As the Depression hit, the $25 per month was a godsend. And Steinbeck made it part of his lore, along with the fact that he and his wife had made ends meet by fishing. They fished from the rocks near China Point, home of the Hopkins Marine Station and scene of the ruins of what had been a fascinating ramshackle maze of Chinese squid fishermen’s shacks that had mysteriously burned to the water line in 1906. Steinbeck had visited that spot often since his youth. But what sustained the couple’s hopes through the early 1930’s were Steinbeck’s ideas. Carol was, for years, a willing and understanding helpmeet. She typed many of his early manuscripts, correcting his punctuation and spelling. (It was also she who later suggested the titles of Of Mice and Men and The Grapes of Wrath.) She believed in his promise, even when times were so tight that, as legend has it, they had to sell their two ducks in order to buy writing paper for To a God Unknown.
The young couple would have to be patient, waiting for success that did not come with the first novel. Steinbeck’s first published book was Cup of Gold (1932), a fictional account of the life of the pirate Henry Morgan. The novel, written in an enthusiastic stream of prose, was marketed in a way that made it hard to take seriously, with a swashbuckling buccaneer manning the cover. Steinbeck, showing his usual self-recrimination, wished he had destroyed it. Pastures of Heaven was published in the same year, a series of connected short stories that take place in a lush California valley.
