Was John Steinbeck acting as a CIA informant in Paris the summer he wrote the satirical short story for Le Figaro, published in English for the first time in the current issue of The Strand, about a haughty French chef and his hyper-finicky cat? That’s the question raised in a provocative Daily Beast piece by Christopher Dickey, the Daily Beast’s Paris-based world-news editor. Working his way to a firm maybe, Dickey quotes John Steinbeck’s contemporaneous correspondence with his New York agent, Elizabeth Otis, and Thom Steinbeck’s eye witness account—first cited by Brian Kannard in his 2013 book Steinbeck: Citizen Spy—of daily visits to the Steinbeck’s residence at 1 Avenue de Marigny by a man from the U.S. embassy with an attaché case. The son of a famous father, like Thom Steinbeck, Christopher Dickey is a frequent contributor to Foreign Affairs, Vanity Fair, The New York Times, MSNBC, CNN, France 24, BBC TV, and Al Jazeera.
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