John Steinbeck in a letter to Elizabeth Otis* ~ Lao Gatos, October, 1939

"It's a beautiful morning and I am just sitting in it and enjoying it.  Everything is ripe now, apples, pears, grapes, walnuts.  Carol has made pickles and chutney, canned tomatoes.  Prunes and raisins are on the drying trays.  The cellar smells of apples and wine.  The berries are ripe and every bird in the country is here ~ slightly tipsy and very noisy.  The frogs are singing about a rain coming but they can be wrong.  It's nice.

"...Grapes* dropped from the head of the list to second place out here and about time too.  It is far too far when Jack Benny mentions it in his program.  Altogether may be some kind of new existence is opening up.  I don't know.  The last year has been a nightmare all in all.  But now I'm ordering a lot of books to begin study.  And I'll work in the laboratory...

"One nice thing to think of is the speed of obscurity.  Grapes is not first now.  In a month it will be off the list and in six months I'll be forgotten."  ~ Love John


*The Grapes of Wrath, 1939, won Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
*Elizabeth of MacIntosh & Otis, literary agents.
Source:  John Steinbeck A Life in Letters, Penguin Books, 1975.  (b. 1902, d. 1968)