John Steinbeck. May 22, 1951

...Yesterday I did not work. I had a sore left arm which gave me hell. Today it is gone. What strange aches we get, physical resentments against living I guess. You know, I like to think that I am general enough and common enough so that I have some empathetic approach to nearly every human emotion and feeling and thought. Of course it is only that I like to think this. It does not make it true but if it were true I would be a better writer for it. There is one field of feeling, however, in which either I am different from most people or they do not tell the truth—perhaps not knowing it or not daring to face it or perhaps feeling that it is a monstrous thing which should not be brought into the light. I don't know that this is so, I simply offer these as reasons why people do not seem to feel as I do. I refer to the will to live. I have very little of it. This must not be confused with a death wish. I have no will to die but I can remember no time from earliest childhood until this morning when I would not have preferred never to have existed. No moment of joy or excitement or sharp experience of pain or sorrow has even made me want to be alive if the opposite were possible. You see it is no longing for death but a kind of hunger never to have lived. The few times I have stated this I have been attacked with everything from straight disbelief to a kind of hatred as though I were a traitor to life. And perhaps I am. But my feeling is not based on any thought whatever. It lies far below the lighted levels of thought, somewhere in the blackness from which impulses arise. This feeling has its corollary in another which is equally disbelieved and yet is equally true. Having little will to be alive I have also very little personal ego—some vanity but little ego. The two oldest and strongest children of ego are domination and possessiveness, and I have very little of either of these. And the youngest and stupidest child is desire for immortality and I have none of this whatever. Another offspring is competitiveness, which is I guess a desire to prove superiority, and I have none of this either. It is a kind of crippled quality I guess, or perhaps one human characteristic is left out. But what I say is true. To that extent I am a monster like Cathy. And it is strange that my trade is one which usually is chosen by people who have a will both for life and for immortality. That is a paradox I know. I truly do not care about a book once it is finished. Any money or fame that results has no connection in my feeling with the book. The book dies a real death for me when I write the last word. I have a little sorrow and then go on to a new book which is alive. The line of my books on the shelf are to me like very well embalmed corpses. They are neither alive nor mine. I have no sorrow for them because I have forgotten them, forgotten in its truest sense.

—John Steinbeck, Journal of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters