Maybe out of the fighting and the struggle there will come some kind of new conceptions. I don't know." Throughout the 1940s, John Steinbeck sought "new conceptions" for his own work. He began the decade composing a scientific travelog, ended it working on his most personal and ex-perimental novel, East of Eden. A Russian Journal is part of his ongoing effort to discover fresh material, to forge new literary forms, to rekindle in his writing, as he wrote in his journal during a dark moment in 1946, "the glory that shadows everything else and that makes me seem like a grey and grizzled animal now… So long since I've done the old kind of work-so long."

In the late 1930s, John Steinbeck had found that glory while writing his masterpiece, The Grapes of Wrath (1939). For a decade prior, he had been perfecting his craft and publishing in quick suc cession the works most often associated with John Steinbeck, social historian: the short stories in The Long Valley (written in the early 1930s, collected in 1938); the comic tour de force, Tortilla, Flat (1935), and the labor trilogy, In Dubious Battle (1936), Of Mice and Men (1937), and The Grapes of Wrath. By the end of the Depression John Steinbeck, novelist of the people, was a "household name," noted the promotional material for the 1940 John Ford film The Grapes of Wrath. That name, however, became something of a burden for the author who had fiercely declared in letters his need for anonymity in order to write. The world's gaze was upon him in the 1940s, expecting high sentiments from this chronicler of the poor. Critics and reviewers waited for the familiar voice of the proletarian writer to return to the gritty themes of the 1930s. He resisted. "I must make a new start," he wrote his college roommate, Carlton Sheffield, in November 1939. "I've worked the novel… as far as I can take it. I never did think much of it-a clumsy vehicle at best.