Cup of Gold by John Steinbeck Read Free Book Online Page A

the library in the main house. There was a phonograph in the cabin, and as he wrote he often listened to Antonín Dvořák’s symphony “From the New World.” Written not long after the Czech composer’s arrival in New York City, the symphony features a heroic, hard-driving horn movement emblematic of determined ambition, contrasted with a tender, nostalgic largo—making a perfect “score” for Cup of Gold . In good weather, Steinbeck wrote outdoors in the woods—the family reported finding cups and glasses under the trees for years after his departure. In the winter, with the family gone, Steinbeck was entirely alone and often snowbound, with little to do but read and write. He would stay in the Tahoe job for two years, and through two long winters, until his first novel was done.
    In the summer of 1928, Steinbeck sent a messy manuscript full of typos, crossings-out, and scribblings-in to his friend Ted Miller in New York. Miller, after arranging to have Cup of Gold retyped, agreed to act informally as Steinbeck’s agent, taking the manuscript around to publishers. A series of rejections followed—seven in all—and then, in January 1929, Steinbeck received the exciting news that Robert McBride & Company, the same publisher that had turned down his short stories, had accepted his first novel. By now, Steinbeck was down out of the mountains, working on another novel, living in his parents’ Pacific Grove cottage, and courting Carol Henning, who would become his first wife. He was grateful for an advance of $250.
    At first, he was glad to learn that his friend Mahlon Blaine, by now enjoying considerable popularity as an illustrator, would create the dust jacket for Cup of Gold . Brightly colored, Blaine’s jacket featured a mustachioed Sir Henry Morgan in the regalia of a seventeenth-century nobleman, including a plumed hat, cloak, lace collar and cuffs, knee britches, silk stockings, silver-buckled shoes, and sword. Morgan clutches an immense golden chalice, and is joined by two barefooted pirates with gold earrings and neckerchiefs, pistols tucked in their sashes. But when Steinbeck saw the cover, he was badly disappointed. He thought the colors were “ghastly,” and the jacket more appropriate to a boys’ adventure story than a work of art. That, however, may have been the publisher’s intention. Perhaps because of its exciting dust jacket, Cup of Gold sold best at department stores during the Christmas season. Biographer Jackson Benson writes, “One wonders how many little boys were lost in the swamp of Steinbeck’s prose as they tried to follow Henry Morgan’s trek across Panama.”
    The book was published in August 1929, a little more than two months before the stock market crash of October 1929 began America’s slide into the Depression. McBride did not bother to send Steinbeck an advance copy; the author saw his first novel for the first time in a department store. He complained bitterly about his publisher’s failure to market Cup of Gold —book clubs turned it down, few review copies were distributed, and bookshop orders were not filled. Still, Cup of Gold enjoyed modest but respectable sales, with 1,533 copies sold from its first issue, more than the sales of Steinbeck’s next two novels combined.
CRITICAL RECEPTION
    Cup of Gold received only a handful of reviews (helpfully collected in Luchen Li’s John Steinbeck: A Documentary Volume ), but almost all of its first critics found something to admire in the novel: “Mr. Steinbeck’s graceful manner lifts the yarn above the adventure groceries of this degenerate age,” they wrote. “Thoroughly masculine and should find much favor with those male readers who used to delight in those bloody tales of piracy and rebellion.” “A meaty pleasing yarn wherein action sets the pace and clever writing plays the tune.” “Mr. Steinbeck’s fantasy is enjoyable reading.”
    Yet for the most part, the same critics were thoroughly confused by the