Steinbeck’s contributions to the United States’ involvement in World War II also shattered his self-containment of the 1930s and carried him far from his native California—first to Washington, D.C., in 1941, where he was interviewed by a newly formed information and propaganda agency, the Foreign Information Service; then to New York City, where he settled with Gwyn Conger, the woman who would become his second wife. There he wrote his first contribution to the war effort, The Moon Is Down (1942), a play-novelette about an occupied Scandinavian country that won wide approval in Europe among underground groups resisting Nazi oppression. In America, Steinbeck’s novel—and the play and film of the work that followed in quick succession—received a less enthusiastic response, for the country was not prepared to see invaders, clearly Germans, as human. Disappointed, Steinbeck went on to other war-related projects: he wrote radio scripts for the FSI early in 1942; later, he was asked to write a text about training air force bombing crews, an assignment that called for Steinbeck and photographer John Swope to visit training sites around the United States.

Once again settled on the East Coast, he worked doggedly on the text of Bombs Away, The Story of a Bomber Team (1942), writing to his college friend Webster Street: “I get farther and farther away from the old realities and more and more immersed in this dreamlike war. When it is over I’m not going to be able to remember what it was like.” Other war-related projects followed: with childhood friend Jack Wagner, Steinbeck wrote a “sample script” for a film, A Medal for Benny, about a small town’s reception of their war hero, a ne’er-do-well from the wrong side of town. Early in 1943 he wrote a novella for Hitchcock’s famous movie about survivors from a torpedoed freighter cast adrift at sea, Lifeboat. Finally, in mid-1943, he was given the assignment that used his talents most successfully: that summer, he was sent overseas by the New York Herald Tribune as a war correspondent to England, West Africa, and ultimately to cover a diversionary mission off the coast of Italy.

In many ways A Russian Journal is the final chapter of this war journalism. When in Stalingrad, “an expanse of ruin,” Steinbeck writes that “Our windows looked out on acres of rubble, broken brick and concrete and pulverized plaster, and in the wreckage the strange dark weeds that always seem to grow in destroyed places.” In that terrain, “there was a little hummock, like the entrance to a gopher hole. And every morning, early, out of this hole a young girl crawled.” In this one vignette about a hounded, dazed child, Steinbeck captures the agony of besieged Stalingrad. Framed by a window, the verbal composition is crafted to accompany Capa’s photos. Indeed, one of the most remarkable qualities of A Russian Journal is the way that Steinbeck’s reporting and Capa’s photojournalism intersect. Steinbeck’s method seems purely photographic, as if the project itself—collaboration with a photographer—dictated style and approach. As he insistently notes in the first chapter of A Russian Journal, the writer and photographer intend to record only what is seen, nothing more. The photograph is an apt metaphor for visiting the Soviet Union in 1947, where visitors were shown so very little of Stalin’s domain, always circumscribed.