![]() ![]() at Harvard and in 1916 broke into print as a reporter on the staff of the New York World. In later years the firm became his bookkeepers, his guards against an intrusive public, and, most important of all, his friends.Ĭritic and journalist, LEWIS GANNETT took his A.B. In his early years he consulted its partners for literary advice and sometimes for literary consolation. The firm’s office became John Steinbeck’s office and home whenever he was in New York. Mary Squire Abbott joined the firm in 1931, Mildred Lyman several years later, and in the 1940’s Miss McIntosh left. ![]() It was a new firm then, consisting of Mavis McIntosh and Elizabeth Otis, with Annie Laurie Williams as associated theatrical agent. It was in 1930 that Steinbeck began his long association with his literary agency. Indeed, he destroyed two full-length novels before Cup of Gold, his first published novel, made its appearance in 1929. He has always written more than he has published. He wrote hard for almost fifteen years before he had his first success. In the early 1920’s he functioned briefly as a reporter for the New York Journal, but he didn’t like that he wanted to do his own kind of writing. He wrote during his intermittent sessions at Stanford University. He wrote for the Salinas, California, high school paper, El Gabilan, in 1919, when he was president of the senior class and on the basketball and track teams. When he was four, he discovered, to his flabbergasted delight, that “high” rhymed with “ fly,” and from that day to this the permutations and combinations of words have charmed and fascinated him. ![]() Steinbeck has been interested in writing as long as he can remember. Nonetheless, in John Steinbeck’s letters to his literary agents, McIntosh and Otis, covering almost fifteen years of partnership in creative writing, appears a singularly honest and revealing record of what John Steinbeck himself thought about what he was writing, when he was writing it. Biography by its very nature must be half fiction.” I can’t remember how much of me really happened and how much I invented. To inquirers for biographical data he has been known to reply: “Please feel free to make up your own facts about me as you need them. He would be the last man to affirm or to deny it. CRITICS have had a holiday detecting exotic symbolisms in John Steinbeck’s work. ![]()
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