Steinbeck reaches out a fictional hand. Emotional bonds are forged between book and reader. Pauline Pearson, who spent countless hours interviewing Steinbeck's Salinas associates for the Steinbeck Library's oral history project, told me once: "John Steinbeck saved me. I was suffering, and in his work I found solace." Solace and laughter and commitment are what many readers discover in Steinbeck's work. "In every bit of honest writing in the world," he wrote in the late 1930s, "there is a base theme. Try to understand men."