Category Archives: John Steinbeck

‘Solved’: the mystery of the ‘slut’ scrawled on The Grapes of Wrath manuscript

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Swedish academics think they can explain why the derogatory term appears at the end of Steinbeck’s text

The word “slut” scrawled at the end of the manuscript for John Steinbeck’s seminal novel The Grapes of Wrath may have been explained, thanks to a handful of Swedish academics.

The Grapes of Wrath was written by Steinbeck in a frenzy of creativity in under 100 days, between May and October 1938. Independent press SP Books released the first ever facsimile of the handwritten manuscript last week, showing Steinbeck’s increasingly tiny handwriting, his swear words, which were excised from the final novel – and a faint “slut”, written in red, at its conclusion.

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Handwritten manuscript of The Grapes of Wrath to be published for the first time

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This early version of John Steinbeck’s most famous novel, written in less than 100 days, will be released by SP Books on 7 October

The handwritten manuscript of John Steinbeck’s masterpiece The Grapes of Wrath, complete with the swearwords excised from the published novel and revealing the urgency with which the author wrote, is to be published for the first time.

Written in under 100 days between May and October 1938, The Grapes of Wrath was Steinbeck’s effort to chronicle the migrant crossings that he had reported on as a journalist for the San Francisco News. The author, who at 36 had already published Of Mice and Men, felt a huge pressure, and responsibility, to get his story right, writing in his diary at the time: “This must be a good book. It simply must. I haven’t any choice. It must be far and away the best thing I’ve ever attempted – slow but sure, piling detail on detail until a picture and an experience emerge.”

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John Steinbeck’s estate urged to let the world read his shunned werewolf novel

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Rejected and hidden away since 1930, an early murder mystery by the Nobel-winning author is ‘an incredible find’

Years before becoming one of America’s most celebrated authors, John Steinbeck wrote at least three novels which were never published. Two of them were destroyed by the young writer as he struggled to make his name, but a third – a full-length mystery werewolf story entitled Murder at Full Moon – has survived unseen in an archive ever since being rejected for publication in 1930.

Now a British academic is calling for the Steinbeck estate to finally allow the publication of the work, written almost a decade before masterpieces such as The Grapes of Wrath, his epic about the Great Depression and the struggles of migrant farm workers.

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