“This Old House” Means Conservation—and Care for Art and Ecology—in John Steinbeck’s Pacific Grove

October 20, 2015 by 2 Comments

Postcard image of 1908 Carnegie library in Pacific Grove, California
Pacific Grove, California—John Steinbeck’s retreat when there was writing or healing to be done—is a preservation-minded community where “this old house” means the whole town, and residents like Nancy and Steve Hauk, celebrity-citizens with ties to Steinbeck, contribute to the present while connecting with the past. Founded in 1875 as a seaside getaway for camp-meeting Methodists, one where liquor was outlawed and modesty was mandated, Pacific Grove soon became a summer destination—Chautauqua West—for vacationing non-Methodists from inland towns such as Salinas.

Founded in 1875 as a seaside getaway for camp-meeting Methodists, one where liquor was outlawed and modesty was mandated, Pacific Grove soon became a summer destination—Chautauqua West—for vacationing non-Methodists from inland towns such as Salinas.

Steinbeck’s parents liked Pacific Grove’s culture and cool air; their modest weekend cottage off Central Avenue on 11th Street had a view of the bay when Steinbeck was a boy. In 1906 Pacific Grove got a grant to build a Carnegie library on Central, within walking distance of the Steinbeck cottage, where Steinbeck’s wife Carol Henning is thought to have worked in the early 1930s. Steinbeck’s friend Ed Ricketts lived in a handsome house up the hill from Central Avenue on Lighthouse, the other major thoroughfare—until Ed’s wife left him and he moved to lab space he rented for his struggling marine specimen business between Lighthouse and Central avenues. Now located on busy Cannery Row, where peaceful Pacific Grove meets fun-loving Monterey, “Doc’s Lab” attracted legendary people and parties in the 1930s and 40s, achieving the stature of myth in John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row fiction.

Image of Ricketts-Hauk home in Pacific Grove, California

Nancy Hauk, an artist, and Steve Hauk, a writer, own the Ricketts home today. Together they operate Hauk Fine Arts, an intimate art gallery less than a block from Holman’s Department Store, another Pacific Grove landmark made famous by Steinbeck’s fiction. A playwright, Steve recently completed “Almost True Stories from a Writer’s Life,” a series of short stories based on relationships and events from Steinbeck’s life in Pacific Grove, Monterey, and Salinas. One story, “The Daughter,” is set in the Ricketts house. Another features Bruce and Jean Ariss, artists who lived in Pacific Grove during Steinbeck’s time and moved in the colorful Ricketts-Steinbeck circle. Steve is an expert on California artists, and the gallery features paintings by friends of Steinbeck, including Bruce Ariss, inspired by the life and landscape of Pacific Grove, Carmel, and Monterey Bay. Visitors to Hauk Fine Arts who are willing to take up the time freely given by Steve, a former reporter for the Monterey Herald, get an instant education in Steinbeck, Pacific Grove, and the town’s this-old-house history.

Pacific Grove Library Honors Hauks with an Art Gallery

Image of Steve and Nancy Hauk at Pacific Grove Library announcementThe Hauks love Pacific Grove, and Pacific Grove loves them in return. Earlier this year officials announced that new gallery space in the Pacific Grove Public Library would be named in honor of the couple, a tribute to Nancy’s art and Steve’s devotion to his wife, who suffers from a progressive neurological disease. Friends of the Library, a volunteer group that gets things done, raised funds to build out the space, part of a long-term program to upgrade and restore the aging Carnegie library to its former glory. Located a stone’s throw from the sea in a neighborhood of immaculate Victorian homes and historic public buildings including Chautauqua Hall, the library was and is a gathering place for Pacific Grove, where culture continues to attract visitors like butterflies. An art exhibit and lecture series celebrating Rachel Carson’s 1955 book about coastal ecology, The Edge of the Sea, will feature the Carson and Steinbeck biographer William Souder on December 4.

Located a stone’s throw from the sea in a neighborhood of immaculate Victorian homes and historic public buildings including Chautauqua Hall, the library was and is a gathering place for Pacific Grove, where culture continues to attract visitors like butterflies.

