Cup of Gold Read Online Free PDF

dreamer, a gardener in his spare time, and a compassionate man loved and respected by others. Having lost his own business, the senior Steinbeck nevertheless maintained his wife and four children (three daughters and John) in modest comfort through his work as a bookkeeper for the Spreckels Sugar Factory and as Treasurer for Monterey County. Olive, a schoolteacher before her marriage, was a dominant force both in her family and in the community— known for her energy, her determination, and her ambition for her children. Aspects of Olive’s character mark the pragmatic, iron-willed Mother Morgan. About his protagonist in Cup of Gold , Steinbeck would write:
    Henry, if you considered his face, drew from his parents almost equally. His cheekbones were high and hard, his chin firm . . . like his mother’s. But there, too, were the sensual underlip . . . and the eyes which looked out on dreams; these were Old Robert’s features. . . . But though there was complete indecision in Robert’s face, there was a great quantity of decision in Henry’s if only he could find something to decide about.
    Young Steinbeck found something to decide about in the pages of books. From enchanted boyhood readings of works including the Caxton Morte d’Arthur and Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island , books that would leave indelible marks on Cup of Gold , he acquired a passionate love of language and a desire to become a storyteller as strong as Henry Morgan’s desire to “go a-buccaneering and take a Spanish town.” Steinbeck must have felt, very early, the conviction that he could achieve greatness as a writer if only he could avoid entrapment in the mundane concerns and expectations of the adult world. Steinbeck’s Merlin, an elderly failed poet who understands the dangers of the path, looks sadly at his own idled harps and says to Henry Morgan:
    “You are a little boy. You want the moon to drink from as a golden cup; and so, it is very likely that you will become a great man—if only you remain a little child. All the world’s great have been little boys who wanted the moon. . . . But if one grow to a man’s mind, that mind must see that it cannot have the moon and would not want it if it could. . . .”
    Before Steinbeck could drink from the moon, there was college. His parents insisted. He arrived at Stanford University in the fall of 1919 and attended sporadically for the next six years. Single-minded about his dream, Steinbeck focused largely on creative writing and literature classes, voracious reading in Stanford’s excellent library, meetings of the English Club, and his own writing. He may have viewed some of his professors as Henry Morgan views James Flower—quiet and kindly, ineffectual and inefficient men and women who cried out to be creators and were not, but who recognized in him “one of those divinely endowed creatures who control[led] the fire” they lacked altogether. Steinbeck’s contempt for Stanford’s required curriculum meant a wealth of incompletes and failures, as well as quite a few leaves of absence. During these periods, Steinbeck found employment supervising migrant workers on the Spreckels ranches, where sugar beets were grown and harvested by gangs of hobos and bindlestiffs, as well as by Japanese, Mexican, and Filipino labor. His education resembled Henry Morgan’s in Cup of Gold , alternating between self-directed study in James Flower’s magnificent library and overseeing the plantation’s multiracial work force.
    In the spring of 1925, Steinbeck left Stanford without taking a degree or even completing the equivalent of three years’ course work. This was failure by the standards of the adult world, and his parents, especially his mother, were understandably disappointed. He had little to show for himself except a sheaf of unpublished manuscripts, including a short story about the pirate Henry Morgan—“A Lady in Infra-Red.” But still Steinbeck had the resolve to continue to