John Steinbeck Day: The Reporter Who Wrote the Novel

John Ernst Steinbeck was born in Salinas, California, on February 27, 1902. He studied English at Stanford on and off, left in 1925 without a degree, and spent the next few years on odd jobs, including work as a caretaker at Lake Tahoe and a stretch in a lab at the Spreckels sugar company. Tortilla Flat gave him his first commercial success in 1935. Of Mice and Men came in 1937, The Grapes of Wrath in 1939 and East of Eden in 1952.

He won the Pulitzer in 1940 and the Nobel in 1962. He died in Manhattan on December 20, 1968, of heart disease after a lifetime of cigarettes.

I was forced to read Of Mice and Men and The Grapes of Wrath in high school, and I disliked both of them. They joined a long list of assigned books I couldn’t stand. That was a teenager reacting to homework, and Steinbeck deserves a fairer hearing than that. The craft in him is real, and most of it comes from one habit any writer can copy: he went and looked before he wrote.

Why did John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath start as journalism?

Because Steinbeck went to the camps before he wrote a line of the novel.

In 1936 the San Francisco News asked him to report on the migrant workers pouring into California’s farm valleys. The paper ran his seven articles, The Harvest Gypsies, on consecutive days from October 5 to October 12.

Most of the families he wrote about had fled the Dust Bowl. The articles covered hunger, squalid housing and exploitative wages.

His guide was Tom Collins, a staff member of the federal Resettlement Administration who managed a government camp and wrote detailed reports on the people who came through it. Steinbeck traveled the fields with him and drew on those reports. The finished novel carries the dedication “To Tom, who lived it,” and Collins shows up in the story as Jim Rawley, the decent manager of the government camp where the Joads are finally treated like people.

The order matters. Steinbeck had the facts before he had the plot, so the plot couldn’t drift away from them.

He’d spent years beside a man who looked at the world that way. Steinbeck met Ed Ricketts, a marine biologist, in 1930, and the two became close friends. Ricketts later turned into Doc in Cannery Row, and in 1940 the pair sailed the Gulf of California collecting specimens for the book that became Sea of Cortez. A writer who spends years next to a scientist learns to write down what’s in the tide pool before deciding what it means.

A novelist who invents first and checks later, if at all, produces a book that reads plausibly to anyone who’s never been there and falsely to anyone who has. The growers hated The Grapes of Wrath because it was close enough to the truth to hurt. Eleanor Roosevelt visited labor camps herself and defended the book’s accuracy in her newspaper column, and her support helped spur congressional hearings on labor law.

How long did John Steinbeck take to write The Grapes of Wrath?

About five months in 1938, in longhand. His first wife, Carol, typed it.

That speed came after a false start. Earlier he’d written a draft of about 70,000 words that attacked California’s growers head-on, and he destroyed it. A writer who can throw away 70,000 words because they’re the wrong 70,000 words has learned something most writers spend a career resisting.

I cut a lot when I revise. Steinbeck cut a whole book.

Carol found the title as well. His journal entry for September 3, 1938, reads “Carol got the title last night,” and the phrase comes from Julia Ward Howe’s Battle Hymn of the Republic. Steinbeck wanted every verse printed on the endpapers, words and music, as an answer in advance to anyone who planned to call the book radical. When the first proof carried only one verse, he objected and asked for all of them.

What are the intercalary chapters in The Grapes of Wrath?

They’re the short chapters that leave the Joad family and pull the camera back. The novel alternates them with the main story, so the reader gets one family’s trip and then the whole migration it belongs to.

Chapter 3 is a turtle crossing a highway, plodding on after a truck swerves to hit it. Chapter 7 is a used car lot told from the dealer’s side, selling junk to desperate people and paying almost nothing for what they own. Neither chapter moves the plot. Both show what the Joads are walking into before the Joads get there.

The device is old, and it’s risky. Done badly, the wide chapters turn into lectures, and the reader skims to get back to the people. Steinbeck dodges that by writing the general chapters with as much concrete detail as the family chapters: a voice, a sales pitch, a road, an animal. The lesson for a writer telling a big story through a small one is clear enough. Give the reader the map now and then, and draw the map with the same pen you use for the characters.

Why wouldn’t John Steinbeck change the ending of The Grapes of Wrath?

Because a different ending would have made a different book.

The novel ends in a barn during a flood, with Rose of Sharon, who has just delivered a stillborn baby, nursing a starving stranger at her breast.

In January 1939 his editor, Pascal Covici, suggested a change. Steinbeck refused. “I am sorry but I cannot change the ending,” he wrote. The Joads don’t know the man and owe him nothing, and he told Covici that was the emphasis.

Readers still argue about the scene.

It works because it refuses a rescue. Nobody arrives, the government fixes nothing, the rain keeps falling, and a family that has lost nearly everything gives away what little it has left to a man it has never met. A tidier ending would have told the reader things turned out fine. Steinbeck knew they hadn’t, and he’d seen enough in the camps to refuse to pretend.

