John Steinbeck - The Winter of Our Discontent

keelson to skys’l:The keel is the spine of the ship, providing structural support, and the keelson is a beam or timbers along the keel to add strength. A skysail is the topsail in a square rigger.

a heart just like this:Steinbeck also had a tattoo, similarly etched with a Stanford classmate.

‘What’s My Line?’… ‘Mystery Guest’:A popular game show that ran from 1950 to 1967 where a panel of four well-known figures tried to guess the unusual occupations of two weekly guests. In the third round of each show, panelists were blindfolded and a celebrity “mystery guest” was questioned.

‘Teen Twisters’:No quiz show with this name made it to the air, but Chubby Checker recorded “The Twist” in 1959, and by September 1960 it reached the top of the charts, launching a new dance craze.

the world being too much with me… peace:William Wordsworth’s sonnet “The World Is Too Much with Us” and allusions to Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass.

muleta and espada: A muleta is a red cloth attached to a stick, used by matadors; an espada is a matador’s sword.

A pleasure dome… down to a sunless sea!:From “Kubla Khan; or, a Vision in a Dream” (1816) by Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834). “In Xanadu did Kubla Khan / A stately pleasure dome decree: / Where Alph, the sacred river, ran / Through caverns measureless to man / Down to a sunless sea.”

What is an individual… his country?:Delivered on July 22, 1850, Henry Clay’s speech on the Compromise of 1850.

It’s so much darker when a light goes out… shone:The typescript of the novel ends with this sentence; the rest of the book is a handwritten addition.

End. And I hope this time it’s clear. I really do hope so. JS:The typescript and handwritten addition end with this remark.