Abstract
After marrying Elaine Anderson Scott, Steinbeck writes the book he considers a major work—winding the history of his mother’s family through California history. Neither the novel or the film made from it are as successful as Steinbeck expects them to be, so he does not write the sequel. He instead writes plays and film scenarios, stories, essays, and travel essays; Elaine accompanies him to many parts of the world. They settle in New York, where her theater connections prove interesting to him. Later they buy a small cottage in Sag Harbor.
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Notes
- 1.
Another pivotal scene of Cathy at her worst occurs when Steinbeck describes her slow poisoning of her mentor Faye. Once she has convinced the owner of the “better” house of ill repute that she has become like a mother to her—so that Faye has left her entire estate to “Kate”—she begins a steady poisoning (of both Faye and herself) that will eventually sicken her and kill Faye. Kate has also shown in her sadistic sexual dealings with her customers that she enjoys other people’s suffering. Her behavior toward Faye fits that “inhuman” pattern as well.
- 2.
Robert DeMott in his Steinbeck’s Typewriter made the strongest case for the influence of Moby-Dick on the character of Cathy, suggesting that from Melville Steinbeck had come to acknowledge “the malevolence in the universe” (DeMott Typewriter 77).
- 3.
In Steinbeck’s Reading, DeMott calls him “a negotiator of inner vision and outer resources, a mediator between internal compulsion and external forces” (DeMott Reading xxx).
- 4.
Timmerman continues, “While not forsaking his essential naturalist view, in the late 1930s and early 1940s, Steinbeck began to define more clearly an agency of evil or wrong. This was manifested in the huge nameless conglomerate of The Grapes of Wrath and in more particularly agents such as the doctor and the pearl buyers in The Pearl” (Timmerman Eden 91–92).
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Wagner-Martin, L. (2017). East of Eden and the 1950s. In: John Steinbeck. Literary Lives. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-55382-9_9
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