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.

Saved! John Steinbeck’s Retreat in Sag Harbor

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Thanks to local support and international interest, the waterfront property in Sag Harbor, New York, from which John Steinbeck set forth in Travels with Charley joins three properties in California which were similarly associated with Steinbeck’s life and writing, and similarly saved for posterity through the luck and pluck of community volunteers. On March 31, a nonprofit group called the Sag Harbor Partnership purchased the 1.8-acre Steinbeck property on Long Island Sound—the modest residence, the guest cottage and boat dock, and Joyous Garde, the 100-square foot writer’s work retreat built by Steinbeck—for $13.5 million.

Like the Steinbeck family home in Salinas, like Ed Ricketts’s lab on Cannery Row and the fishing vessel the two men sailed in Sea of Cortez, the Sag Harbor compound where Steinbeck wrote his final novel, The Winter of Our Discontent, will foster learning and creativity. Under local nonprofit management since the 1970s, the Steinbeck House in Salinas offers daily lunch and venue tours. Doc’s Lab—gifted to the City of Monterey 25 years ago by Ed Larsh—incubated the Monterey Jazz Festival. Restored and rehabilitated after being rescued from the waters of Port Townsend, Washington, the Western Flyer will return to Monterey Bay in 2023 for use as a mobile marine biology classroom. One vision is to sail the boat on learning excursions through the Panama Canal to Sag Harbor, connecting the western and the eastern spheres of John Steinbeck’s personal and literary worlds.

John and Elaine Steinbeck purchased the Sag Harbor home in 1955 and used it part-time until his death in 1968. Subsequently the property was deeded to the trust established by Steinbeck’s widow, who died in 2003. The secluded Suffolk County property was listed for sale in February 2021 for $17.9 million. Almost two years later to the day, the Sag Harbor Partnership completed its purchase for $13,5 million, obtaining an additional commitment for the $10 million endowment needed to maintain the property, fund a writer’s residency program, and support community outreach.

As the two-year delay showed, the asking price was too high, and that gave the citizens of Sag Harbor time to act. In Steinbeck’s terminology, when these networks organized and moved into action they became a phalanx, a coming together of concerned individuals as a single social entity, one powerful enough to protect their environment from external threat—preventing demolition and redevelopment by securing the property for noncommercial use. Steinbeck saw the phalanx as an unstoppable force, moving in one direction with a mind and a will of its own. Sag Harbor proved his point.

Fortune helped pave the way. Not long ago, the State of New York empowered Suffolk County to impose a two percent tax on real estate transactions, with the funds collected to be managed by a Community Preservation Fund in support of projects that contribute to the physical, social and cultural health of the area. In Suffolk County, these funds have helped acquire open space, parkland, and historic properties—like the Steinbecks’—through use and conservation easements. The neighboring Town of Southhampton contributed $11.2 million from its portion of the Community Preservation Fund, the Sag Harbor Partnership raised $2.3 million in private donations, and the State made up the $750,000 difference to clinch the deal.

Parallel to this effort, the organizers considered how best to care for the property and create programs consistent with Steinbeck’s legacy and Sag Harbor’s culture, which the Steinbecks loved. Steinbeck’s adopted town has a rich literary history, and creating a working retreat for writers—as Joyous Garde was for Steinbeck—became the the primary focus. Inquiries about managing the property were made to private and public institutions, but found limited interest. Then a major donor suggested going to “where the papers [of Steinbeck’s work] are located.” Thus the search for an academic partner led to the University of Texas in Austin, where Elaine Steinbeck was born. After her husband’s death she contributed a large tranche of material to UT’s Harry Ransom Center, an internationally recognized repository of materials on American and European writers. Attachment to place is a powerful force in Steinbeck’s fiction, and several of the people associated with the Elaine Steinbeck Trust live in and around Austin. Like her, they attended UT, and their university came on board. UT’s Michener Center for Writers, which is named for James Michener, will operate the Sag Harbor writers program.

In a miraculous period of 24 months, the Sag Harbor Partnership organized its forces, negotiated the purchase price, and (in the words of SHP’s March 31 press release) helped insure “the future of Steinbeck’s legacy and his contributions to our cultural heritage.” As Susan Mead, SHP’s co-president, noted, “The Steinbecks loved their Sag Harbor place and were involved in Sag Harbor’s village life.” Comparable dedication by community volunteers led to the purchase of Steinbeck’s childhood home from private owners almost 50 years ago. The stately old Victorian has became a local landmark, but one with national and international significance. John and Elaine’s modest little bungalow in Sag Harbor has a similarly bright future.

