Meeting John Steinbeck in Somerset

I travelled down to Bruton in south Somerset yesterday for a very interesting talk to Andrew Miller about his bracingly ghoulish new novel Pure. A very gracious host and an enthusiastic ambassador for his patch of the west country, he led me to the town's compact but charming museum, the kind of one-room miscellany of curious artefacts that seems, sadly, to be dying off in most places: a reproduction hairstylist's salon from the 1960s, geological models and a display of Soviet graphic art.

Lots of intriguing surprises, but most intriguing of all was an exhibit about Bruton's most celebrated literary connection, who turns out to be John Steinbeck. Wrong continent, surely? But no, exposing this reader's ignorance, it turns out that California's Nobel laureate was besotted with Somerset – drawn there by a lifelong fascination with Arthurian legend, he described it to one correspondent as "Avalon". He visited three times, renting a cottage nearby for nine months in 1959, and exulting over its views of Glastonbury Tor. The author of such profoundly American stories as The Grapes of Wrath and Of Mice and Men, I learned, considered that "the best work of my life and the most satisfying" would be a retelling of the King Arthur legend, updating Malory for a 20th-century audience. Who knew?

The book itself was never completed to Steinbeck's satisfaction, though a version was published posthumously, and "a well attended lecture in the Community Hall" suggested that the Grail legend resonates throughout Steinbeck's work as a whole. Not just East of Eden, then, but West of Warminster too?

Alas, the mannequin of the author himself (which you can glimpse in this YouTube video has been removed. "People found it a little disturbing," we were told. But I'm very glad to have encountered a familiar writer in this unexpected context, and has left me eager to find more unlikely literary landmarks. Any pointers?