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Om hvordan Steinbeck blei involvert i å skrive Bombs Away for The US Army Air Forces.

"At about this time, mid-May of 1942, he was offered another temporary assignment." ...
"The job was to write two books for the Air Force, and Steinbeck was very dubious about it, since the books were obviously designed as publicity for the service and as enlistment bait - he didn't know whether he wanted to lend his name to something like that or not." (side 504)

"Other major writers, such as Hemingway and Faulkner, refused assignments such as Bombs Away,"... (side 505)

Steinbeck sier sjøl at han blei involvert i å skrive boka slik:
" He had heard about the project but was dead set against it when he was called in to see President Roosvelt. Having seen the President in action before, he knew that he would have to have great determination to stick to his guns and not get involved. So when he got to the White House, he set his jaws and kept thinking to himself, "I am not going to do this. They will have to get somebody else. I am not going to do this."
He went into the Oval Office, and there sat this very affable man, just oozing charm, puffing on a long cigarette. They never discussed anything but Roosevelt's interest in his writing. Then suddenly at the end of the interview, *Steinbeck was taken aback, he recalled, when the President suddenly said, "Now John, you are going to do what I want you to do - what I want you to do John". John told Oliver, "Then I found myself saying, "Yes, Mr. President, I am," and that was it." (side 508)

Steinbeck om reaksjonen på at FIS ikke godtok første utkast av The Moon Is Down og om hvilket land boka beskriver:
"my friends from the various resistance groups, Norwegians, Danes, French, Czechs, who had furnished my manuscript, were outraged at the decision. At that time no account of the process of occupation and resistance had been written. Why not, my friends suggested, change the scene to an occupied country? The book might hurt American morale, they said, but it would be good for the morale of the resistance men. And so I placed the story in an unnamed country, cold and stern like Norway, cunning and implacable like Denmark, reasonable like France. I did not even call the Germans Germans but simply invaders.

Steinbecks første utkast til Natt uten Måne handla om en amerikansk by som blir okkupert av en brutal okkupasjonsstyrke. Sjefene hans i FIS (Foreign Information Service) avslo stykke med følgende begrunnelse: "many people might think this an admission that we might be defeated, and this would have a devestating effect on morale."

Om Natt uten Måne (The Moon Is Down), skriver Benson at Steinbeck skreiv boka på oppdrag for organisasjonen som seinere blei CIA:
To put his work for the Coordinator of Information in as dramatic terms as possible, he wrote his next novel, The Moon Is Down, on assignment for the agency that eventually became the CIA.

En kort sitat om Vredens Druer:

Throughout I've tried to make the reader participate in the actuality, what he takes from it will be scaled entirely on his own depth or hollowness. There are five layers in this book; a reader will find as many as he can and he won't find more than he has in himself. (1/16/39)

(He, his og himself kunne kanskje vært bytta med she, her og herself hvis Carol Steinbeck hadde maskinskrevet brevet for han)

Steinbeck i brev til forleggeren sin om hvordan og hvorfor han vil ha the Battle Hymn på coveret til Vredens Druer:
The facist crowd will try to sabotage this book because it is revolutionary. They will try to give it the communist angle. However, the Battle Hymn is American and so intensely so. Further, every American child learns it and forget the words. So if both words and music are there the book is keyed into the American scene right from the beginning. (1/10/39).

Om John Steinbeck:
It may bee that the most important single thing in his personal history as it affected his writing was that as a young man he was employed in hard physial labor close to the earth for extended periode of time...
And exept for a few moments in his career when it appeard that he was a Marxist, Steinbeck demonstrated considerable talent for offending litterary gentlemen. That he rubbed som many of the right people the wrong way may be reason enough to love him

I have made no attempt to correlete my quotations throughout the book with A Life in Letters because nearly half the letters used in my text do not appear in that volume and because many of the letters in that collection were edited.

Fra Prefatory note s. XI