But this facsimile doesn’t skirt the issue but includes the faint marks on the final page.” “I suspect the latter, but we’ll never know for sure.

“Did his wife Carol playfully write that word in red and then erase it? Did someone in the University of Virginia archives deface the manuscript?” she said. Shillinglaw noted that the facsimile reproduces the faint “slut” written at the end of the manuscript, a word she described as “an archival mystery”. The manuscript suggests the sheer weight of the task he was undertaking – to capture migrant woe in California in the late 1930s – and also the urgency of his telling,” the academic said.

He wanted to capture history as it was happening, and indeed that’s what he accomplished. “The writing begins with a large hand and gets smaller and smaller as the text progresses, so one can sense Steinbeck’s urgency. Steinbeck scholar Susan Shillinglaw said that “to see an author’s handwriting is to creep close to the source of inspiration”, describing it as a “powerful moment”. The manuscript itself, the only one of The Grapes of Wrath, is kept in the University of Virginia’s archives. It also excised two sentences accusing tenant farmers of socialism and bolshevism, and of wanting to attack the sacred rights of property. There are scarcely any crossings-out or rewrites in the manuscript, although the original shows how publisher Viking Press edited out Steinbeck’s dozen uses of the word “fuck”, in an attempt to make the novel less controversial. “From start to finish, Steinbeck’s manuscript evidences the single-mindedness with which he approached this task, with relentless determination and discipline,” said SP Books, who have already published facsimiles of the original manuscripts of novels including Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and JM Barrie’s Peter Pan and Wendy. “She looked up and across the barn and her lips came together and smiled mysteriously,” wrote Steinbeck on 26 October 1938, as the novel ended. At the end of chapter eight, he notes “End Chapter 8 long son of a bitch too”, writes “halfway” as he reaches page 98, and scrawls END just below his final line. Despite this, his writing gets smaller and smaller as he races to his conclusion, missing commas, capital letters, full stops and quotation marks along the way. The author also notes “Big Writing” at the start, presumably to remind himself to keep his handwriting legible for his typist and proofreader, his first wife Carol Steinbeck. Steinbeck had already tried to write about the migrant experience in L’Affaire Lettuceberg, but had destroyed his previous attempt. Filled with Steinbeck’s tiny handwriting, it opens with the words NEW START, in capitals. Independent press SP Books will release the manuscript version of the novel on 7 October.

The grapes of wrath book