No Lie
No Lie
Steinbeck was very much of the conviction that, as E.B. White eloquently put it many years later, a writer should “lift people up, not lower them down.”
Upon finishing a satire about a lettuce worker's strike in Salinas:
"This is going to be a hard letter to write … this book is finished and it is a bad book and I must get rid of it. It can’t be printed. It is bad because it isn’t honest."
"Oh! these incidents all happened but — I’m not telling as much of the truth about them as I know."
"My whole work drive has been aimed at making people understand each other and then I deliberately write this book the aim of which is to cause hatred through partial understanding. My father would have called it a smart-alec book. It was full of tricks to make people ridiculous."
Less than two weeks later, Steinbeck was already hard at work on The Grapes of Wrath — the iconic epic of the Great Depression that shines a light on the same uncomfortable and often gruesome subjects of class struggle, power, and oppression, but does so in a way that ennobles the characters, chooses dignity over depravity, and critiques a hopeless situation while granting hope.
via Timothy Street
https://www.brainpickings.org/2014/12/15/john-steinbeck-integrity-lettuceberg/?mc_cid=40c48c0405&mc_eid=5eae57494d
Steinbeck was very much of the conviction that, as E.B. White eloquently put it many years later, a writer should “lift people up, not lower them down.”
Upon finishing a satire about a lettuce worker's strike in Salinas:
"This is going to be a hard letter to write … this book is finished and it is a bad book and I must get rid of it. It can’t be printed. It is bad because it isn’t honest."
"Oh! these incidents all happened but — I’m not telling as much of the truth about them as I know."
"My whole work drive has been aimed at making people understand each other and then I deliberately write this book the aim of which is to cause hatred through partial understanding. My father would have called it a smart-alec book. It was full of tricks to make people ridiculous."
Less than two weeks later, Steinbeck was already hard at work on The Grapes of Wrath — the iconic epic of the Great Depression that shines a light on the same uncomfortable and often gruesome subjects of class struggle, power, and oppression, but does so in a way that ennobles the characters, chooses dignity over depravity, and critiques a hopeless situation while granting hope.
via Timothy Street
https://www.brainpickings.org/2014/12/15/john-steinbeck-integrity-lettuceberg/?mc_cid=40c48c0405&mc_eid=5eae57494d
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