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shape.
    From late May 1938, when he put the first words of the new novel to paper (“To the red country and part of the gray country of Oklahoma, the last rains came gently, and they did not cut the scarred earth”), through the winter of 1939, when the last of the corrections and editorial details were settled (“I meant, Pat, to print
all all all
the verses of the Battle Hymn. They’re all pertinent and they’re all exciting. And the music if you can”),
The Grapes of Wrath
was a task that fully commanded his artistic energy and attention. Everything he had written earlier—from his 1936
Nation
article, “Dubious Battle in California,” through “Starvation Under the Orange Trees,” an April 1938 essay that functioned as the epilogue to
Their Blood Is Strong
, and even a poignant short story called “Breakfast” that he included in
The Long Valley
(New York: The Viking Press, 1938)—became grist for his final attempt. “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,” he wrote in
Working Days
on June 11, 1938. From his numerous field travels with Tom Collins, and from countless hours spent talking to migrant people, working beside them, listening to them, and sharing their problems, Steinbeck summoned all the concrete details of human form, language, and landscape that ensure artistic verisimilitude, as well as the subtler imaginative nuances of dialect, idiosyncratic tics, habits, and gestures that animate fictional characterization. “Yesterday it seemed to me that the people were coming to life. I hope so. These people must be intensely alive the whole time. I was worried about Rose of Sharon. She has to emerge if only as a silly pregnant girl now. Noah I think I’ll lose for the time being and Uncle John and maybe for a while Casy. But I want to keep Tom and Ma together. Lots of people walking along the roads in this season. I can hear their voices,” he wrote in
Working Days
on July 8.
    From the outset, in creating the Joad family to occupy the narrative chapters of
The Grapes of Wrath
, Steinbeck endowed his novel with a specific human context, a felt emotional quality, and a dramatic dimensionhis earlier versions lacked: “Begin the detailed description of the family I am to live with. Must take time in the description, detail, detail, looks, clothes, gestures…. We have to know these people. Know their looks and their nature,” he reminded himself on June 17. By conceiving the Joads as “an over-essence of people,” Steinbeck elevated the entire history of the migrant struggle into the realm of art, and he joined the mythic western journey with latently heroic characters, according to this key notation on June 30: “Yesterday… I went over the whole of the book in my head—fixed on the last scene, huge and symbolic, toward which the whole story moves. And that was a good thing, for it was a reunderstanding of the dignity of the effort and the mightyness of the theme. I feel very small and inadequate and incapable but I grew again to love the story which is so much greater than I am. To love and admire the people who are so much stronger and purer and braver than I am.”
    At times during that summer, though, his task seemed insurmountable, because he kept losing the “threads” that tied him to his characters. “Was ever a book written under greater difficulty?” Nearly every day brought unsolicited requests for his name and his time, including unscheduled visitors, unanticipated disruptions, and reversals. Domestic and conjugal relations with Carol were often strained. House guests trooped to Los Gatos all summer, including family members and long-time friends Carlton Sheffield, Ed Ricketts, Ritch and Tal Lovejoy, plus new acquaintances Broderick Crawford, Charlie Chaplin, and Pare Lorentz. As if that weren’t enough to erode the novelist’s composure, the Steinbecks’ tiny house on