What Were John Steinbeck's Publishers Thinking Rejecting His 1930 Werewolf Murder Mystery?
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Unearthing a lost novel from a titanic writer’s dusty desk drawer is every reader’s dream, but that dream comes true all too infrequently. Yet somehow 2021 is shaping up to be a banner year for lost novels, with Richard Wright’s long-buried novel of police brutality resurrected this spring and Simone de Beauvoir’s abandoned novel of girlhood interrupted on its way this fall. Just when readers thought the year couldn’t get any better, news of another unpublished novel has come along to dazzle us all: John Steinbeck’s lost werewolf novel.
Yes, you read that right. Nobel Prize winner and giant of American letters John Steinbeck wrote a werewolf mystery titled Murder at Full Moon, which has languished in the archives at the University of Texas in Austin after Steinbeck’s publishers rejected it almost a century ago. Written under the pen name Peter Pym, Murder at Full Moon is one of three early career novels Steinbeck never published, two of which Steinbeck himself destroyed as he struggled to achieve literary fame. Now, an academic is calling on the troubled Steinbeck estate to finally allow publication of Murder at Full Moon.
“There would be a huge public interest in a totally unknown werewolf novel by one of the best-known, most read American writers of the twentieth century,” said Professor Gavin Jones, a specialist in American literature at Stanford University, in an interview with The Guardian. “This is a novel that really nobody knows about. It’s a complete novel by Steinbeck. It’s incredible.”
Set in Steinbeck’s beloved coastal California, Murder at Full Moon is about a community terrorized by a series of grisly murders taking place under, as you might have guessed, a full moon. Detectives fear that a supernatural monster has emerged from the marshland near the coastal town. The novel’s characters include a rookie reporter, the mysterious owner of a local gun club, an armchair sleuth determined to solve the rash of crimes using techniques from pulp detective fiction, and a werewolf.
“Even though it is very different from Steinbeck’s other work, in a totally different genre, it actually relates to his interest in violent human transformation—the kind of human-animal connection that you find all over his work; his interest in mob violence and how humans are capable of other states of being, including particularly violent murderers,” Jones said.
In 1930, publishers rejected Murder at Full Moon, and Steinbeck shelved the project. Jones speculated that publishers were disinterested in publishing a gory novel from a then-unknown writer. In the decade to follow, Steinbeck would go on to achieve great fame with Dust Bowl novels about the beleaguered working poor, including Of Mice and Men, Tortilla Flat, and The Grapes of Wrath, which you either read or pretended to read in ninth grade. His fame has come with a steep cost to his legacy: decades of infighting among his heirs over money and movie deals, deemed “a family feud worthy of a Steinbeck novel.”
Murder at Full Moon’s fate may hang in the balance of this legal feud. Ever since Steinbeck’s death in 1968, his family has remained bitterly divided, with his widow and his children from a previous marriage pitted against one another in a heated dispute over the copyright to Steinbeck’s works. Litigation has been ongoing since the early 1980s, and now that Steinbeck’s widow and sons are deceased, their heirs have continued the feud. The unfortunate consequence of the family's ongoing squabble is that Murder at Full Moon remains unread, and as a result, we remain in the dark about this undiscovered side of an American master. All this handwringing about preserving Steinbeck's legacy, all these hundreds of thousands of dollars spent in legal fees, and the literary public understands Steinbeck no better than we did before.
The estate's infighting isn't just holding back Murder at Full Moon—it's holding back Steinbeck's work from enjoying the natural life cycle of art. Stories are meant to be adapted, reinterpreted, and widely enjoyed, not hoarded to curate a writer's legacy or maximize a financial portfolio. The estate's short-sightedness has had a profound impact on the continued life of Steinbeck's work on screen, with a number of high-profile film adaptations squelched. In the most recent lawsuit, Steinbeck’s stepdaughter alleges that his son, Thomas Steinbeck, put the kibosh on lucrative film adaptations of Steinbeck’s works, including a Steven Spielberg remake of The Grapes of Wrath and a version of East of Eden starring Jennifer Lawrence. As recently as October 2020, the Steinbeck family attempted to escalate their lawsuit to the Supreme Court, which declined to hear the case. Until the litigation is put to rest, the copyright to Murder at Full Moon remains in flux. Steinbeck's stepdaughter argues that the estate is losing out as a result of bad business decisions, but at the end of the day, the only party losing out is Steinbeck's global audience, who are eager to enjoy and understand the beloved author in all his werewolf-loving complexity. Steinbeck's readers want to see all of him—not just the literary lion the estate wants us to see.
Yet the fate of Murder at Full Moon may be entirely out of the Steinbeck estate’s hands. Steinbeck’s literary agency, McIntosh & Otis, has no intention of publishing the novel. In a statement to the Observer, McIntosh & Otis said, “As Steinbeck wrote Murder at Full Moon under a pseudonym and did not choose to publish the work during his lifetime, we uphold what Steinbeck had wanted. As the estate’s agents, we do not further exploit the works beyond what had been the author and estate’s wishes.”
Jones took issue with McIntosh & Otis’ argument, saying, “Steinbeck did attempt to have the book published early in his career, and he did not destroy this manuscript as he did several others. Many authors have their works published posthumously, and write under pseudonyms.”
Unpublished novels never have an easy path to seeing the light of day. It took Wright’s estate eighty years to combat the censorship and racism that buried The Man Who Lived Underground, while de Beauvoir’s literary executor has taken thirty-five years to tackle The Inseparables. “Other publishing priorities simply got in the way, which is why I’m just getting to her novels and short stories now,” Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir said. Murder at Full Moon may set a new record for just how long an unpublished novel can collect dust.
Give us Murder at Full Moon, cowards. Let us see this pulpy, undiscovered side of Steinbeck, an American master that perhaps we don’t understand as thoroughly as we thought. Let us have the novel, and free up the copyright while you’re at it, so that we can have the werewolf movie we so richly deserve. It’s what Steinbeck would have wanted. If you won’t take our word for it, take it from Steinbeck himself: “The free, exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in the world. And this I would fight for: the freedom of the mind to take any direction it wishes, undirected. And this I must fight against: any idea, religion, or government which limits or destroys the individual. This is what I am and what I am about.”
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