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With the onset of the 1940s, the world had altered its step. “Things are very bad in the world, aren’t they,” Steinbeck wrote to his editor Pascal Covici in 1940. “Everything seems to be going to pot, everything as conceived before I mean. Maybe out of the fighting and the struggle there will come some kind of new conceptions. I don’t know.” Throughout the 1940s, John Steinbeck sought “new conceptions” for his own work. He began the decade composing a scientific travelog, ended it working on his most personal and experimental novel, East of Eden. A Russian Journal is part of his ongoing effort to discover fresh material, to forge new literary forms, to rekindle in his writing, as he wrote in his journal during a dark moment in 1946, “the glory that shadows everything else and that makes me seem like a grey and grizzled animal now…. So long since I’ve done the old kind of work—so long.”

In the late 1930s, John Steinbeck had found that glory while writing his masterpiece, The Grapes of Wrath (1939). For a decade prior, he had been perfecting his craft and publishing in quick succession the works most often associated with John Steinbeck, social historian: the short stories in The Long Valley (written in the early 1930s, collected in 1938); the comic tour de force, Tortilla Flat (1935), and the labor trilogy, In Dubious Battle (1936), Of Mice and Men (1937), and The Grapes of Wrath. By the end of the Depression John Steinbeck, novelist of the people, was a “household name,” noted the promotional material for the 1940 John Ford film The Grapes of Wrath. That name, however, became something of a burden for the author who had fiercely declared in letters his need for anonymity in order to write. The world’s gaze was upon him in the 1940s, expecting high sentiments from this chronicler of the poor. Critics and reviewers waited for the familiar voice of the proletarian writer to return to the gritty themes of the 1930s. He resisted. “I must make a new start,” he wrote his college roommate, Carlton Sheffield, in November 1939. “I’ve worked the novel … as far as I can take it. I never did think much of it—a clumsy vehicle at best. And I don’t know the form of the new but I know there is a new thing which will be adequate and shaped by the new thinking.” At the cusp of the new decade, his initial course was scientific and ecological, “things more lasting,” he remarked to Sheffield. John Steinbeck, novelist, transformed himself into John Steinbeck, marine biologist, as he set out in March 1940 with friend, biologist, and intellectual soul mate Ed Ricketts to explore the littoral of the Sea of Cortez; the 1941 account of that trip, Sea of Cortez, is one of Steinbeck’s neglected masterpieces, a rich brew of scientific observation, philosophical musing, and humorous anecdotes capped by Ricketts’s catalog of specimens discovered on the trip.

As a travel narrative, collaborative project, and structural experiment, Sea of Cortez is paradigmatic of Steinbeck’s work throughout the restless 1940s, culminating with A Russian Journal at the end of the decade. “He tried to enter the great world, so to speak,” remarked Arthur Miller. His search for inspiration sparked a kind of frenetic decade of experimentation; he wrote film scripts, journalism, travel diaries, plays, novellas. Indeed, travel became a kind of panacea for Steinbeck during the 1940s. Claiming that “there’s an illogic there I need,” he went to Mexico several times throughout the decade. In 1941, at the urging of documentary filmmaker Herbert Kline, he wrote a script about health problems in a remote Mexican village, The Forgotten Village. After the war, he repeatedly returned to write and then film The Pearl, and in 1948 he went again to Mexico to work on a film treatment of Emiliano Zapata’s life for Elia Kazan’s great film Viva Zapata!