John Steinbeck, turning 60, indicted himself for having lost touch with America. He found that he was writing about a place he didn’t really know because he was working from memory. He recalled an earlier time:
Once I traveled about in an old bakery wagon, double-doored rattler with a mattress on its floor. I stopped where people stopped or gathered, I listened and looked and felt, and in the process had a picture of my country the accuracy of which was impaired only by my own shortcomings.
You might recognize this passage from Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley.
I read it in college. I knew I wanted to be a writer. I’d gone to school on the G.I. Bill with no thought of a career or job training and, after getting a degree, was about to run out of money.
Faced with the prospect of figuring out a way to stay alive, while doing something that might prove useful to a writer, I thought I might try to find a job as a newspaper reporter. A job like that might make me stop where people stopped and listen to what they were saying.
I’m still living with my own shortcomings as a writer. But Steinbeck’s observation was the closest thing I got to career counseling.
• Sources: John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley; New York: Penguin Books, 1988, p. 5. I’m trying not to mark birthdays this year. But if you’re keeping track, Steinbeck was born Feb. 27, 1902, in Salinas, Calif.
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