Photo of Steinbeck’s’ Sag Harbor home courtesy Forbes.

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.

Who Added the “SLUT” to The Grapes of Wrath?

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First, let me say that the recently released facsimile edition of John Steinbeck’s handwritten manuscript for The Grapes of Wrath is stunning. Published by SP books in France, it’s the same size as the original (an oversized journal), printed on fine paper, and boxed. It reproduces all the red editorial comments—including a puzzling addition to Steinbeck’s manuscript: the word “SLUT,” in block-cap letters, on the last page. Who wrote that?

I first learned of the pale red “SLUT” several years ago when I received a call from an archivist at the University of Virginia, where the manuscript is housed. He sent me the scanned image and asked what I thought of the “SLUT” at the end. But I had no idea. Perhaps a rogue scholar scrawled the word as a response to Steinbeck’s controversial closing scene, I suggested. Although I had examined the manuscript when I visited the University of Virginia, where my daughter went to college, I didn’t study it closely. So hearing about “SLUT” came as a surprise.

When the publisher of SP books, Editions des Saints Peres, wrote me last year with questions about the manuscript, I was asked about the final page. I still had no clue as to the origin of “SLUT,” nor did the other Steinbeck scholars I consulted at the time. The publisher reproduced the final page, “SLUT” included, in the facsimile edition that came out this fall.

The October 4, 2021 review of the facsimile edition in The Guardian speculated on the strange appearance of the word at the end of Steinbeck’s manuscript. I received an email from a Swedish scholar, and soon after emails from three other readers—one in Denmark and two in Sweden. All four noted that in Swedish and Danish the word “SLUT” (pronounced sloot) means End. I loved each email, all four adding a bit about the prevalence of “SLUT” in films and books, and what Steinbeck might have known about its meaning when he wrote the novel.

Carol and John Steinbeck Would Have Known the Swedish

carol-john-steinbeck-susan-shillinglawThe late English scholar Roy Simmonds failed to mention the “SLUT” mystery in a long article he wrote on the manuscript of The Grapes of Wrath. (Perhaps it didn’t show up in his Xeroxed copy). As I told my email correspondents—and The Guardian, which did a follow-up piece— my guess is that Steinbeck’s wife Carol penciled it, perhaps when she finished typing the manuscript in the fall of 1938, perhaps after the couple’s acrimonious divorce in 1943, perhaps years later, in jest, before she sold the manuscript to a San Francisco book dealer. She and John must have known the meaning of “SLUT” in Swedish: they visited Sweden in 1937 and knew the Swedish artist Bo Beskow, whose mother was a children’s author. Carol loved word play, and the double meaning would have delighted her.

But it’s anyone’s guess.

Composite image of facsimile edition of John Steinbeck’s handwritten manuscript for The Grapes of Wrath courtesy of The Guardian. Cover image of Susan Shillinglaw’s Carol and John Steinbeck: Portrait of a Marriage courtesy University of Nevada Press.

 

 

William Souder’s Life of John Steinbeck Wins Los Angeles Times Biography Book-Prize

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William Souder’s Mad at the World: A Life of John Steinbeck has won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in biography. The announcement was made at a virtual ceremony on April 16, 2021. Also nominated for the annual award were biographies of Sylvia Plath, Malcolm X, Andy Warhol, and Eleanor Roosevelt, John Steinbeck’s champion in the controversy surrounding the publication of The Grapes of Wrath 82 years ago. Mad at the World: A Life of John Steinbeck received widespread praise when it was published by W.W. Norton & Co., starting with a September 14, 2020 pre-publication review by Donald Coers at SteinbeckNow.com.

