Did you know...Steinbeck edition

For all I've written on all manner of subjects, there's been surprising little about Steinbeck. We've been weaving together information about his life, his writing, and his family, but most of it hasn't transferred to my writing. Here's your next 10 list, and it's by no means exhaustive.


-Steinbeck's work had very few crossouts. When he starting writing, he felt the words stream from his thoughts. According to his first wife (Susan says she's a reliable source), he lost his first copy The Gift, part one of The Red Pony. They found it a year later when they moved; it had fallen behind a couch. 6 words differed between the first copy and the copy that he rewrote from memory.

(Steinbeck and his first wife, Carol, lived in this home in Pacific Grove during the 1930s. His sister later lived there, and it's now owned by her granddaughter, Steinbeck's great-niece. She doesn't live there fulltime, but she showed us around, and she'd like to fix it up. For those of you worried about the condition of your old home, this one isn't in great shape. It was built without a foundation, and it has 'single-plank' walling, meaning it's like a fence. This is the room where Steinbeck lost the manuscript, although I imagine it's a different couch.)

-Steinbeck wrote all of his works longhand. In early years, his wife typed for him, and in later years, he mailed his manuscripts directly to the publisher. The one exceptions to this is The Wayward Bus, where he used a dictophone.

(Primary source of Steinbeck's journalistic writings from WWII. He generally wrote in ledger books like this one.)

-Steinbeck liked to work with his hands as a contrast to the 3-5 hours he spent writing each morning. Among other activities, he spent two winters caretaking a property on Lake Tahoe, he built his own fireplace in his Pacific Grove house, and he carved a Timshel box for his East of Eden manuscript.

(The fireplace Steinbeck built in the Pacific Grove home.)

-The original title of Of Mice and Men was "Something that Happened." This fits with John Steinbeck and Ed Rickett's ideal of nonteleological thinking, which is essentially describing "life as lived" rather than asking why or drawing conclusions. There are three general threads that appear in most of Steinbeck's work. The first is the importance of place to the setting. The second is a distrust of the dominant culture. The third is the element of homes and domesticity. They weren't generally traditional homes, but people banding together in a domestic way. (A fourth, less important, strand is physical labor.)

-Keeping the previous statement in mind, Steinbeck wrote very little about happy marriages or about communication between spouses. Rather, he modeled strong male friendships. Steinbeck forged a new path in American literature. There's a history of male fiction that values individualism. Men go out on their own, and they conquer an internal or external foe. (Moby Dick, Call of the Wild, Huck Finn, etc.) Women stay in the home in parlor novels. If you consider The Grapes of Wrath, and in particular Tom Joad's story, it's one of an unrepentant murderer westering...with his mother, and gathering around the hearth of the truck.

(Family photos on the wall of the Pacific Grove home.)

-Many of the places, characters, and events of Steinbeck's stories were drawn from real life. For those who are particularly familiar with Steinbeck's work, this includes the lynching in The Murder, Johnny Bear mimicry abilities, the male rattlesnake request in The Snake, Olive's terrifying flight reward in East of Eden, and the suggestion to put bells on the toilet paper rolls in The Grapes of Wrath.

(Jamie looking into the castle from the story Flight. It stands on someone's front lawn, and it's still standing through "benign neglect." Note the castle rock from the story in the distance.)

(Ironically, the Pastures of Heaven is now a gated community. We snuck in behind a car that belonged. One of the houses in it was on foreclosure for 1.3 million.)

-John Steinbeck thought greatly about the pacing for his novels. He purposely created slow epics with factual intercalory chapters (good vocab word, right?) for East of Eden and Grapes of Wrath. Susan suggested that we notice different things when we slow down, and asked how many people pay for yoga for just this purpose. The pacing creates a heft to the novel that is impossible in short stories, even those with sentimental plots.

-Steinbeck generally was happy to let others adapt his work, and he was hands-off in letting their creative visions shine. This includes Broadway plays and movies. Even works that substantially differed from his original ideas were fine by him. His was "a household name" in the 1940s largely due to film adaptations.

-The one work that he was embarrassed to be associated with was Alfred Hitchcock's Lifeboat. He thought that others took his story treatment and created a caricature of a black man.

(Steinbeck's family home in Salinas. Volunteers have preserved it and now serve lunch there.)

-Steinbeck never wanted children; he said his books were his children. His second wife, Gwen, had two children, named Thom and John. He was "loyal to them, but didn't quite know what to with them." When Thom was 5, Steinbeck told a reporter that he couldn't wait to teach him to drive a jeep. He wasn't thinking indefinitely in the future.