John Steinbeck

Brian St. Pierre.

“Steinbeck's Timeless Tale of Migrant Suffering.”

San Francisco Chronicle,

26 March 1989,

Section 4, pp. 3–4.

… From Working Days, the journals Steinbeck kept while writing The Grapes of Wrath, comes the astonishing fact that he wrote this dense and complex novel in 100 days, by hand, under a fair amount of duress: His publisher was going bankrupt, a noisy housing project was being built next door, he and his wife Carol were ill at times, and he was plagued to the point of depression by doubts about his talent. No wonder he wrote, “I am ready to go to work and I am glad to get into other lives and escape from mine for a while.”

Steinbeck undertook this journal to make himself accountable (“If a day is skipped it will show glaringly on this record”), and as editor Robert DeMott notes, it is a “hermetic-even claustrophobic” diary of the making of a book as well as its attendant terrors and distractions.

Many of the entries are rambling and banal, as many of anyone's days would be, but the earnest, die hard effort of writing and the importance of the task have great cumulative power: “I grew again to love and admire the people who are so much stronger and purer and braver than I am,” he wrote of the migrants.

DeMott has surrounded the journal entries with a biographical introduction, commentary and illuminating notes, building a good book onto a narrow foundation.