Image of the new gallery sign at the Pacific Grove LibraryThe Nancy and Steve Hauk Gallery formally opened at a Friends of the Library reception—attended by fellow artists and community members, and the Hauks’ younger daughter Anne—on October 2, 2015. The library’s Rachel Carson exhibit opened the same day, a meaningful coincidence on many levels. The Methodists who founded Pacific Grove may have been teetotalers, but they were thirsty for knowledge and curious about ideas, art, and science, subjects that defined the summer Chautauqua circuit with its West Coast center in Pacific Grove more than a century ago.

The Methodists who founded Pacific Grove may have been teetotalers, but they were thirsty for knowledge and curious about ideas, art, and science, subjects that defined the summer Chautauqua circuit with its West Coast center in Pacific Grove more than a century ago.

Like Ed Ricketts, Rachel Carson was a scientist; like Ricketts and Steinbeck, she thought deeply and wrote prophetically about ecology. The Sea Around Us (1950), The Edge of the Sea, and Silent Spring (1962), popular books that have become classics, equal Steinbeck in style and Ricketts in observation. Nancy Hauk paints with similar grace and perception about similar subjects—seabirds on the sand, water reeds reflected in a tide pool, the gentle golden hills described by Steinbeck in his best writing about California. Like Steinbeck, Nancy rarely repeats herself in her work, and Steve is still finding sketches and paintings—some completed, others left unfinished—in their house on Lighthouse Avenue.

A Piece of This-Old-House from Steinbeck’s Pacific Grove

Image of Steinbeck family cottage in Pacific Grove, CaliforniaNancy and Steve are walkers in a walking town. Since Nancy’s move to memory care at Cottages of Carmel, where she often can be found with caregiver and friend Yolanda Campos, Steve’s been doing more driving than walking, daily making the drive to visit Nancy over Carmel Hill, a trip Mac and the Boys made to hunt frogs in Cannery Row. One day recently he walked by the Steinbeck family cottage off Central Avenue in Pacific Grove and noticed a dumpster loaded with wood that had been removed for replacement in the process of retrofitting the cottage. “This old house,” he said, “witnessed so much history, and writing. I salvaged three pieces of redwood siding from the dumpster, just in case. I’m glad I did. When I drove by the next day the dumpster was gone.” Thanks to Steve’s care for John Steinbeck, Pacific Grove, and posterity, a piece of the famous cottage has joined the collection of Steinbeck memorabilia at the Martha Heasley Cox Center for Steinbeck Studies, one that includes Steinbeck’s typewriter and the manuscripts of books the author wrote while living—and healing—in the place he loved.

Photo of Ricketts-Hauk home in Pacific Grove courtesy David Laws.

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Timely Topic: John Steinbeck As an International Writer— Planners Invite Proposals for Papers at 2016 Conference in San Jose, California

September 16, 2015 by Leave a Comment

Composite image of John Steinbeck and earth map

In a 1946 letter, John Steinbeck described arriving in Denmark to find “thirty cameramen with flashlights . . . . I didn’t know anyone treated writers like this.” He later observed that Denmark was the only country in the world to keep all his books in print. Meanwhile, on the other side of the globe, the John Steinbeck Society of Japan boasts one of the strongest memberships of any foreign author society dedicated to an American author, with annual conferences and a peer-edited scholarly journal. If any 20th-century American author can be considered an “international” writer, it is Steinbeck.

International Society of Steinbeck Scholars Goes Global

The International Society of Steinbeck Scholars is planning to examine Steinbeck as an international writer in a May 4-6, 2016 conference to be held at the Martha Heasley Cox Center for Steinbeck Studies at San Jose State University in San Jose, California. Proposals are being accepted now through February 2016 for papers on a wide variety of theoretical applications, such as Steinbeck’s connections to world literature and world thought—for example, Classical Greek and Roman, Eastern, and twentieth-century Russian. Other topics are welcome as well, such as deep ecology, power and subjugation, the concept of democracy and America, ethics and philosophy, and gender studies.

San Jose State University Event and Salinas/Monterey Steinbeck Festival Scheduled Back to Back: Do Both!

The San Jose, California conference has been scheduled to precede the 2016 Steinbeck Festival in Salinas and Monterey sponsored by the National Steinbeck Center, located less than two hours south by car from San Jose State University’s downtown campus. Many attendees of the 2013 John Steinbeck conference at San Jose State University traveled to Salinas after the conclusion of the academic proceedings to participate in the tours and other activities organized by the National Steinbeck Center, host of the annual weekend-long celebration of one of the most internationally popular American authors of the 20th century.

