a delicate sympathy for mortal man’s transient nobility and beastliness that I believe no other writer possesses. Surely we have no other writer so likely to catch on paper the inner things that most people don’t know about war—the pitiableness of bravery, the vulgarity, the grotesquely warped values, the childlike tenderness in all of us.

At its best, all of Steinbeck’s journalism captures with unflagging empathy the commonplace yet telling angle or story. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, the writer turned to journalism with greater and greater frequency, willing to finance trips abroad by writing articles, eager to see for himself what events absorbed the world. In the early 1950s he wrote most of his travel articles, some of the best of these on an American in Paris in 1954, published in Le Figaro. In 1966, a weary and unwell Steinbeck traveled to Vietnam to witness war once again. The record of this trip is sketched in a remarkable series, “Letters to Alicia.” Steinbeck, argues biographer Jackson Benson, needed “to be on the scene, where things were going on—it was part of his restlessness—which was similar to the compulsion, or perhaps addiction, that some journalists have to rush to the eye of the storm.”

III

In 1946 and 1947, John Steinbeck experienced personal and professional anguish that mirrored the dark uncertainty of the emerging cold war face-off. As his newly purchased house on East Seventy-eighth Street in New York City was being remodeled around his “working cellar … gray concrete walls and cement floors and pipes overhead,” his marriage was slowly crumbling. With bravado, he declared himself happy in his four-year union to Gwyn Conger, content with his status as a father to two young sons. But the truth of his situation was far less sanguine: he had difficulties sustaining interest in his new novel, The Wayward Bus, published in February 1947; he anxiously sought to create the perfect working space, even toying with the idea—as he notes in a diary he kept for the year—of writing in a completely dark room. In nuanced phrases, he voices his suspicions that Gwyn was having an affair. And with characteristic force, he blasts the world outside his study:

Our leaders seem to be nuts. If ever a nation was being dragged over the edge of folly into destruction this is it. God help us! … [Times are] growing more complicated to the point which a man can’t even see his own life let alone control it. What a time. What a time. We will have our nice house put in to get it bombed. But so will everyone else. So I go on writing an unimportant novel that carefully avoids anything timely….

Throughout this dark time, the novelist at odds with both wife and world toiled sporadically on other projects, interrupting the slow progress on “The Bus.” His writing took on an increasingly insistent moral edge as he attempted to come to terms with the irrationality and complexity of postwar America. On October 15, 1946, he sketched a piece called “The Witches of Salem,” a synopsis of an idea for a motion picture “intended to be a film treatise on public hysteria and injustice.” From that aborted project came another, “The Last Joan,” a play that “has to do with witchcraft. And that in a modern sense we better heed what the present Joan tells us of the atom bomb, because it’s the last time that we’ll have a Joan to tell us what to do.” Behind all of these projects and voiced dissatisfaction with contemporary life was, undoubtedly, the urge to escape—his country, his unhappy home situation. In 1945, he’d turned down a request to cover the war trials in Europe. A trip to the Soviet Union, sponsored by the New York Herald Tribune, promised relief. He’d been there once briefly in the summer of 1937 with his first wife, Carol (not 1936, as he notes in the book), and he wanted to see how the country had been transformed by war.