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By Root 12265 0

It is bad because it isn’t honest. Oh! these incidents all happened but— I’m not telling as much of the truth about them as I know. In satire you have to restrict the picture and I just can’t do satire. . . . I know, you could sell possibly 30,000 copies. I know that a great many people would think they liked the book. I myself have built up a hole-proof argument on how and why I liked it. I can’t beat the argument but I don’t like the book. And I would be doing Pat a greater injury in letting him print it than I would by destroying it. Not once in the writing of it have I felt the curious warm pleasure that comes when work is going well. My whole work drive has been aimed at making people understand each other and then I deliberately write this book the aim of which is to cause hatred through partial understanding. My father would have called it a smart-alec book. It was full of tricks to make people ridiculous. If I can’t do better I have slipped badly. And that I won’t admit, yet.

The final stage of writing culminated in The Grapes of Wrath. His conscience squared, his integrity restored, Steinbeck quickly embarked on the longest sustained writing job of his career. Ridding himself of poison by passing through a “bad” book proved beneficial, he told Otis on June 1, 1938: “It is a nice thing to be working and believing in my work again. I hope I can keep the drive. I only feel whole and well when it is this way.” Naturally, his partisanship for the workers and his sense of indignation at California’s labor situation carried over, but they were given a more articulate, directed shape.

Everything he had written earlier—from his 1936 Nation article, “Dubious Battle in California,” through “Starvation Under the Orange Trees,” an April 1938 essay that functioned as the epilogue to Their Blood Is Strong, and even a poignant short story called “Breakfast” that he included in The Long Valley (New York: The Viking Press, 1938)—became grist for his final attempt. “For the first time I am working on a book that is not limited and that will take every bit of experience and thought and feeling that I have,” he wrote in Working Days on June 11, 1938. From his numerous field travels with Tom Collins, and from countless hours spent talking to migrant people, working beside them, listening to them, and sharing their problems, Steinbeck summoned all the concrete details of human form, language, and landscape that ensure artistic verisimilitude, as well as the subtler imaginative nuances of dialect, idiosyncratic tics, habits, and gestures that animate fictional characterization. “Yesterday it seemed to me that the people were coming to life. I hope so. These people must be intensely alive the whole time,” he wrote on July 8.

From the outset, in creating the Joad family to occupy the narrative chapters of The Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck endowed his novel with a specific human context, a felt emotional quality, and a dramatic dimension his earlier versions lacked: “Begin the detailed description of the family I am to live with. Must take time in the description, detail, detail, looks, clothes, gestures. . . . We have to know these people. Know their looks and their nature,” he reminded himself in his work diary on June 17. By conceiving the Joads as “an over-essence of people,” Steinbeck elevated the entire history of the migrant struggle into the realm of art, and he joined the mythic western journey with latently heroic family characters, according to this key Working Days notation on June 30:

Yesterday . . . I went over the whole of the book in my head—fixed on the last scene, huge and symbolic, toward which the whole story moves. And that was a good thing, for it was a reunderstanding of the dignity of the effort and the mightyness of the theme. I feel very small and inadequate and incapable but I grew again to love the story which is so much greater than I am. To love and admire the people who are so much stronger and purer and braver than I am.

At times during that summer, though, his task seemed insurmountable, because he kept