“John Steinbeck stole his best friend’s wife — and then wrote her into his novels.”

Before The Grapes of Wrath made him America’s conscience, John Steinbeck was a struggling writer in California — and a scandal magnet. In the early 1940s, he began an affair with Gwyn Conger, the wife of one of his closest friends. He pursued her obsessively, broke up her marriage, and then married her himself. The betrayal rippled through their small circle of artists and friends, many of whom never forgave him.

But Steinbeck didn’t stop there. He turned Gwyn into his muse — and his victim. He poured their fights, her vulnerabilities, and their sex life into his novels, reshaping her into characters the public devoured. Gwyn later said being married to him was like living under surveillance: everything she said could be stolen and twisted into art. When their marriage imploded, she wrote bitterly in her memoir, “He didn’t want a wife. He wanted material.”

The scandal was how cold Steinbeck could be. He won the Pulitzer, the Nobel, the adoration of the world — but his family paid the price. His sons later accused him of neglect, saying he treated them as “distractions” from his work. His third wife, Elaine, once joked that John was only faithful to one thing: his typewriter.

And his feuds? Legendary. He despised critics who dismissed him as “sentimental,” lashing out in furious letters. He feuded with fellow writers who thought he was a sellout. Even his Nobel Prize acceptance speech sounded like an attack — more defiant than grateful.

John Steinbeck’s scandal wasn’t only in his novels being banned or burned. It was in the betrayals behind the words — the lives he cracked open for material, the friends he discarded, the women he consumed and then immortalized on the page without mercy.

He wasn’t just writing America’s pain. He was writing his own — and making sure everyone around him bled for it.