Cup of Gold was a strange book. At its heart, it concerns the doomed nature of the solitary hero—a man who gets everything he wants, but to the same end as any other man. All but ignored among Steinbeck’s books a century later, it was nonetheless the one that prefigured the arc of his own life. In his longing for success, Steinbeck could never shake the feeling that time was running out on him. He could stop time in a book, but not for his own account. Steinbeck was, for all his hard work and discipline and earnest desire, merely mortal. Like anybody else.