MK

“Within a year Ballou, whom Steinbeck would eventually consider a “fine” and “sensitive” man, but too gentlemanly to fight New York publishing battles, remaindered both The Pastures of Heaven and To a God Unknown and rejected Steinbeck’s Tortilla Flat manuscript as unsuitable. For a while Steinbeck was back in a familiar situation: writing under stressful circumstances (both his parents were seriously ill) and trying not to worry about publication. Arguably, the time he and Carol spent caring first for his mother, then for his father, probably did as much as anything else to end Steinbeck’s interest in heroic, larger-than-life literary characters. Frequent interruptions to clean his mother’s bed-pans and wash loads of soiled sheets, and later to witness his father’s decline into senility, refocused Steinbeck’s attention on common life, on the realm of “clerks” who, when they broke through reality at all, broke into a far more limited, even dubious, kind of heroism than Henry Morgan’s or Joseph Wayne’s. Steinbeck had already struck that chord in Pastures, but it would be with In Dubious Battle and with Of Mice and Men that a gritty style and an uncompromising vision of beleaguered humans caught in overwhelming circumstances would carry his “new conception of realities” to yet another stage of achievement.”
― 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

“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

“If modern scholars overlook the entertainment motive, dominant in the Iliad, and treat Homer as a Virgil, Dante, or Milton, rather than as a Shakespeare or Cervantes, they are doing him a great disservice. The Iliad, Don Quixote and Shakespeare’s later plays are life—tragedy salted with humour; the Aeneid, the Inferno and Paradise Lost are literary works of almost superhuman eloquence, written for fame not profit, and seldom read except as a solemn intellectual task. The Iliad, and its later companion-piece, the Odyssey, deserve to be rescued from the classroom curse which has lain heavily on them throughout the past twenty-six centuries, and become entertainment once more; which is what I have attempted here. How this curse fell on them can be simply explained.”
― Robert Graves, The Anger of Achilles: Homer's Iliad