Thursday, April 17, 2014

"he had this great book that he wanted to write"



A day of struggles with writing, knowing you have a story eating away at you from the inside, a global tale, and Steinbeck and the 75th anniversary of The Grapes of Wrath:

"One of the amazing things about the book is that Steinbeck knew that he had an epic that he was going to write. He spent months researching it. He spent much of the mid and late '30s with migrant workers. He wrote a long series of six articles for the San Francisco News, and he knew that he had the raw material of an American epic. He was really almost kind of crushed by the awareness that he had this great book that he wanted to write, this large tale that was both personally but also societal, that was sort of economic but also moral. 
And he was plagued by the pressure of it as he's writing it. In his journals, you can tell that he is really weighted by the idea of how to get this right. And he wrote about it: I've done my darnedest to rip a reader's nerves to rags. I tried to write this book the way lives are being lived, not the way books are written. He wanted the book to become a part of the culture immediately and it did. I mean, if you think about the idea that a major industry was burning this book and you - you know, you move forward to 2014, that's quite astonishing. Can you imagine a novel that would move a major industry to burn it? That speaks to how much of a nerve Steinbeck was hitting in." - Steve Almond

The lingering echoing words, "kind of crushed by the awareness that he had this great book that he wanted to write, this large tale that was both personally but also societal, that was sort of economic but also moral. "