It also changed Steinbeck permanently. The effects of writing 260,000 words in a single year “finished” him, he told Lawrence Clark Powell on January 24, 1939. After his long siege with the “Matter of the Migrants” (“I don’t know whether there is anything left of me,” he confided in October 1939), his “will to death” was so “strengthened” that by the end of the decade he was sick of writing fiction. It was a decision many critics and reviewers held against him for the rest of his life; they wanted him to write The Grapes of Wrath over and over again, which he refused to do. “The process of writing a book is the process of outgrowing it,” he told Herbert Sturz. “Disciplinary criticism comes too late. You aren’t going to write that one again anyway. When you start another—the horizons have receded and you are just as cold and frightened as you were with the first one.”
The unabated sales, the frenzied public clamor, and the vicious personal attacks over The Grapes of Wrath confirmed his worst fears about the fruits of success and pushed the tensions between the Steinbecks to the breaking point, a situation exacerbated by his willful romance with Gwyn Conger (they were wed from 1943 to 1948; the marriage produced two children) and his repeated absences in Hollywood and Mexico. Steinbeck did not quit writing, as he had threatened, but by the early 1940s he was no longer content to be the man he had once been. His letter of November 13, 1939, to former Stanford roommate Carlton Sheffield pulls no punches: “I’m finishing off a complete revolution…. The point of all this is that I must make a new start. I’ve worked the novel—I know it as far as I can take it. I never did think much of it—a clumsy vehicle at best. And I don’t know the form of the new but I know there is a new which will be adequate and shaped by the new thinking.” Steinbeck’s change from social realist to meta-fictionist was not caused by a bankruptcy of talent, a change of venue, or a failure of nerve or honesty. Rather, it was the backlash from an unprecedented and unanticipated success, a repugnant “posterity.” “I have always wondered why no author has survived a best-seller,” he told John Rice in a June 1939 interview. “Now I know. The publicity and fan-fare are just as bad as they would be for a boxer. One gets self-conscious and that’s the end of one’s writing.” His new writing lacked the aggressive bite of his late 1930s fiction, but it had the virtue of being different and varied. After 1940much of his important work centered on explorations of a newly discovered topic: the implications of individual choice and imaginative consciousness. A prophetic post-modernist, Steinbeck’s deep subject in Sea of Cortez (1941), Cannery Row (1945), East of Eden (1954), Sweet Thursday (1954), The Winter of Our Discontent (1961), and Journal of a Novel (1969) was the creative process itself, the epistemological dance of the law of thought and the law of things.
The Grapes of Wrath is arguably the most significant indictment ever made of the myth of California as a Promised Land. And ironically, as John Steinbeck composed this novel that extolled a social group’s capacity for survival in a hostile world, he was himself so unraveled in the process that the angle of vision, the vital signature, the moral indignation that made his art exemplary in the first place, could never be repeated with the same integrated force. Once his name became inseparably linked with the title of his most famous novel, Steinbeck could never escape the influence of his earlier life, but thankfully neither can we. Wherever human beings dream of a dignified and free society in which they can harvest the fruits of their own labor, The Grapes of Wrath’s radical voice of protest can still be heard. As a tale of dashed illusions, thwarted desires, inhuman suffering, and betrayed promises—all strung on a shimmering thread of hope—The Grapes of Wrath not only summed up the Depression era’s socially conscious art but, beyond that—for emotional urgency, evocative power, and sustained drama—has few peers in American fiction.
Suggestions for Further Reading
Primary works by John Steinbeck
Note: Steinbeck’s holograph manuscript of The Grapes of Wrath is in the Clifton Waller Barrett Library, Special Collections Department, University of Virginia Library, Charlottesville, Virginia. The typescript is in The Library of Congress Manuscript Division, Washington, D.C.
The Harvest Gypsies: On the Road to The Grapes of Wrath. Introduction by Charles Wollenberg. Berkeley, CA: Heyday Books, 1988.
Working Days: The Journals of The Grapes of Wrath, 1938–1941. Robert DeMott, ed. New York: The Viking Press, 1989.