On October 15, 1946, he sketched a piece called "The Witches of Salem," a synopsis of an idea for a motion picture "intended to be a film treatise on public hysteria and injustice." From that aborted project came another, "The Last Joan," a play that "has to do with witchcraft. And that in a modern sense we better heed what the present Joan tells us of the atom bomb, because it's the last time that we'll have a Joan to tell us what to do." Behind all of these projects and voiced dissatisfaction with contemporary life was, undoubtedly, the urge to escape-his country, his unhappy home situation. In 1945, he'd turned down a request to cover the war trials in Europe. A trip to the Soviet Union, sponsored by the New York Herald Tribune, promised relief. He'd been there once briefly in the summer of 1937 with his first wife, Carol (not 1936, as he notes in the book), and he wanted to see how the country had been transformed by war.

But the trip promised more, the chance to experiment as a writer. As he was completing The Wayward Bus Steinbeck wrote in his journal: "I have finally worked out what I could do in Russia. I could make a detailed account of a journey. A travel diary. Such a thing has not been done. And it is one of the things people are interested in. And it is the thing I could do and perhaps do well and it might be a contribution." At this juncture, when his novels and play synopses were not bearing fruit-novels seemed insignificant, outlines for plays heavily allegorical-journalism promised discipline, relevance, and a guaranteed audience for the forty-five-year-old writer. And a "journal" offered an opportunity to experiment with prose honed to photographic integrity.

In 1947, the acclaimed war photographer Robert Capa, age thirty-three, was also at loose ends, although "very happy to become an unemployed war photographer." Early that year he had finished preparing for press a collection of war photographs with personal narrative, Slightly Out of Focus.