John Steinbeck
I was born lost and take no pleasure in being found.
This is one of the very first drawings in my sketchbook, which I started in 2010. Steinbeck was a writer we had foisted upon us at school, studying Of Mice & Men for O-level, but I was a teenage dickhead and didn’t get it at the time. Now I do, and he was one of the first writers I encouraged my daughter to read after she matured past the ‘YA’ titles. Reading Steinbeck when you’re young raises the bar of your expectations for any future writers you come across. While in California in 2000 we visited Monterey, where they really milk the Steinbeck connection for the tourist trade, but I couldn’t get too exercised about it because if it means more people ended up buying an reading his books, that can only be a good thing.
