John Steinbeck had a paternal stance toward labor, toward migrant workers, toward the poor and desperate and meek—but not toward his own sons. Like other adamantly humanitarian novelists—Dickens, Tolstoy, and Salinger come to mind—he was far kinder to Humanity than the humans in his family. Despite ordering his second wife, Gwyn Conger (who had changed her name from Gwen), to undergo many abortions, she managed to give birth to two boys. She’d be putting the kids to bed upstairs in their Manhattan townhouse when Steinbeck would interrupt, telling her he needed her urgently downstairs to discuss something. Once he had pried her away, he’d prepare a cocktail for each of them and sit drinking in silence while he read the newspaper. When Gwyn politely reminded him he’d supposedly had something to discuss, he’d make two more drinks and remain mute. The boys’ mere existence seemed to chafe and irritate the novelist. Later he left the poor woman and married a third time. She believed the boys were the reason. “My only mistake,” she once said, “was in having children.”

The boys, Thom and John IV (called Catbird), had few illusions about their father’s nature. Other dads might rub a dog’s nose in his mess on the floor; Steinbeck did that to Catbirdwhen the family sheepdog had an accident in the apartment. At this point the lad was three. He recalled later that his father once invented a game in which he’d encourage the boy to leap