#The pearl john steinbeck citation full#

Boileau said that Kings, Gods and Heroes only were fit subjects for literature.

Journal entry (11 June 1938), published in Working Days : The Journals of The Grapes of Wrath, 1938-1941 (1990) edited by Robert DeMott.

For the first time I am working on a book that is not limited and that will take every bit of experience and thought and feeling that I have.

Letter to Elizabeth Otis, once he had begun The Grapes of Wrath (1 June 1938).

I only feel whole and well when it is this way.

It is a nice thing to be working and believing in my work again.

mid-May 1938) as quoted in Conversations with John Steinbeck (1988) edited by Thomas Fensch, p.

Letter to Elizabeth Otis, expressing dissatisfaction with L'Affaire Lettuceburg - a satire he abandoned in favor of work on what became The Grapes of Wrath ( c.

If I can't do better I have slipped badly.

#The pearl john steinbeck citation full#

It was full of tricks to make people ridiculous. My father would have called it a smart-alec book. … My whole work drive has been aimed at making people understand each other and then I deliberately write this book, the aim of which is to cause hatred through partial understanding. One you never saw because I burned it the day I finished it. I've written three books now that were dishonest because they were less than the best that I could do. In satire you have to restrict the picture and I just can't do satire. Oh! the incidents all happened but - I'm not telling as much of the truth about them as I know.

You see this book is finished and it is a bad book and I must get rid of it.

Letter to Elizabeth Otis (1938), as quoted in Conversations with John Steinbeck (1988) edited by Thomas Fensch, p.

… Funny how mean and little books become in the face of such tragedies. … The death of children by starvation in our valleys is simply staggering. But the crops of any part of this state could not be harvested without them. The states and counties will give them nothing because they are outsiders. I've tied into the thing from the first and I must get down there and see it and see if I can do something to knock these murderers on the heads.ĭo you know what they're afraid of? They think that if these people are allowed to live in camps with proper sanitary facilities they will organize, and that is the bugbear of the large landowner and the corporate farmer. In one tent there were twenty people quarantined for small pox and two of the women are to have babies in that tent this week. The government is trying to feed them and get medical attention to them, with the Fascist group of utilities and banks and huge growers sabotaging the thing all along the line, and yelling for a balanced budget. … There are five thousand families starving to death over there, not just hungry but actually starving.

I must go over into the interior valleys.

Journal entry (1938), quoted in the Introduction to a 1994 edition of Of Mice and Men by Susan Shillinglaw, p.

There is writing promoting social change, writing punishing injustice, writing in celebration of heroism, but always that base theme. Knowing a man well never leads to hate and nearly always leads to love. Try to understand men, if you understand each other you will be kind to each other.

In every bit of honest writing in the world … there is a base theme.

The discipline of the written word punishes both stupidity and dishonesty.

“In Awe of Words,” The Exonian, 75th anniversary edition, Exeter University (1930).One of our ancient methods is to tell a story begging the listener to say - and to feel - ”Yes, that’s the way it is, or at least that’s the way I feel it. We spend all our life trying to be less lonesome. In the endless war against weakness and despair, these are the bright rally-flags of hope and of emulation. The writer is delegated to declare and to celebrate man's proven capacity for greatness of heart and spirit - for gallantry in defeat - for courage, compassion and love.