Private Narratives / Public Texts: Steinbeck’s Journals

Treating his journaling as a habitual tic necessary to the technology of his novel writing, rather than as a co-opted or anomalous venture, allows insights into Steinbeck’s self-created authorial history—that elusive entity approaching what scholar Leigh Gilmore has, in a different connection, handily called “autobiographics.” Steinbeck wasn’t explicitly embarked on a project of confessional “life writing” in these journal texts, but even so in each one he manages to fashion a revealing and dramatic (though often piecemeal and covert) inside narrative that historicizes three different eras in his creative and personal life.