After reading this, I rabidly went through pretty much everything Steinbeck wrote, starting with his shorter novels (the Pearl, of Mice and Men) and moving into his collections of short stories (Tortilla Flats) and his novels about the Monterey Bay (Cannery Row, Sweet Thursday). A year later, I branched out drastically into the world of science fiction, reading Asimov and Phillip K. Dick as though they had the secrets of the universe woven in between their lines of prose, and if I could only red enough of them then all would be made clear. I guess I still think this is true to some degree; every story has elements that every human being can relate to, and each time I begin a new story I am hoping to pick out those elements and add them to the mosaic of my own understanding of human beings and the way(s) we are....
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