Many unpublished journals detailing the depression of the American author are up for auction in New York

On the eve of 1949, shortly before he started writing his masterpiece, East of Eden, the great American author John Steinbeck wrote in his diary: “I don’t suppose anyone has ever so hated a year as I hated 1948. It is with a great sense of relief that I move into 1949. No matter how bad it is, it can’t be as bad as ’48. Wife, children, best friend: all gone. But perhaps it toughened me.”

His best friend and fellow author, the marine biologist Ed Ricketts, had died in a train crash, before his second wife, Gwyn, left him and took their children with her. The diary Steinbeck wrote throughout the year that followed was the most “intense and private” journal he ever wrote, said Prof Susan Shillinglaw, the pre-eminent Steinbeck scholar and former director of the Center for Steinbeck Studies at San José State University, California.