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young writer saw possibilities. In Cup of Gold ’s descriptive passages, Steinbeck too would reach—and even overreach—for poetry—a poetry that immediately surpassed Byrne’s and that would only grow stronger as his career advanced.
    Winter was come sliding down over the world from the Pole; and riverward there was the faint moaning of new ice. It was a sad day, a day of gray unrest, of discontent. The gently moving air seemed to be celebrating the loss of some gay thing with a soft, tender elegy. But in the pastures the great work horses nervously stamped their feet, and all through the country small brown birds, in cliques of four or five, flew twittering from tree to tree and back again, seeking and calling in recruits for their southing.
    Proud of his Irish ancestry on his mother’s side, Steinbeck also experimented with Irish dialect, placing it in the mouth of Morgan’s Welsh father—“What time will you be starting, the morning?”—and more appropriately using it to color the speech of the Irish sailor, Tim—“ ’Twas when I was a boy like this one here, and I sailing in a free ship that tucked [sic] about the ocean. . . .”
    Not long after completing Cup of Gold , Steinbeck understood that he would need to sweep “all the Cabellyo-Byrneish preciousness” out of his prose “for good.” “I seem to have outgrown Cabell,” he wrote to his friend A. Grove Day, and “I have not the slightest desire to step into Donn Byrne’s shoes.” Already Steinbeck knew that he had “twice [the] head” of these two early influences. Yet in some respects his protests are disingenuous. Long after the triumph of The Grapes of Wrath (1939), Steinbeck remained attracted to medievalism as well as to the comic and satiric possibilities of fantasy, as we see in The Short Reign of Pippin IV (1957). At the time of his death in 1968, Steinbeck was working on his own translation of Malory’s Morte d’Arthur . The “Cabellyo-Byrneish” strain underlies his canonical works as well. Throughout his career, Steinbeck would continue to combine allegory and fantasy with naturalism, to strive unabashedly for melody and sensuality in his descriptive writing, and to value the poetic properties of dialect, albeit more realistically deployed (as in The Grapes of Wrath ). Cabell and Byrne were unusual models for an American writer serving an apprenticeship in the 1920s, and Cup of Gold provides an important look at young Steinbeck experimenting with their methods—methods that would give his mature work a distinctive stamp.
CUP OF GOLD AND YOUNG JOHN STEINBECK
    Cup of Gold is not solely a historical-biographical-swashbuckling pirate fantasy with literary ambitions. The novel also has a strong autobiographical strain. Writing to his friend A. Grove Day on December 5, 1929, Steinbeck confessed that Cup of Gold was written in part “for the purpose of getting . . . all the autobiographical material (which hounds us until we get it said) out of my system.” Into the story of young Henry Morgan, Steinbeck wove the experiences of his own young life and of his quest to become a writer. Those experiences included Steinbeck’s own very real voyage to Panama—a country torn by political unrest and speaking volumes about American corporate and military imperialism in the 1920s. His literary quest included an abortive assault on that Cup of Gold for all American writers—New York City. These autobiographical currents make Cup of Gold not only a portrait of the artist as a young man, but an allegory of the Faustian bargain implicit in the American dream— whether the dream of an aggressive young nation, Steinbeck’s “Republic of Buccaneers”—or the dream of an aggressive young individual ambitious for fortune, fame, and love.
    John Steinbeck was born to John Ernst and Olive Hamilton Steinbeck on February 27, 1902, in the small town of Salinas, California. His father resembled Henry Morgan’s father, Robert, in being a failure, a