John Steinbeck's Typewriter

John Steinbeck was known for writing his novels out by hand. Later in his career, however, he was forced to introduce a typewriter into his daily routine. John’s son Thom shared what brought about this change, and how his father coped with his new writing companion. 

Full transcript of the conversation included below.

The saddest thing was… to my father, as a writer… is the woman who had been doing his line editing, the woman who could actually read his handwriting, finally died.

At Viking, she was at Viking Press. And nobody else could read his handwriting.

And they sent him a letter saying, “John, we’re so sorry. We know you like to write by hand, but we can’t publish your handwriting. We can’t read it. You either have to find somebody who can type it up for you, or you’re going to have to get a typewriter.”

Well, this was a big drama in our house. Big drama. And he went out and he bought himself one of those gigantic IBMs. You know the kind that when you typed on it, all the paintings in the room moved.

Tunk, tunk, tunk, tunk, tunk. It was an unbelievable sound.

He was a six finger typist. Tick, tick. Tick, tick, tick. And it was too slow, it would drive him crazy.

What he would do is… write by hand… finish his writing for the day and then he would have to spend the afternoon typing up what he’d hand-written. Because he knew what it said.

So he went out and bought balls in every language. Remember they had the ball? And he got balls in Finnish, and balls in Russian. Just to see what they looked like, you know?

And just to get it back on his publishers, he one day wrote… sent them… three pages in Russian. Now he couldn’t speak or read Russian, he just used the Russian ball and made all these letters in Russian.

Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick.

And shipped it off and said “How’s this?”

And they said, “You’re kidding.”