Steinbeck in Vietnam

don’t care any more what people think of me. I’ll tell you how it happened. You will remember at Stanford that I went about being different characters. I even developed a theory that one had no personality in essence, that one was a reflection of a mood plus the moods of other persons present. I wasn’t pretending to be something I wasn’t. For the moment I was truly the person I thought I was.
Well, I went into the mountains and stayed two years. I was snowed in eight months of the year and saw no one except my two Airedales. There were millions of fir trees and the snow was deep and it was very quiet. And there was no one to pose for any more. You can’t have a show with no audience. Gradually all the poses slipped off and when I came out of the hills I didn’t have any poses any more. It was rather sad, but it was far less trouble. I am happier than I have ever been in my life.

I thought I would be getting to New York this winter, but that seems impossible.

is funny and a little sad (for the onlooker) and lots of fun (for us). We take our efforts to write with great seriousness

justify her. You make fun of these things and yet they must impress you to some extent. I know they would impress me. I have always been a little afraid of a woman who wore a dress that cost more than a hundred dollars.

try to comb up courage enough to blow out my brains.

In a maniacal period this summer I went through Pushkin and Turgenev.”

some short stories by Katherine Fullerton Gerould, and she certainly is the master of he

Dear Toby:
Do you know, one of the things that made me come here, was, as you guessed, that I am frightfully afraid of being alone. The fear of the dark is only part of it. I wanted to break that fear in the middle, because I am afraid much of my existence is going to be more or less alone,