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New Video from San Jose State University on John Steinbeck: A Writer’s Vision

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San Jose State University’s Martha Heasley Cox Center for Steinbeck Studies continues four decades of distinguished service to scholars, teachers, and students with John Steinbeck: A Writer’s Vision. The recently released video was written by Susan Shillinglaw and produced by the Center’s staff, led by Peter Van Coutren, the Center’s curator. Tracing Steinbeck’s life and work from Salinas, California to New York City and beyond, the 16-minute video uses photographs and recordings from the Center’s extensive collection—as well as voice over designed to sound as old as Steinbeck himself—to summon the period and personality that gave rise to Steinbeck’s greatest fiction. A follow up video is in preparation, about John Steinbeck, Woody Guthrie, and The Grapes of Wrath.

Portrait photos of John Steinbeck by Yousuf Karsh courtesy of the Karsh Foundation.

Henry Fonda’s Daughter, Jane Fonda, to Receive 2023 John Steinbeck Award

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Jane Fonda, the actress-activist daughter of John Steinbeck’s friend, the actor Henry Fonda, will receive the 2023 John Steinbeck “In the Souls of the People” Award on September 13 at San Francisco’s Herbst Theatre. The award is made annually by the Martha Heasley Cox Center for Steinbeck Studies at San Jose State University. Previous awardees include Bruce Springsteen, Arthur Miller, and Joan Baez. In a January 27 post—“Even John Steinbeck Thought Henry Fonda Was The Perfect Pick For Grapes Of Wrath”—film writer Jeremy Smith celebrates the performance that helped make Henry Fonda famous, and John Steinbeck’s friend.

Celebrating Woody Guthrie’s Grapes of Wrath Connection

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“Woody is Just Woody,” an exhibition expressing the inspired connection between the author of The Grapes of Wrath and the folk singer Woody Guthrie, is on display through August 25, 2023, in the fifth floor art gallery of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Library at San Jose State University. Organized by Peter Van Coutren, curator of San Jose State’s John Steinbeck collection, it features sculpture by Lew Aytes (see photo) and poster-size covers from foreign-language editions of John Steinbeck’s 1939 masterpiece. The exhibition is open to the public from 11:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. weekdays and from 1:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m. on Saturdays.

San Jose State Hosts Steinbeck Conference

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Reading, teaching, and translating Steinbeck, the subject of San Jose State University’s first Steinbeck conference since 2019, attracted a reported 30 attendees to the downtown San Jose, California campus, March 22-24, 2023. Many if not most papers and panelists were virtual, and at least one speaker was pre-recorded, giving the gathering a sketchy, spare feel. But a pair of in-person presentations, accessed by jockeying between two concurrent sessions, stimulated conversation and served as a reminder of conferences past to those who remembered 2013 and 2016. Susan Shillnglaw (in photo) profiled Toni Jackson, Ed Ricketts’s live-in partner and a familiar figure around 1930s and ’40s Pacific Grove who, like Steinbeck’s spouse Carol Henning, served as frequent typist and sometimes-editor in the relationship. Carrying on the tradition of research on Steinbeck by readers outside the academy, Daniel Levin—a chemist by training—traced the literary and theological lineage of timshel, the free-will-vs.-fate concept borrowed by Steinbeck from Talmudic Judaism in East of Eden.

Jacqueline Woodson to Receive John Steinbeck Award on October 18, 2022

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Together with the Martha Heasley Cox Center for Steinbeck Studies, the Center for Literary Arts at San Jose State University will present the 2022 John Steinbeck “In the Souls of the People” Award to Jacqueline Woodson, author of the 2014 memoir novel Brown Girl Dreaming. The award is given to writers, artists, thinkers, and activists whose work captures Steinbeck’s empathy, commitment to democratic values, and belief in the dignity of people who by circumstance are pushed to the fringes; and the phrase “in the souls of the people” comes from Chapter 25 of The Grapes of Wrath. Woodson is the recipient of a 2020 MacArthur Fellowship and the 2020 Hans Christian Andersen Award. Brown Girl Dreaming, a New York Times bestseller, won the National Book Award, the Coretta Scott King Award, a Newberry Honor, and the NAACP Image Award. Woodson is also the author of Red at the Bone, a New York Times bestseller; Another Brooklyn, a 2016 National Book Award finalist; and books for young readers including Before the Ever After, The Year We Learned to FlyThe Day You Begin, and Harbor Me. The October 18, 2002 awards ceremony will take place at 7:00 p.m. in the Student Union Theater on the San Jose State campus in downtown San Jose, California. During the event Woodson will have an onstage conversation with Michele Elam, the William Robertson Coe Professor of Humanities at Stanford University. The 7:00 p.m. event is free.

Propose a Paper or Panel for March 22-24, 2023 Steinbeck Conference at San Jose State

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San Jose State University invites proposals for papers and panels on reading, teaching, and translating John Steinbeck for the Steinbeck conference to be held March 22-24, 2023 at San Jose State. Said Daniel Rivers, assistant professor of American studies and literature and newly appointed director of the university’s Martha Heasley Cox Center for Steinbeck Studies: “We invite proposals from varied disciplines and critical frameworks, including but not limited to literary/cultural studies, comparative literature, media studies, secondary and post-secondary education, psychology, political science, sociology, ecology, and marine biology. Potential topics include comparative studies of Steinbeck and post-Steinbeck writers, issues in translating Steinbeck’s works into other languages, stage/film/video adaptations, and approaches to teaching Steinbeck in contemporary classrooms.”

