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John Steinbeck in the 1930s: Living Under the Gun 1 IN ONE OF HIS MORE obscure works, The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights, John Steinbeck asserts that in any fight “the final weapon is the brain. All else is supplemental.” Perhaps. This analysis, however, didn’t stop Steinbeck from packing a pistol in the late 1930s, just in case he needed a little protection beyond what resided between his ears.1 It isn’t entirely clear what kind of firearm he had. But records suggest that he owned a Colt automatic, maybe two. In any case, beyond doubt is that Steinbeck felt his life was in danger—as stark a sign as any of the deep divide between Far Left and Far Right in California during the Great Depression and of the central role that Steinbeck played in this schism. As one account has it, Steinbeck was attending a picnic with some old friends from Salinas High during those hungry years when a white pickup truck jumped the curb and sent everyone scattering. Two men leaped out, and one thrust a gun into Steinbeck’s chest. The assailant told Steinbeck that “he better stop writing what he was writing—or else,” one of the picnic goers would recall much later.2 Over time, Steinbeck grew afraid that he might be set up for charges of drunk driving or falsely accused of rape. “I went to my attorney, and he said there was no way of stopping a charge but advised me of keeping a diary containing names of people I saw and when so that I could call an alibi if I had to,” Steinbeck explained, adding that his enemies were “capable of anything.”3 A few years later, after Steinbeck had moved to the East Coast, the menacing evidently continued. According to one story, he took a phone call Rick Wartzman PROLOGUE 2 Rick Wartzman in New York, and the voice on the other end of the line told him, “You may think you’re safe 3,000 miles away, but we’re coming for you.”4 It is difficult to think of another author—aside perhaps from Salman Rushdie, on whose head a fatwa would be placed a half century after Steinbeck ’s struggles—who has come under siege like this. And it certainly raises the question, Why would anyone want Steinbeck dead? The short answer, of course, boils down to four words: The Grapes of Wrath. Steinbeck’s 1939 classic, more than any book of its day, laid bare the inequities of capitalism and the mistreatment of migrant laborers who toiled in California’s farm fields. But it did so in a style that, for many readers, was more compelling and accessible than the proletarian literature of Dos Passos, Farrell, or Caldwell. The result: The Grapes of Wrath catapulted to the top of the national best-seller list in 1939 (with some 430,000 copies sold), and it was also one of America’s top-ten favorites for 1940, when the film version of the novel appeared.5 Tom Joad, the book’s protagonist, was quickly on his way to becoming an indelible American icon. Men of the day even took to donning a hat called the “Joad Cap.”6 Yet it wasn’t simply Steinbeck’s gripping prose or his immense popularity that incensed those on the right. Their intense reaction was very much the product of a particular time and place. California had been boiling over politically and ideologically for the better part of a decade.7 The state has always been the home of extremes—like the rest of America, “only more so,” as Wallace Stegner famously put it. In 1934 this quality manifested itself in the gubernatorial campaign of Upton Sinclair, the muckraking writer and longtime Socialist who promised to end poverty in California. At the heart of this pledge was a quixotic fiscal scheme that involved putting private factories under government supervision and allowing workers to own what they had manufactured. Small farmers, for their part, would then bring crops to the city, where they’d be “made available to the factory workers in exchange for the products of their labor.”8 Although everyone from William Randolph Hearst to President Franklin D. Roosevelt derided Sinclair’s plan, Uppie (as he was called) won the Democratic primary and almost triumphed in the general election. All in all, said Jerry Voorhis, who would eventually become a Democratic congressman from the...

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