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The ObserverJohn Steinbeck
John Steinbeck's estate urged to let the world read his shunned
werewolf novel
Rejected and hidden away since 1930, an early murder mystery by the
Nobel-winning author is 'an incredible find'
John Steinbeck pictured in 1962, the year he won his Nobel prize.
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John Steinbeck pictured in 1962, the year he won his Nobel prize.
Photograph: Bettmann/Bettmann Archive
John Steinbeck pictured in 1962, the year he won his Nobel prize.
Photograph: Bettmann/Bettmann Archive
Dalya Alberge
Sat 22 May 2021 12.15 EDT[ ]
Last modified on Sat 22 May 2021 13.23 EDT
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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.
"There would be a huge public interest in a totally unknown werewolf
novel by one of the best-known, most read American writers of the
20th century," said Professor Gavin Jones, a specialist in American
literature at Stanford University.
"This is a novel that really nobody knows about. It's a complete
novel by Steinbeck. It's incredible."
The 233-page typescript has been stored in the vast archives of the
Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas in Austin after
Steinbeck's unsuccessful attempt to have it published more than 90
years ago.
Finding recognition was a struggle for the author, who eventually won
the Nobel prize for literature in 1962. While his father helped him
financially, he also supported himself as a manual labourer before
going on to write classics such as the 1937 novella Of Mice and Men,
about two migrant labourers, and East of Eden in 1952.
Set in a fictional Californian coastal town, Murder at Full Moon
tells the story of a community gripped by fear after a series of
gruesome murders takes place under a full moon. Investigators fear
that a supernatural monster has emerged from the nearby marshes. Its
characters include a cub reporter, a mysterious man who runs a local
gun club and an eccentric amateur sleuth who sets out to solve the
crime using techniques based on his obsession with pulp detective
fiction.
The typescript even has two illustrations by Steinbeck. They depict
the floorplan of the building where the murders took place, including
the victims' bodies. In the book, these are drawings made by one of
the characters trying to solve the murders.
Jones described it as a world away from Steinbeck's realist
representations of the Great Depression, which may explain why he
wrote this one under a pen name, Peter Pym. "Even though it is very
different from Steinbeck's other work, in a totally different genre,
it actually relates to his interest in violent human transformation -
the kind of human-animal connection that you find all over his work;
his interest in mob violence and how humans are capable of other
states of being, including particularly violent murderers.
"It's certainly not Steinbeck the realist, but it is Steinbeck the
naturalist, interested in human nature. It's a horror potboiler,
which is why I think readers would find it more interesting than a
more typical Steinbeck. It's a whole new Steinbeck - one that
predicts Californian noir detective fiction. It is an unsettling
story whose atmosphere is one of fog-bound, malicious, malignant
secrecy."
James Dean and Julie Harris in the 1955 film version of Steinbeck's
East of Eden
James Dean and Julie Harris in the 1955 film version of Steinbeck's
East of Eden
Photograph: George Rinhart/Corbis/Getty Images
Speculating on why publishers rejected it, he wonders whether it was
deemed too lurid at the time, especially since Steinbeck was then an
unknown author.
But Steinbeck's literary agents, McIntosh & Otis, told the Observer
they would not be publishing the novel. "As Steinbeck wrote Murder at
Full Moon under a pseudonym and did not choose to publish the work
during his lifetime, we uphold what Steinbeck had wanted," they said.
"As the estate's agents, we do not further exploit the works beyond
what had been the author and estate's wishes."
Hearing of the estate's response, Jones said: "Steinbeck did attempt
to have the book published early in his career, and he did not
destroy this manuscript as he did several others. Many authors have
their works published posthumously, and write under pseudonyms."
William Souder, author of the acclaimed 2020 biography Mad at the
World: A Life of John Steinbeck, also urged the estate to allow
publication. "Why wouldn't a complete novel by a famous author find
its way into the daylight?" he said. "I hope it does."
In another archive - the Center for Steinbeck Studies, San Jose State
University - Jones has also unearthed a virtually complete
unpublished Steinbeck story called Case History. It is an earlier
version of a published story, The Vigilante, based on an actual
lynching that took place in San Jose in 1933 of two men accused of
kidnapping and murdering a local resident. The two battered, partly
naked men were hung from trees before a crowd of up to 15,000
onlookers in one of the last mass lynchings in the US.
Steinbeck was haunted by the legacies of racism and injustice in the
American west, and the earlier version of the story reveals that, in
the final version, Steinbeck had rewritten history, changing the
lynching of two white men, in the actual event, to that of a single
African American man. In Case History, a single white man is lynched.
"Both versions of the story are about a theory of mob activity and
how humans are capable of perpetrating this violence, told from such
a close perspective that I wonder, could Steinbeck have witnessed the
events of the original lynching?" said Jones. "His in-laws were from
San Jose, and he was fascinated with mob action."
Jones's research will feature in his forthcoming book, Reclaiming
John Steinbeck: Writing for the Future of Humanity, which will be
published by Cambridge University Press on 10 June.
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