John Steinbeck - Sweet Thursday

Il n’y a pas de mouches sur la grandmère: The English translation of the French is: “There are no flies on Grandmother.”

“no room of my own”: Suzy’s lament ironically and meta phorically echoes Virginia Woolf’s pioneering feminist essay, A Room of One’s Own (1929), delivered as lectures at Cambridge University in 1928. In the essay, Woolf claims that in order for a woman writer to be successful, she needs space to work in and money enough to support herself.

Lama Sabachthani?: From Matthew 27:46: “And about the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, saying, ‘Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?’ that is to say, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”

Monarch butterflies: Steinbeck has taken some license here by timing the arrival of the butterflies (Danaus plexippus) in spring. In reality, they appear annually by the thousands in October to begin their crucial overwintering period in the pine and eucalyptus groves in Pacific Grove, which has established a permanent Monarch Grove Sanctuary.

Kinsey Report: Alfred C. Kinsey (1894–1956), a biologist at Indiana University and the founder of its Institute for Sex Research, published the studies Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948) and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953).

petition for release of Eugene Debs: Eugene V. Debs (1855–1926), four-time Socialist Party presidential candidate, was convicted in 1918 under the Espionage Act for inciting disloyalty in the armed forces by making an antiwar speech in Canton, Ohio. He was sentenced to ten years in prison, but was freed on December 25, 1919, after President Warren G. Harding commuted his sentence.

March Hare: The March Hare appears in chapter seven, “A Mad Tea-Party,” in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), by British writer and mathematician Charles L. Dodgson (1832–98).

Salinas High School: Steinbeck’s alma mater; he graduated in 1918.

I’m Sure We Should All Be as Happy as Kings: Poem 25 (“Happy Thought”) by popular Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–94) in his A Child’s Garden of Verses and Underwoods (1913): “The world is so full of a number of things, / I’m sure we should all be as happy as kings.”

Woodmen of the World: Widespread national fraternal organization founded in 1890 in Omaha, Nebraska, by Joseph Cullen Root. Lodges, whose members are eligible for a wide array of insurance coverage, conduct volunteer, patriotic, and charitable activities that benefit individuals and communities. The organization is one of the leading donors of U.S. flags to schools and nonprofit groups.