The Long Valley Read Online Free PDF Page B

(Winter 1966-67): 479-84.
    Simmonds, Roy S. “The First Publication of Steinbeck’s ‘The Leader of the People.’ ” Steinbeck Quarterly 7 (Winter 1975): 13-18.
    ————. “The Original Manuscripts of ‘The Chrysanthemums.’ ” Steinbeck Quarterly 7 (Summer-Fall 1974): 102-11.
    ————. “Steinbeck’s ‘The Murder’: A Critical and Bibliographical Study.” Steinbeck Quarterly 9 (Spring 1976): 45-53.
    Steinbeck, John. “My Short Novels.” Wings 26 (October 1953): 4, 6-8.
    ————. Steinbeck: A Life in Letters, edited by Elaine Steinbeck and Robert Wallsten. New York: Viking Press, 1975. Quotations from this volume are here cited parenthetically as SLL.
    ————. Working Days: The Journals of The Grapes of Wrath, edited by Robert DeMott. New York: Viking Penguin, 1989.
    van Gelder, Robert. “Interview with a Best-Selling Author: John Steinbeck.” Cosmopolitan (April 1947: 18, 123-25). Reprinted in Conversations with John Steinbeck: 43-48.

A NOTE ON THE TEXT
    The Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics edition of The Long Valley uses the original text of the volume, published in 1938 by the Viking Press.
    The textual history of the volume, however, has not been without controversy. When Steinbeck’s friend and editor Pascal Covici first tried to publish the stories in a single volume, he held in hand a collection of badly worn typescripts apparently used as the originals for magazines that first published the stories. Because of editorial work at these magazines prior to publication, the typescripts that Covici held did not always accord with the published versions. It is evident, furthermore, that since he was deep into the writing of The Grapes of Wrath during the summer of 1938, Steinbeck himself did not take time to check the manuscripts carefully. Given the conditions of publication, it is remarkable that we have as good a text as we do.
    Many of the variants in the textual history have already been examined in studies listed in the Suggestions for Further Reading. Quite often they are relatively minor, a matter of standardizing punctuation, for example, to conform to current style. Some obvious errors were caught. For example, in “The Chrysanthemums,” page 2, the Viking Penguin text uses the term “strangers,” a correction of an obvious error in both the holograph manuscript and the Harper’s Magazine publication, which use “stranger men.”
    Even with access to holograph manuscripts, typescripts, and first publications, it is sometimes imprudent to tamper with a manuscript that has been standard for many years if such matters that appear are relatively minor stylistic issues rather than substantive. The few notable variants and matters of interest in Steinbeck’s composition process are indicated in the Explanatory Notes following the short stories.

The Chrysanthemums
    The high grey-flannel fog of winter closed off the Salinas Valley from the sky and from all the rest of the world. On every side it sat like a lid on the mountains and made of the great valley a closed pot. On the broad, level land floor the gang plows bit deep and left the black earth shining like metal where the shares had cut. On the foothill ranches across the Salinas River, the yellow stubble fields seemed to be bathed in pale cold sunshine, but there was no sunshine in the valley now in December. The thick willow scrub along the river flamed with sharp and positive yellow leaves.
    It was a time of quiet and of waiting. The air was cold and tender. A light wind blew up from the southwest so that the farmers were mildly hopeful of a good rain before long; but fog and rain do not go together.
    Across the river, on Henry Allen’s foothill ranch there was little work to be done, for the hay was cut and stored and the orchards were plowed up to receive the rain deeply when it should come. The cattle on the higher slopes were becoming shaggy and rough-coated.
    Elisa Allen, working in her flower garden, looked