John Steinbeck’s Working Days

Straight Up Fiction

By Robert Cavaliere

I keep a notebook on process, not a diary. The distinction feels important, a matter of orientation. A diary faces the self; a notebook faces the work. It’s a companion in the room, a silent partner to the blank page. I write in it to remember who I am when I’m writing, to argue with myself, to map the daily, often glacial, progress of making something from nothing. It’s a hedge against despair, a ledger of small faith.

Lately, feeling adrift in my own work, I went looking for company. Not in the present, crowded literary moment, but in the past. I pulled down a slender, unassuming volume from a high shelf: Working Days: The Journals of The Grapes of Wrath, edited by Robert DeMott. It is the record of John Steinbeck’s daily wrestle with the book that would become his monument, penned between the summer and fall of 1938. I wasn’t seeking the novel itself—that “social movement” between covers, that “Great American Novel” now too often shrugged at—but its ghost: the doubts, the logistics, the sheer mundane human grind that preceded the myth.

What I found was a mirror, and a relief. The great, hulking vessel of The Grapes of Wrath was built not in a single, heroic surge of inspiration, but in a series of small, stubborn, anxious days. Here was Steinbeck, at the peak of his powers (he would win the Pulitzer in 1940, the Nobel in 1962), writing to himself on June 13, 1938: “I only hope the book is some good.” On another day, he frets about the rent, about his dog, about the “laziness” seeping into his prose. He sets a daily quota of 2,000 words and berates himself for missing it. He is, in short, a writer. Not a statue, but a working man at a desk.

"I only hope the book is some good."
– Steinbeck, June 13, 1938

This is the profound solace of the process journal. It democratizes genius. It reveals that the monumental was built brick by sweaty brick, and that the bricklayer was often tired, hungry, and plagued by the conviction that the wall was leaning. Steinbeck’s journal is a manual for perseverance. It shows a man creating a scaffold of discipline—the word count, the isolated room, the refusal of distraction—to scale a cliff face of his own choosing. The subject was vast: the migration of the “poor and hungry” from the Dust Bowl to a promised land that despised them. The responsibility weighed on him. “I am not a writer,” he insists to his journal. “I’ve been fooling myself and other people.” The sentiment is so achingly familiar it feels like a secret handshake across the decades.

Steinbeck’s self-doubt, however, was never nihilistic; it was the engine of his integrity. To understand this, you have to go back a year before the journal, to a moment of even more stark professional crisis. In 1937, his publisher was eagerly awaiting a satirical novel called Laffitte’s Lettuceberg. Steinbeck finished it, read it, and deemed it a fraud. He did not quietly revise it. He did not send it off with a shrug, knowing his name would sell it. He destroyed it and wrote his editor, Pat Covici, a letter of breathtaking artistic conscience.

“This book is finished and it is a bad book, and I must get rid of it,” he wrote. “It can’t be printed. It is bad because it is not honest.” He admitted the book could sell 30,000 copies, that many would like it, that he had built clever arguments to himself for its worth. But none of that mattered. “Not once in the writing of it have I felt the curious warm pleasure that comes when the work has gone well,” he confessed. “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.” He concluded with a line that has haunted me since I first read it: “I’m not ready to be a hack yet. Maybe later.”

"I’m not ready to be a hack yet. Maybe later."
– Steinbeck, in a letter to his publisher

The letter is a moral lightning bolt. Here is the core of it: the “curious warm pleasure” of honest work. Not acclaim, not sales, not critical laurels, but the private, physiological feeling of a thing fitting, of a truth being squarely met. It is the antithesis of the “smart aleck book,” the clever book, the book written from a place of cynical distance. By torching Laffitte’s Lettuceberg, Steinbeck cleared the ground for The Grapes of Wrath. He chose the harder, more honest path, the one that led toward empathy rather than ridicule, toward the “heroic struggle” he saw in the dispossessed.

