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where the energy comes from. Now to work, only now it isn’t work any more“ (Entry #97). With that visitation, that benediction, Steinbeck arrived at the intersection of novel and journal, a luminous point where the life of the writer and the creator of life merge. The terms of his complex investment fulfilled, Steinbeck needed only a few more days to finish his novel.
    In matters of form, style, and execution Steinbeck was persuaded or emboldened by another host of haunting voices and visions. Especially in Grapes’ digressive intercalary chapters, Steinbeck drew on the fluid linguistic style of John Hargrave’s novel, Summer Time Ends (1935), the daring, elastic form of John Dos Passos’s U S A trilogy (1937), the narrative tempo of Pare Lorentz’s radio drama, Ecce Homo!, and the sequential quality of Lorentz’s films, The Plow that Broke the Plains (1936) and The River (1937), the stark visual effects of Dorothea Lange’s F.S.A
    photographs of Dust Bowl Oklahoma and California migrant life, the poetic/photographic counterpoint of Archibald MacLeish’s Land of the Free (1938), the reverberant rhythms of the King James Bible, the inspired mood of classical music, the poignant refrains of American folk music, the elevated timbre of the Greek epics, and the biological impetus of his own phalanx, or group-man, theory. Steinbeck’s conscious and unconscious borrowings, echoes, and reverberations throughout The Grapes of Wrath came from a constellation of artistic, social, and intellectual sources so varied no single reckoning can do them justice. All of these elements—and more—entered the crucible of his imagination and allowed Steinbeck to transform the weight of his whole life into the new book. In The Grapes of Wrath the multiple streams of subjective experience, ameliorism, graphic realism, and symbolic form gather to create the “truly American book” (Entry #18) Steinbeck had planned.
    As a result of shifting political emphases, the enlightened recommendations of the La Follette Committee (that the National Labor Relations Act include farm workers), the effects of loosened labor laws (California’s discriminatory “anti-migrant” law, established in 1901, was struck down by the Supreme Court in 1941), the creation of compulsory military service, and the inevitable recruitment of migrant families into defense plant and shipyard jobs caused by the booming economy of World War II (California growers soon complained of an acute shortage of seasonal labor), the particular set of epochal conditions that crystallized Steinbeck’s awareness in the first place passed from his view (though not necessarily ours, if we witness the continuing struggles of Mexican-American farm laborers since then). Like other momentous American novels that embody the bitter, often tragic, transition from one way of life to another, The Grapes of Wrath possessed, among its other attributes, perfect timing. Its appearance permanently changed the literary landscape of the United States.
     
    The Grapes of Wrath also changed Steinbeck forever. Many “have speculated,” his biographer writes, “about what happened to change Steinbeck after The Grapes of Wrath. One answer is that what happened was the writing of the novel itself” (Benson, True Adventures of John Steinbeck, p. 392). Here, perhaps, is a private tragedy, a cautionary tale, to parallel the tragic aspects of his fiction: an isolated individual writer composed a novel that extolled a social group’s capacity for survival in a hostile economic world, but he was himself so nearly unraveled in the process that the unique qualities—the angle of vision, the vital signature, the moral indignation—that made his art exemplary in the first place could never be repeated with the same integrated force. Although he published prolifically after The Grapes of Wrath, it would be twelve years before Steinbeck summoned the resources to attempt, in East of Eden, another “big” book