William Souder’s Life of John Steinbeck Finalist for Los Angeles Times Book Prize

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Since its founding 140 years ago in December, the Los Angeles Times—the largest-circulation U.S. daily published west of the Mississippi—developed a reputation for in-depth reporting and colorful editorializing on local subjects of national interest, such as immigration and labor unrest, which preoccupied John Steinbeck from 1935, when the paper’s book critic, Wilbur Needham, became a personal friend and much-needed ally. This history makes the March 3, 2021 announcement that William Souder’s Mad at the World: A Life of John Steinbeck is a Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist welcome news for fans of Steinbeck’s fiction and Souder’s biography. Other nominees in the same category are recently published lives of Eleanor Roosevelt, Sylvia Plath, Andy Warhol, and Malcom X—welcome company for a book about an author who was defended by Mrs. Roosevelt (for The Grapes of Wrath) and known (like the others) for the slightly mad emotion expressed in the title of Souder’s superbly written work.

 

John Steinbeck’s Sag Harbor Home on Sale for $18 Million

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According to a February 19, 2021 New York Times real estate item that quickly caught the attention of Travels with Charley fans, the modest home in Sag Harbor, New York from which John Steinbeck and his poodle started their 1960 road trip can be yours for just under $18 million—more than Steinbeck and his wife Elaine paid in 1955, but less than the price of comparable waterfront properties for sale in tonier Long Island communities like the Hamptons. Steinbeck’s lifelong attachment to small, secluded spaces extended to the tiny writing cabin that he built on the 1.8-acre site and named Joyous Garde, after the Arthurian legend he learned to love as a boy. The online version of the Times real estate story included this comment from Bill Steigerwald, the Pittsburgh journalist who visited Sag Harbor (the venue for Steinbeck’s last novel, The Winter of Our Discontent) before setting out to discover the actual the driving route—and expose the narrative liberties—taken by John Steinbeck on his unsentimental journey “in search of America.”

bill-steigerwald“In 2010, exactly 50 years after Steinbeck and dog Charley left on the road trip around the USA that became Travels with Charley, I left his Sag Harbor house and retraced his route for my 100 percent nonfiction road book/expose, Dogging Steinbeck. I was kindly allowed to trespass on the property by the man who took care of it and I shot some video. I’ve never been confused with Steven Spielberg, and Peter Coyote was otherwise engaged, and I had no sound man . . . .”

Photo of John Steinbeck’s Sag Harbor property, by Gavin Zeigler for Sotheby’s International Realty, courtesy of the New York Times. Photo of Bill Steigerwald courtesy of truthaboutcharley.com.

John Steinbeck Awardees Discuss “Giving Back”

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A pair of celebrity philanthropists with marquee humanitarian projects and progressive political agendas will discuss “Giving Back” in a live-stream event that will end with one receiving the 2020 John Steinbeck Award, given by the Martha Heasley Cox Center for Steinbeck Studies “to honor an artist, thinker, activist who has made a significant contribution to causes that matter to the common person.” Sponsored by the Commonwealth Club of California, the online event features master chef and World Central Kitchen founder José Andrés, recipient of this year’s award, and the actor Sean Penn, who won in 2004. Tickets to the November 30 live-stream are $5.00 for Commonwealth Club members and $10.00 for non-members.

Composite image of José Andrés and Sean Penn courtesy Commonwealth Club of California.

Decision to Close Steinbeck House Bad News for Salinas

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In a July 24, 2020 San Jose Mercury News report that was picked up by wire services, plans were announced by the Steinbeck House in Salinas, California, to cease restaurant and catering operations indefinitely due to COVID-19. John Steinbeck was born in the handsome Queen Anne Victorian on Central Avenue near downtown Salinas in 1902; 70 years later a group of Salinas citizens created a nonprofit organization to purchase and preserve the home as an educational enterprise, supported by earned revenue from the restaurant and catering service run by volunteers on the first floor. Open five days a week to diners, many of them visitors from other states and countries, the restaurant quickly became a point of local pride, providing fine food at popular prices and feeding traffic to other local venues, including the National Steinbeck Center on Main Street. Says Dale Bartoletti—the retired Salinas educator and long-time Steinbeck House docent who has hands-on experience with the 122-year-old building—the decision to shutter the restaurant indefinitely was difficult but inevitable. “We donated several hundred dollars worth of food to a local church that provides daily meals to the homeless. Since then, we’ve served take-out dinner three nights a week and bought enough to see us through August 7, which will be our last Friday Night Dinner,” a popular feature of life in John Steinbeck’s home town before COVID-19 made dining out dangerous.