Rare Steinbeck story about black pilot published

[malaise]

http://www.cp24.com/entertainment-news/rare-steinbeck-story-about-black-pilot-published-1.2090424

<snip>
NEW YORK -- In July 1944, Orson Welles wrapped up one of his wartime radio broadcasts with a brief, emotional reading of one of the country's favourite authors, John Steinbeck.

The piece was titled "With Your Wings," an inspirational story about a black pilot that Steinbeck wrote for Welles' program, and it seemed to disappear almost as soon as it was aired. There are no records of "With Your Wings" appearing in book or magazine form. Even some Steinbeck experts, including scholar Susan Shillinglaw and antiquarian James Dourgarian, know little about it.


But 70 years after Welles' introduction in the midst of World War II, "With Your Wings" is getting a second release. Andrew F. Gulli, managing editor of the Birmingham, Michigan-based quarterly The Strand Magazine, came upon the transcript recently while looking through archives at the University of Texas at Austin. He features it in The Strand's holiday issue, which comes out Friday.

"Steinbeck was an idealist. He saw America as this wonderful land with so much to offer but on the flip side, he could see inequality, he could see greed and excess destroying the working classes," Gulli wrote. "This story strikes me as an effort to show middle America that African-Americans were carrying on a huge burden in defending the United States and the allies during the war."