behind the reader’s public one): “I was not made for success. I find myself with a growing reputation. In many ways it is a terrible thing.… Among other things I feel that I have put something over. That this little success of mine is cheating.”
    Steinbeck augmented his talent with plain hard work and repeated practice. Where his characters use tools to elevate work to a dignified level, Steinbeck turned to his “comfortable and comforting” pen, an instrument that became an “extension” of the best part of himself: “Work is the only good thing,” he claimed on July 6, 1938, in
Working Days
. For Steinbeck, writing was a kind of textual habitation. He wrote books methodically the way other people built houses—word by word, sentence by sentence. His act of writing was a way of fulfilling his dream of finding a home in the architectural spaces created by his imagination. In fact, this creative and interior level of engagement is the elusive, unacknowledged fifth layer of Steinbeck’s novel. Although Steinbeck insisted on effacing his own presence in
The Grapes of Wrath
, the factremains that it is a very personal book, rooted in his own compulsion. The “plodding” pace of Steinbeck’s writing schedule informed the slow, “crawling” movement of the Joads’ journey, while the harried beat of his own life gave the proper “feel” and tone to his beleaguered characters. Their unsavory weaknesses and vanities, their struggles for survival, their unsuspecting heroism are