“I’m going to do what people call rest for a while.
I don’t quite know what that means – probably reorganize. I don’t know what work is entailed, writing work, I mean, but I do know I have to slough off nearly fifteen years and go back and start again at the split path where I went wrong because it was easier. True things gradually disappeared and shiny easy things took their place. I brought the writing outside, like a cook flipping hot cakes in a window. And it should never have come outside.”
     – John Steinbeck, Dec. 30, 1959,
         in a private letter to Elizabeth Otis.
         Steinbeck: A Life in Letters