Steinbeck

                           photo dorothy lange

                  Although John Steinbeck never wrote anything remotely Hardboiled, in the way that Hemingway produced The Killers, and arguably other pieces, he certainly dabbled in a dark poetic type of  Dirty Realist writing before it actually existed.

         You're buying years of work, toil in the sun; you're buying a sorrow than can't talk.
                                              ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
                  Death was a friend, and sleep was death's brother.

Grapes of Wrath
John Steinbeck
1939