Email a 300-word or less abstract of the paper you propose to present, along with your biography of 200 words or less, to Steinbeck@sjsu.edu with the subject line “Steinbeck Conference 2023 Submission, [your last name].” If you are interested in suggesting a pre-constituted panel, workshop, or roundtable session for the conference, note the title, the format, and the names of your co-presenters in your online submission to the same address. If you are interested in soliciting participants for your proposed panel, workshop, or roundtable session, email your topic and request with the subject line “Panel CFP Steinbeck Conference 2023.” Your topic and invitation will be shared with the center’s mailing list. The deadline for all submissions is November 15, 2022.

Above: John Steinbeck caricature by David Levine.

Washington Post: Read Steinbeck to Understand Russia and Ukraine

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John Steinbeck’s wrote The Moon Is Down to inform Americans and inspire people in the formerly free countries of Europe—Norway, Denmark, Holland, France—occupied by Hitler’s forces in 1941. A March 1, 2022 op-ed in The Washington Post, by a literary-minded diplomat named Charles Edel, uses Steinbeck’s 1942 novella-play to educate another generation, and inspire resistance to another invasion and another dictator, eight decades later. “President Zelensky’s leadership of Ukraine’s resistance is a testament to democracy” profiles the Ukrainian president as a modern-day Mayor Orden, the fictional character Steinbeck likely modeled on the exiled mayor of Narvik, Norway. The op-ed’s subtitle—“How John Steinbeck’s ‘The Moon Is Down’ inspired resistance to occupation”—might give away the lede. But it will please fans of Steinbeck’s writing, which also includes A Russian Journal, Steinbeck’s 1948 nonfiction work in which Ukrainians emerge as victims of central planning and Russian belligerence. But that’s a subject for another op-ed on John Steinbeck’s continuing relevance.

Photo of Theodor Broch, the exiled mayor of Narvik, Norway.

The New Yorker Finds John Steinbeck Serious, Funny

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The January 24, 2022 New Yorker magazine puts John Steinbeck in the friendliest possible light—twice in one issue—by exploiting his popularity as an enduring cultural meme for purposes both serious and silly. The pop-music department profile of John Mellenkamp, by Amanda Petrusich, opens with a sober account of the John Steinbeck “in the souls of the people” humanitarian award, which was conferred in 2012 on the Indiana-born singer-songwriter known, like the award’s namesake, for employing art to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. Elsewhere in the magazine, the weekly humor column by David Kamp satirizes such Steinbeckian over-seriousness by ascribing qualities to the “Established Creative” type of COVID-era dating partner that Steinbeck might have recognized in himself: “The hetero package comes with a Jaguar E-Type, attractively shelved first editions of John Steinbeck, and a meticulously catalogued collection of rare jazz ’78s.” Fair warning, however. “Extremely successful creative can be more susceptible to messiah complexes, infidelity, [and] using Jessica Chastain as a communications proxy.”

Photo collage: John Steinbeck flanked by serio-comic “Established Creative” co-types, Orson Welles (left) and Burgess Meredith. Not shown: Fred Allen, the comic writer and occasional New Yorker contributor who remained Steinbeck’s close friend until Allen’s death in 1956.

Native Grandson 2022: County Londonderry Celebrates John Steinbeck

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John Steinbeck’s blarney-free critique of Depression-era California and post-war America continues to engage fans, scholars, and presenters in disparate places, from Steinbeck’s native state to his grandfather Samuel Hamilton’s Northern Ireland. After noting that Steinbeck visited Hamilton’s birthplace in rural Limavady in 1952, a January 28, 2022 online article entitled “John Steinbeck Festival coming to Roe Valley Arts and Cultural Centre” offers a month-long schedule of local activities kicking off on February 5 and including weekly lectures and concerts, Dust Bowl photography, and a book cover design contest for schoolchildren reading Steinbeck for the first time. Articles in Steinbeck Review on “Dust Bowl Refugees as Reference for Today,” by Kimberly Wright, and “Travels with Charley as American Picaresque,” by Carter Davis Johnson, demonstrate Steinbeck’s enduring attraction for bright young scholars turned on to Steinbeck by their own early reading. Wook-Dong Kim’s essay on “John Steinbeck and Korean Connections” reminds us that Steinbeck’s sympathies and appeal were always international, and Robert DeMott’s review of Chasing Steinbeck’s Ghost—Bill Steigerwald’s rigorously researched correction of the chronology of Travels with Charley—shows that investigation need not be limited to scholars where John Steinbeck is concerned.

Salinas Festival Celebrates Close Mexican Connection

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John Steinbeck was no accidental tourist when it came to the Republic of Mexico. Although he later expressed a preference for the mother culture of Spain, he traveled to Mexico early and often for personal and professional purposes: for escape and recovery, for literary and film material, and (some speculate) for at least one abortion for at least one of his three wives. Current criticism faults him for the absence of Mexicans, blacks, and other non-white characters in his 1939 protest novel The Grapes of Wrath, but four works from the following decade—The Forgotten Village and Sea of Cortez (1941), The Pearl (1947), and Viva Zapata (1952)—reflect Steinbeck’s fascination with the history and people of a country that was less than a day’s drive but utterly different from his hometown of Salinas, California. On October 2-3, 2021, the National Steinbeck Center in Salinas will celebrate Steinbeck’s Mexican connection with a schedule of in-person and online activities packaged and presented as Steinbeck and Mexico and priced at $20 a day ($17 for seniors). In addition to bingo, mural painting, and movies, the 40th annual Steinbeck festival includes online presentations by Richard Astro and Donald Kohrs on the writing of Sea of Cortez and by Vincent Parker on teaching Steinbeck in the 21st century. (The annual Steinbeck festival in Salinas used to take place in the spring to overlap with the triennial Steinbeck conference at San Jose State University, where discussion has begun about convening another conference in 2022.)