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.

At a recent agricultural technology summit held in Salinas, Steve Forbes called the small Central California city “the Ag-Tech capital of the world.” As director of the Salinas History Project at Stanford University, I have written a book which reconsiders the history of John Steinbeck’s home town from its incorporation as a city in the mid-19^th century to its 20^th century incarnation as an agricultural powerhouse—and its 21^st identity as a laboratory for multiculturalism.

Numerous dissertations, academic papers, and books have focused on various racial and ethnic communities in and around Salinas, and on specific issues important to its evolution, including labor, environment, agriculture, and gang violence. The interconnection of these groups and issues has gained the attention of local leaders. So has the need for a more comprehensive account of the city’s history, and its place in the complex context of national and state history.

We began this work in 2016 knowing the obstacles we faced in achieving an analysis that would be broad and deep enough to shed new light on old problems. Primary among our challenges was one frequently faced by scholars of John Steinbeck’s life and work: written and recorded sources are scattered among multiple collections, some of which are more easily accessed and readily shared than others. The project is now complete and the resulting book is scheduled for publication this fall by Stanford University Press.

Readers with questions about the Salinas History Project are encouraged to contact me at mckibben@stanford.edu. Recently I gave a talk celebrating the 75^th anniversary of Steinbeck’s novel Cannery Row. It was video recorded by the Bill Lane Center for the American West at Stanford University, where I have taught since 2006, and it can be accessed at https://west.stanford.edu/research/works/cannery-row-75-virtual-event.

Photograph of historic Salinas, California downtown courtesy Salinas Public Library and Salinas History Project.

Monterey County’s move to rename Confederate Corners, the isolated intersection south of Salinas, California restyled as Rebel Corners in The Wayward Bus, has renewed interest in John Steinbeck’s 1947 re-imagining of Plato’s Ship of Fools allegory, from Book VI of The Republic. Located on Highway 68 in unincorporated Monterey County, Confederate Corners got its name during the Civil War, when a handful of Southern sympathizers proposed seceding from California as a mark of solidarity with the Confederate States of America. Except for informed readers of The Wayward Bus, the Monterey County ranchers’ mini-rebellion was largely forgotten until controversy over the removal of racist flags and statues in several states of the former Confederacy erupted, post-Charlottesville, into Trumpian rhetoric around issues of ethnicity, immigration, and loyalty to the flag. Like the Ship of Fools metaphor embedded in Steinbeck’s neglected novel—which few critics recognized, then or now—the recent news from Monterey County is replete with the kind of irony that appealed to the author, a big-tent American who began writing The Wayward Bus in and about Mexico.