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was not much interested in doctrinaire political theories at this point in his career.) Carol was an energetic, talented person in her own right, who agreed to relinquish a possible career in favor of helping to manage his. Their partnership and marriage was smoother and more egalitarian in the struggling years of Steinbeck’s career; with the enormous success—and pressures—brought first by Of Mice and Men (New York: Covici-Friede, 1937), and then by The Grapes of Wrath, their situation became more tenuous and volatile. Carol was an extremely strong-willed, demonstrative person, and she was often frustrated, resentful, and sometimes jealous; John, inordinately shy, was frequently beleaguered, confused, and demanding. In the late 1930s, whenever John was writing daily, which was much of the time, Carol handled—but didn’t always like—most of the routine domestic duties. She also shielded her husband as much as possible from unwarranted disruptions and intrusions, and she oversaw some of the financial arrangements (an increasingly large job) between Steinbeck and his literary agents. “Carol does so much,” Steinbeck admitted on August 2, 1938.

Carol also served as his cultural envoy and stand-in. In January 1938, on a trip to New York City, she met with documentary filmmaker Pare Lorentz (1905-1992), arranging between them his first visit to Los Gatos to discuss a joint Steinbeck-Lorentz movie version of In Dubious Battle (which was never made) and a private showing of The River and The Plow That Broke the Plains. These pioneering documentary films, which Lorentz made for President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal-inspired Resettlement Administration (forerunner of the Farm Security Administration) , dealt with human displacement and natural erosion caused by the Dust Bowl and Mississippi Valley floods. After their initial meeting, Lorentz became an increasingly important figure in the novelist’s life, providing everything from practical advice on politics to spirited artistic cheerleading.

Carol left her stamp on The Grapes of Wrath in many ways. She typed the manuscript, editing the text as she went, and she served in the early stages as a rigorous critical commentator (after typing three hundred pages, she confessed to Elizabeth Otis that she had lost “all sense of proportion” and felt unfit “to judge it at all”). In a brilliant stroke, on September 2, Carol chose the novel’s title from Julia Ward Howe’s “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” perhaps inspired by her hearing of Pare Lorentz’s radio drama, Ecce Homo!, which ends with a martial version of Howe’s song. Steinbeck was impressed with “the looks of it—marvelous title. The book has being at last”; he considered it “Carol’s best title so far.” (“Tell Carol she is a whiz at picking titles and she has done it again with the new one,” his drama agent, Annie Laurie Williams, exulted.) Her role as facilitator is recorded permanently in one half of the novel’s dedication: “To CAROL who willed it.” On February 23, 1939, Steinbeck told Pascal Covici that he had given Carol the holograph manuscript of The Grapes of Wrath: “You see I feel that this is Carol’s book.”

Eventually, however, Carol’s brittle efficiency, managerial brusqueness, and wide mood swings seemed increasingly pronounced. Deeper than that, according to a recent biographer, Jay Parini, Carol resented letting Steinbeck talk her into getting an abortion when she had recently become pregnant (complications later developed that required a hysterectomy, signaling the end of childbearing possibilities). She, too, was exhausted by the novel’s completion and at her wit’s end over its histrionic reception: “The telephone never stops ringing, telegrams all the time, fifty to seventy-five letters a day all wanting something. People who won’t take no for an answer sending books to be signed. . . . Something has to be worked out or I am finished writing. I went south to work and I came back to find Carol just about hysterical. She had been pushed beyond endurance,” Steinbeck told Elizabeth Otis on June 22, 1939. His indulgent