Terrence McNally, the Tony Award-winning playwright who taught and babysat John Steinbeck’s boys when they were hard-to-manage teenagers, has died in Sarasota, Florida from complications of the COVID-19 virus which shuttered Broadway and much of the world’s business after being declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization. A survivor of lung cancer, McNally, 81, was a 20-something graduate student at Columbia University when Steinbeck family friend Edward Albee recommended him as a tutor and companion for Steinbeck’s sons Thom and John IV during an extended tour of Europe taken by the Steinbeck family 60 years ago. As noted in a March 24, 2020 profile of the playwright published in The Guardian, “McNally’s long career began in 1961 when John Steinbeck asked him to work together on a number of projects, including a musical version of East of Eden” which, like other projects following the failure of the 1955 musical Pipe Dream, never materialized.

Composite image of Terrence McNally courtesy New York Post.

John Steinbeck © 1954 Yousuf Karsh

Hard news from three different sources suggests the year ahead will be a busy one for followers, fans, heirs, and collectors of John Steinbeck. Steinbeck at Stanford is the subject of a special January 30 library event at Stanford University (sold-out as of this writing) that includes a lecture by Stanford professor Gavin Jones and an exhibit of items from Stanford’s substantial collection of Steinbeck editions, manuscripts, and memorabilia. Hard on the heels of October’s sale of manuscripts and personal possessions from the estate of Steinbeck’s widow Elaine, by an auction house in San Francisco, New Jersey’s Curated Estates auction service has announced the sale of items—including Steinbeck’s baby hair and confirmation certificate—timed to end on February 27, the author’s birthday. As reported by the Hollywood Reporter, attorneys for the widow of Steinbeck’s son Thom are taking their case for reassigning the movie rights to Steinbeck’s books all the way to the Supreme Court, assuming the high court finds time for issues beyond impeachment and tax returns in the busy year ahead.

Like the recent donation of the S.J. Neighbors collection of John Steinbeck papers to Stanford University, the upcoming sale of John Steinbeck memorabilia by Heritage Auction House in San Francisco serves as a reminder that much remains to be learned about the author’s life and work—and that access to documents is key to discovery. Among the 36 items on offer, spanning 100 years of Steinbeck family history, are the walnut box Steinbeck’s grandfather gave his grandmother, an early manuscript of his novel Tortilla Flat, and the journal he kept when he was writing The Wayward Bus. Also included are letters from President John Kennedy and First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy, the latter in response to questions posed to her by Steinbeck for the biography she asked him to write following her husband’s assassination in 1963. “I enclose a letter I wrote you weeks ago – but hesitated to send. But I don’t have the strength to do it over. In answer to your second letter – I do think about your letters for the longest time. I welcome them but they are not easy to answer,” wrote Mrs. Kennedy in 1964.

Donald Trump said weather kept him from wreath-laying duty at the American cemetery outside Paris on the 100th anniversary of the armistice that ended the Great War. But the rain-shy Make-America-Great-Again president managed to keep his Armistice Day date in Paris with Vladimir Putin, the former KGB officer who runs Russia the way Stalin did when John Steinbeck and Robert Capa toured the Soviet Union 70 years ago. Previously undisclosed details of KGB spying on Steinbeck and Capa emerged from a recently declassified document summarized in a Radio Free Europe report that should stir anyone anxious about Russian history repeating itself in the love affair between Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump. (For a dose of relief, see Stephen Cooper’s blog post on finding solace in Steinbeck published by The Hill in 2016.)