As a travel narrative, collaborative project, and structural experiment, Sea of Cortez is paradigmatic of Steinbeck's work throughout the restless 1940s, culminating with A Russian Journal at the end of the decade. "He tried to enter the great world, so to speak," remarked Arthur Miller. His search for inspiration sparked a kind of frenetic decade of experimentation; he wrote film scripts, journalism, travel diaries, plays, novellas. Indeed, travel became a kind of panacea for Steinbeck during the 1940s. Claiming that "there's an il-logic there I need," he went to Mexico several times throughout the decade. In 1941, at the urging of documentary filmmaker Herbert Kline, he wrote a script about health problems in a remote Mexican village, The Forgotten Village. After the war, he repeatedly returned to write and then film The Pearl, and in 1-948 he went again to Mexico to work on a film treatment of Emiliano Zapata's life for Elia Kazan's great film Viva Zapata!
Steinbeck's contributions to the United States' involvement in World War II also shattered his self-containment of the 1930s and carried him far from his native California-first to Washington, D.C., in 1941, where he was interviewed by a newly formed information and propaganda agency, the Foreign Information Service; then to New York City, where he settled with Gwyn Conger, the woman who would become his second wife.