“Ideas are
like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon
you have a dozen.”
John Steinbeck
(1902 - 1968)
Curious facts about:(1902 - 1968)
For awhile,
Steinbeck tried to make a go out of a writing career in New York City, but it
just didn’t pan out for him. He was working full time as a construction worker
and could only find some passing work as a newspaper reporter. Steinbeck
decided to take a job in Lake Tahoe as a caretaker and that’s when he wrote his
first novel in his spare time. He didn’t receive any decent reviews of his
first novels, however, and didn’t find any real commercial success until 1935.
When it was
first published, The Grapes of Wrath was banned by certain libraries. The book was
burned in several districts, with censors citing coarse language, references to
sex, and anti-establishment tones as the reason for its suppression. The suggestion
that capitalism could result in poverty and forced migration was considered
sympathetic to communism.
Steinbeck
hand-wrote all his manuscripts---in pencil---on lined yellow paper. Steinbeck used
as many as 60 pencils each day. The pages were then typed out by staff at Viking
Press, his publisher. According to Steinbeck's own records, East of Eden
took one year of uninterrupted writing, 25 dozen pencils and about 36 reams of
paper to complete.
For a time,
Steinbeck and his first wife, Carol Henning, kept two mallard ducks in the
fishpond of their California home. Unfortunately, the ducks, named Aqua and
Vita, were later sold so the couple could afford writing paper for Steinbeck’s
manuscript, To a God Unknown.