Journal of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters

1969. New York: The Viking Press, 1969.

Narrow 4to, 148 pp. Yellow card wrappers, lettered in black, with folding box. Upper wrappers numbered "11" in top left corner. very light wear to spine of wrappers, box spotted, else very good.

§ Unrevised proofs. Steinbeck's day-by-day account of the writing of East of Eden, in the form of letters to his friend and publisher, Pat Covici. The book was published posthumously in an edition of 600 copies.

"John Steinbeck, in writing East of Eden, warmed up for the daily stint ahead in a "letter" to his editor, the late Pascal Covici. It was written in pencil, usually on the left-hand (truncated) pages of a large notebook, which Covici had supplied. Then, when Steinbeck felt ready, he proceeded to the text of the novel on the right-hand pages. The writing covered the period from January 29 to November 1, 1951. There was a "letter" for every working day.

The letter was primarily a method of flexing the author's mental and physical muscles. Steinbeck sometimes used it to adumbrate the problems and purposes of the passage on which he was about to embark-"a kind of arguing ground for the story," as he said once. At other times it consisted of random thoughts, trial flights in wordsmanship, nuggets of information and comment about the events of the moment, both personal and public. But the letters were also full of serious thinking about this novel, his longest and most ambitious, as well as about novel-writing in general. Never intended for publication, they cast a flood of light on the author's mind and on the nature of the creative process. And in the private glimpses of the Nobel-Prize-winning writer-his concern about his sons, his hobbies such as wood- carving and carpentry, his passion for invention-they are autobiographical material of the first order. In a sense this is Steinbeck's testament. (Inventory #: 126468)