This gets to the heart of why Steinbeck feels so urgently relevant now, and why my East Coast, often irony-saturated literary sensibility finds such gravity in his Western, earnest gaze. In April 1939, as The Grapes of Wrath was being released, Steinbeck drafted a script for an NBC radio program. In it, he channeled the 17th-century critic Nicolas Boileau’s dictum that “kings, gods, and heroes only were fit subjects for literature.” Then he updated it for his time:

“Present-day kings aren't very inspiring. The gods are on a vacation, and about the only heroes left are the scientists and the poor… And since our race admires gallantry, the writer will deal with it where he finds it. He finds it in the struggling poor now.”

Where do we find our gallantry today? The gods are still on vacation. Our kings—be they tech oligarchs, media moguls, or political strongmen—are, if anything, less inspiring. But the struggling are everywhere, in new configurations and ancient plights. We have witnessed historic migrations, climatic and economic displacements, struggles for dignity in warehouses, hospitals, and classrooms. The “heroic struggle with starvation, death, or imprisonment” continues, its settings and stakes ever-evolving. Yet so much of our dominant literary culture seems wary of looking at it straight, of naming the struggle heroic for fear of being called sentimental, didactic, or naive.

We prefer the fragment to the saga, the ironic to the earnest, the technically dazzling to the emotionally direct. We’ve been taught that feeling is suspect, that to write with open heart is to write a “soap opera.” But Steinbeck’s legacy, and particularly the testimony of his journal, argues that the greatest technical feat is the marshaling of craft in service of a profound empathy. His prose is not sparse like Hemingway’s; it is muscular, rhythmic, at times biblical, rising to meet the scale of the tragedy it documents. It does not look away from sentiment, because the conditions of his characters’ lives were overwhelmingly, outrageously sentimental—in the true sense of the word: full of feeling.

Reading his journal, I am struck by his self-imposed isolation, the sparse room where he lived with the Joads day and night. “Unless a writer is capable of solitude, he should leave books alone and go into the theater,” he wrote. This solitude wasn’t misanthropy; it was the necessary condition for that deep listening, for the kind of attention that allows a writer to disappear into other lives. It is a solitude under constant assault today, by the psychic rent of the gig economy, by the infinite scroll of digital distraction, by a publishing ecosystem that demands the writer be a brand manager. Steinbeck worried about money, too—his journal is peppered with financial anxiety—but he protected the sanctity of the writing hours with a ferocity we might consider radical.

So, what do we do with this? We are not all Steinbeck, and our moment is not the 1930s. But the questions his process poses are timeless. What is your subject? Do you admire it? Are you writing toward that “curious warm pleasure” of honest work, or are you building a clever argument for something you don’t believe? When you are stuck, as I have been, is it because you’ve lost the thread of that honest feeling?

My notebook is open now. It is not a diary. In it, I am trying to answer Steinbeck’s unspoken challenge. I am writing not to be smart, but to be clear. Not to impress, but to connect. I am looking for the gallantry in my own field of vision, which happens to be this crowded, anxious, striving East Coast city, full of its own invisible migrations and quiet desperations. It is harder to see than the Dust Bowl, perhaps, but it is no less there.

The final lesson of Working Days is that the great works are not born great. They are built. They are the sum of daily choices: the choice to show up, the choice to scrap the dishonest page, the choice to look at the struggling world with awe rather than contempt. Steinbeck’s journal is the chronicle of those choices. It is a companion for the long haul, a voice in your ear saying, I was tired too. I was doubtful too. But I did not look away. Keep going.

"My whole work drive has been aimed at making people understand each other."
– Steinbeck

He finished his marathon on October 26, 1938, writing in the journal: “Finished this day—and I hope to God it’s good.” The rest, as they say, is history. But the history is not the point. The point is the hundred days before the finish, each one a struggle, each one a brick in the wall. The point is that it can be done. You just have to start with the truth in front of you, and the will to set it down straight.