John Steinbeck — Journal of a Novel — The East of Eden Letters
A nudge to write
John Steinbeck has been a favorite author of mine since I first read The Grapes of Wrath, a required reading for my college orientation at the University of California, Berkeley in the summer of 1963. It was a pleasant diversion from the sometimes intense preparations for college.
No one in my family had attended college, so I would be the first. I had no idea what to expect and neither did anyone in my immediate circle. At the time, I knew practically nothing about Steinbeck and very little about any of the other famous authors except William Shakespeare and Robert Frost, and I knew them only through the plays I had read or seen and their poems.
I loved the way Steinbeck’s novel pulled me away from my real world and into his imaginary one. It was great escape literature, and it focused attention on the plight of people trying to escape the dust bowl of the Midwest during the Great Depression.
I eventually read most of Steinbeck’s work.
When I lived in Cupertino, California, and occasionally visited Monterey, I read Cannery Row. I loved reading about those quirky fictional characters that inhabited the row: Henry the painter looking for scraps of wood to build his boat, the ladies from Dora Flood’s bordello…