What happened when Kern County banned The Grapes of Wrath?

In August 1939, a few months after publication, the Kern County Board of Supervisors voted 4 to 1 to ban the book from the county’s libraries and schools.

The real Weedpatch camp from the novel sits in Kern County, and the growers there didn’t like seeing themselves in print.

The Associated Farmers arranged a public burning, and the worker they recruited to put a copy to the flame for the photographers had never read it. The ban stayed in force for about a year and a half. Steinbeck got threats and started carrying a gun.

The book sold anyway.

It was the best-selling book of 1939, it won the National Book Award in February 1940 and the Pulitzer later that year, and it has sold about fourteen million copies since. A ban on a book about hungry people did nothing for the hungry people and a great deal for the book. The same thing happens nearly every year the lists come out for Banned Books Week.

What happened to the first draft of Of Mice and Men?

A dog ate it.

In a letter to his agent, Elizabeth Otis, in the spring of 1936, Steinbeck reported that his setter pup, left alone one night, had “made confetti” of about half the manuscript. “Two months work to do over again,” he wrote. He had no other draft.

He did it over. The book is a short novel written in scenes and heavy on dialogue, and he turned it into a stage play the same year it came out. The play was a hit.

The setup is the part a working novelist should study. Steinbeck plants Lennie’s strength, his habit of petting soft things until he hurts them, the dead puppy and Candy’s old dog taken outside and shot, and every one of those plants pays off in the last chapter. I love a plot set up with small hints, and whatever I thought of the book as a teenager, this one is built out of nothing else. A reader who goes back as an adult can watch the ending arrive from the first pages.

It’s also among the most fought-over books in American schools.

The American Library Association ranked it fifth on its list of the most challenged books of 2000 to 2009.

How did John Steinbeck write East of Eden?

With pencils and a running letter to his editor. Pascal Covici gave him a notebook, and from January 29 to October 31, 1951, Steinbeck wrote a letter to Covici on each left-hand page as a warm-up and the novel on the right. The letters were never mailed. They came out after his death as Journal of a Novel.

He was fussy about tools.

He called the Blackwing pencil “the best I have ever had” and is reported to have started each day with two dozen sharpened, going through about 300 pencils on the book.

The warm-up letter is the habit worth stealing. Each morning he talked himself into the day’s work on the left page before he did it on the right, and by the time he crossed over he was already moving. I write my novels in Microsoft Word, and the tool matters less than the ritual. The warm-up is the piece to copy.

Why did critics attack John Steinbeck’s Nobel Prize?

The Swedish Academy gave him the prize in 1962 for his “realistic and imaginative writings,” and the reaction at home was ugly. The New York Times complained that his “limited talent is, in his best books, watered down by tenth-rate philosophising.”

Some of that was snobbery about a writer who sold well and wrote about farmworkers.

Some of it was fair. His best work was more than twenty years behind him by 1962, and the late books had grown preachy.

Then there’s Travels with Charley, his 1962 account of a road trip around the country with his standard poodle. In 2011 a reporter retraced the route using Steinbeck’s own diaries and concluded that much of the book was fictionalized, and scholars and Steinbeck’s son John agreed with him. Steinbeck built his name on reporting the truth about people other writers ignored. Late in his career he made some of it up, and a nonfiction writer tempted to tidy a road trip into a better story should remember what that cost him.

What doesn’t hold up in John Steinbeck’s novels?

The sentimentality, first. Steinbeck loved his poor characters so openly that the prose leans on the reader in places, and the philosophizing the Times sneered at does turn up, in speeches characters make about the people and the land.

The women get less than the men. Curley’s wife, the only woman in Of Mice and Men with a speaking part, never gets a name of her own. She’s a type and a plot device, and she dies to set up the ending. Ma Joad is the exception, and a good one, holding her family together when the men fall apart.

And the allegory gets heavy. East of Eden retells Cain and Abel across two generations, and the characters sit down and discuss the parallel out loud. A reader who’d like to find it unaided doesn’t get the chance.

How should you mark John Steinbeck Day?

Read The Grapes of Wrath again if school spoiled it, and read the intercalary chapters slowly, since they show the technique at its best. Then find The Harvest Gypsies, all seven articles, and set them beside the novel. You’ll watch a reporter’s notes turn into a family.

If you write, go somewhere before you write about it. Talk to the people, take notes, find out what things cost and what people eat, then build the story on that floor. Watch the 1940 film too. It won Oscars for John Ford’s direction and for Jane Darwell as Ma Joad.

Steinbeck earned his place by doing the legwork, and a teenager’s grudge doesn’t change that. For another writer who learned his trade in newspapers, see Ernest Hemingway Day, and the full set of author birthdays is on the literary holidays calendar. If you’ve done the research and the story still won’t come together, book coaching is where I help writers make that turn.

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