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Working Days: The Journals of The Grapes of Wrath

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Working Days is for Steinbeck readers or any student of creative processes and habits of successful people. John Steinbeck wrote the beefy The Grapes of Wrath like a freight train, averaging 2,000 words a day in longhand, from June through October, 1938. He did not do this in isolation. He got up an average of five days a week, had breakfast, wrote in his journal, then went to work until early evening, while hammers from neighborhood construction pounded relentlessly, amid human intrusions of all kinds, a souring stomach and self doubt. He was a purposeful journal-keeper, using it to set the goals for the day, to talk himself into character development and plot movement. No doubt the journal also served to subconsiously swat away the distractions so he could focus on the work. Working Days is edited by Robert Demott who has seemingly devoted his career to the meticulous scrutiny of Steinbeck's life, works and habits. If there can be a criticism of this volume, it's that Demott hovers too much; his is, for instance, one of the longest critical introductions I've come across. But this does not detract from the enjoyment of crawling around in Steinbeck's mind, which the journal freely permits.

I found this work diary of Steinbeck to be far less informative than I had imagined it would be. Aside from his daily ruminations that he was unsure if "Grapes" would be a good book, there was little revealed as to his creative process. How did he create his characters? Why did he use certain plot devices? Where did his inspirations come from? All this was lacking.

If you read Christopher Tolkien's works on his father's "Lord of the Rings," you see the work created before you. You can see how a character developed, how a plot changed. In "Working Days" there is none of that. It is simply repetitive admonitions to himself to work harder. It became tedious and a great many times I wondered if the editor had simply repeated previous entries and only changed their number.

"Working Days" is interesting, but don't be fooled into thinking you are going to be there at the birth of a great novel.

If you enjoyed reading Grapes of Wrath, or any other books by Steinbeck...get this book. If you want to follow a writer through the process of creating an important novel, get this book. The daily journal entries written by Steinbeck show the ebb and flow of his moods, his confidence that he was indeed writing a great book, and those days when he felt that he lacked the talent to pull it off. It is rare to get the opportunity to watch an artist create....this is pretty darn close. And a good read!

This journal of Steinbeck's progress through Grapes of Wrath gives an inside view of what was on his mind when writing the novel. Interesting to see what Grapes of Wrath looked like from the inside out.

`Working Days', as it's title suggests, is a diary written during the writing of Steinbeck masterpiece `The Grapes of Wrath'. This also covers the period afterwards when he is dealing with the praise and political backlash and trying to start writing again. This has an extensive introduction by the editor, as well as a commentary at the start of each section and each diary entry has notes on some of the more obscure references. These notes were in the back and I spent the whole book flicking back and forth and it may have been better to include them as footnotes. That aside, they did clarify certain points very well for me. This diary shows Steinbeck's working method, as well as his day to day life and his fears, paranoia and frustration with writing this novel. The writing style is very staccato and he admits he only used the diary to get his daily writing flowing (he used to write letters for the same purpose) and this has some, but much less, of the beauty of his novels. Instead it is a raw rendering of his emotional state during this exhausting book creation. This has some photos in the middle that show some of the manuscript pages, people mentioned in the book, as well as the house he wrote the novel in and they make for an interesting glimpse into his world. All in all this is a fascinating, but slightly dry, look at Steinbeck's inner world and is only of real interest to huge fans or scholars.

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I found this book to be less informative than I thought it was going to be. I was hoping to see more of whats happened in Steinbeck's physche during his labor over The Grapes Of Wrath, but it doesnt really happen. This almost feels like he was asked to perform this task and he did it as an assignment rather than a labor of love.