"Russian Diary" by Pulitzer Prize-winning writer John Steinbeck and renowned military photographer Robert Capa is a classic of reportage and travel notes. The two craftsmen's forty-day trip to the Soviet Union in 1947 was an expedition of the curious. Kapa and Steinbeck "wanted to capture everything that the eye would fall on, and to build from observation and reflection some structure that would serve as a model of observed reality." The structure they chose for their book - and in fact the dominant metaphor for "The Russian Diary" - is a portrait of the Soviet Union.