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And I would be doing Pat a greater injury in letting him print it than I would by destroying it. Not once in the writing of it have I felt the curious warm pleasure that comes when work is going well. 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. My father would have called it a smart-alec book. It was full of tricks to make people ridiculous. If I can’t do better I have slipped badly. And that I won’t admit, yet.
    ... It is sloppily written because I never cared about it.... I had got smart and cocky you see. I had forgotten that I hadn’t learned to write books, that I will never learn to write them. A book must be a life that lives all of itself and this one doesn’t do that.... I beat poverty for a good many years and I’ll be damned if I’ll go down at the first little whiff of success....
    I think this book will be a good lesson for me. I think I got to believing critics—I thought I could write easily and that anything I touched would be good simply because I did it. Well any such idea conscious or unconscious is exploded for some time to come. I’m in little danger now of believing my own publicity....
    Again I’m sorry. But I’m not ready to be a hack yet. Maybe later. Carol feels the same way about it. 14
     
    The fourth and last stage of Steinbeck’s writing culminated in The Grapes of Wrath. His conscience squared, Steinbeck stood ready to embark on the longest sustained writing job of his life. From late May 1938, when he struck 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 which, as the main section of Working Days makes clear, fully commanded his energy. 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 —became grist for his final attempt. From his numerous field travels with Tom Collins, and from countless hours of talking to migrant people, working beside them, listening to them, and sharing their problems, Steinbeck drew all the concrete details of human form, language, and landscape that ensure artistic verisimilitude, as well as the subtler nuances of dialect, idiosyncratic tics, habits, and gestures, which animate fictional characterization. But the choreography of details alone, the dance of his ear and eye, won’t fully account for the metamorphosis from “The Harvest Gypsies” to The Grapes of Wrath.
    Steinbeck’s leap from right-minded competency to inspired vision was the result of one linked experience that hit him so hard it called forth every ounce of his moral indignation, social anger, and pity. In late February and early March Steinbeck witnessed the deplorable conditions at Visalia where thousands of human beings, flooded out of their shelters, were starving to death: “the water is a foot deep in the tents and the children are up on the beds and there is no food and no fire, and the county has taken off all the nurses because ‘the problem is so great that we can’t do anything about it.’ So they do nothing” (Steinbeck and Wallsten, eds., Steinbeck: A Life in Letters, p. 161). In the company of Tom Collins, photographer Horace Bristol, and other Farm Security Administration personnel, Steinbeck worked day and night for nearly two weeks (sometimes dropping to sleep in the mud from exhaustion) to help relieve the misery, though of course no aid seemed