The Moon is Down

by John Steinbeck

I wrote my fictional account about a medium-sized American town with its countryside of a kind I knew well. There would be collaborators certainly. Don’t forget the Bund meetings in our cities, the pro-German broadcasts before the war and the kind of man who loves any success: “Mussolini made the trains run on time.” “Hitler saved Germany from communism.” It was not beyond reason that our town would have its cowards, its citizens who sold out for profit. But under this, I did and do believe, would be the hard core that could not be defeated. And so I wrote my account basing its fiction on facts extracted from towns already under the Nazi heel.