This is really messing with my head now. We read Steinbeck at school - in the UK - and were in awe at the gravitas, use of English, literary genius. This is like finding out that Thomas Hardy also wrote manga, or something. I would so love to get my hands on Murder at Full Moon.
I've just searched out some news stories about this and, apparently, Steinbeck destroyed some manuscripts he'd written under the Peter Pym pseudonym, but not this one; apparently he had also tried to get it published.
Arrrgh! I so hope that this sees the light of day at some point - or, er, the light of the Moon.
It kinda doesn't feel like a Steinbeck book, really, but it's not a bad read, for what it is.
(someone DV'd my original post, at some point, and I'm not sure if this is why [maybe it was for some other reason entirely] but I intended my use of the term "propaganda" in a descriptive, neutral sense—that's what it is, and what it was intended to be)
https://www.npr.org/2021/05/28/1001309335/a-young-john-stein...