MK

“In April 1934, by the time Steinbeck thanked Needham for his prescient review in the Los Angeles Times, he was at the threshold of becoming not only the accomplished writer he had started out to be seven years earlier, but a popular one as well. If the remainder of Steinbeck’s career after Tortilla Flat can be seen as an anguished dance with fame, he had here arrived at a transitional moment when his sense of himself as a writer was still driven by the private pleasures of his art. “A couple of years ago,” he confessed in August 1933, “I realized that I was not the material of which great artists are made and that I was rather glad I wasn’t. And since then I have been happier simply to do the work and to take the reward at the end of every day that is given for a day of honest work.” His candor still strikes a resonant chord. To a God Unknown is not considered a great novel, though it is a quirky, memorable one. But because John Steinbeck may have learned more about crafting long fiction from it than from anything else he worked on during that period, this book laid the foundation for later artistic greatness.”
― John Steinbeck, To a God Unknown

“In mid-May 1933, while proofreading galley sheets Ballou had sent, he wrote in another notebook: “I read a few pages and found them fairly effective. The detached quality is there undoubtedly. Here and there I could see a word I would like to change were I better known and the fear of proof correction costs less fearful to me. But I was not cast down by the prose. It is ambitious. Perhaps in its thousands of lines there are one or two of pure poetry. The critics will scream at me but I do not care about that.”
― John Steinbeck, To a God Unknown

“When reading this unusual novel, then, with its oddly unsettling and sometimes strained combination of Christian and pagan, sacred and profane attributes—its earthiness and surreality, violence and pastoralism, pantheism and anthropomorphism, naturalism and lyricism—it is helpful to remember that Steinbeck invested his essential self in it, which is to say, he wrote it more like an extensive poem, or extended dream sequence, than like a traditionally mimetic or realistic novel. “I have the instincts of a minstrel rather than those of a scrivener,” he informed Grove Day in late 1929. Thus, while To a God Unknown has an urgent, breathless fairy-tale quality, and is, as critic Howard Levant asserts, more “a series of detached... scenes” than “a unified... organic whole,” it is not an incoherent concoction—“a rambling and improbable history,” as Warren French calls It—that flies in the face of all sensible literary convention. During its long gestation through different versions and multiple drafts, Steinbeck worked hard to create a palpable factual dimension that gives this otherwise arcane book a recognizable texture in regard to its geographical setting and landmarks (the moss-covered rock actually existed in the northern California town of Laytonville), its unusual characters (some of whom, such as the seer, Steinbeck claimed were based on living persons), and in its feel for telling details of nature and social life in Monterey County in the early part of this century.”
― John Steinbeck, To a God Unknown

“no publishing firm would take the novel, even though Steinbeck worked diligently in successive drafts to improve it by enlarging his characterization of the protagonist, another indication of the novel’s growing reach: “I’m having a devil of a time with my new book,” he wrote Albee on February 27, 1931, Steinbeck’s twenty-ninth birthday: “It just won’t seem to come right. Largeness of character is difficult. Never deal with an Olympian character.”
― John Steinbeck, To a God Unknown