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Another Writer in the Family: Steinbeck’s Niece Wows Fans at National Steinbeck Center in Salinas, California

August 25, 2015 by Leave a Comment

Image of Molly Knight, John Steinbeck's niece

John Steinbeck rarely wrote about sports, disliked book-signing crowds, and left Salinas, California more or less for good when he enrolled at Stanford University almost 100 years ago. Bucking family tradition on all three points, a young sports-reporter-turned-book-writer named Molly Knight—the great-granddaughter of Steinbeck’s younger sister Mary Steinbeck Dekker—returned to the National Steinbeck Center in Salinas on August 23 for a book-signing and lively Q & A about her bestselling book, The Best Team Money Can Buy: The Los Angeles Dodgers’ Wild Struggle to Build a Baseball Powerhouse. By all accounts the Sunday afternoon event in John Steinbeck’s home town hit a home run.

From Stanford University to the Los Angeles Dodgers

Like her famous great-great-uncle and his favorite sister, Knight attended Stanford University, where she majored in human biology; John and Mary studied biology at Stanford’s Hopkins Marine Station, not far from Salinas, in 1924. After graduating from Stanford (something Mary did but John Steinbeck didn’t do), Knight worked for ESPN before leaving the network to write her book about the Los Angeles Dodgers, a sharp-eyed baseball-insider’s look at big-business sports. Not a topic you’d think would appeal to Steinbeck or to scholars and fans of his work, perhaps—but you’d be wrong. In fact, the Dodgers were part of Steinbeck’s own household. Steinbeck’s wife Elaine was a Dodgers fan before the team moved west, and John was drawn to Elaine’s “pure spiritual energy” for the team.

Like her famous great-great-uncle and his favorite sister, Knight attended Stanford University, where she majored in biology, a subject John and Mary studied together at Stanford’s Hopkins Marine Station, not far from Salinas.

Steinbeck’s personal interest in sports was “catholic but cool,” the phrase he used in a little essay he wrote for Sports Illustrated in 1965 entitled “Then My Arm Gassed Up.” When Steinbeck scholar and National Steinbeck Center director Susan Shillinglaw heard about Knight’s Los Angeles Dodgers book, she was intrigued: women sportswriters are a rare breed. When Knight spoke, said Shillinglaw, “It was immediately clear that she shared some of Steinbeck’s journalistic sensibilities—she’s curious, engages her subject, knows her stuff—and was on the scene when it mattered most. Molly’s style is forthright, and she tells a good story.”

Clayton Kershaw and the Rewards of Humanitarianism

Knight’s book begins with an interview she conducted with Clayton Kershaw, the Los Angeles Dodgers starting pitcher who is the subject of the prologue from which Knight read at the National Steinbeck Center event. Kershaw sounds exactly like John Steinbeck’s kind of guy. A left-handed strike-out star who was major league baseball’s youngest player when he started at age 20, Clayton Kershaw has been compared to Sandy Koufax, the legendary Jewish pitcher who played for the Dodgers when the team was still in Brooklyn and John and Elaine Steinbeck were living in New York 60 years ago. Both pitchers have won trophies for their athletic prowess, but Kershaw—with his wife—has also been honored for raising money to build an orphanage in Zambia, world-humanitarian work that John Steinbeck would surely applaud, despite the Dodgers’ defection from Brooklyn to Los Angeles in 1957.

A left-handed strike-out star who was major league baseball’s youngest player when he started at age 20, Clayton Kershaw has been compared to Sandy Koufax, the legendary Jewish pitcher who played for the Dodgers when the team was still in Brooklyn and John and Elaine Steinbeck were living in New York 60 years ago.

Another writer—Nick Taylor, director of the Martha Heasley Cox Center for Steinbeck Studies at San Jose State University—was in the National Steinbeck Center audience and loved what he heard Knight say, both about her book and about the author of East of Eden, her favorite Steinbeck novel. More than most, Taylor understood what he was listening to when Knight talked baseball: the hero of Taylor’s thriller The Setup Man (published under the pen name T.T. Monday) is an aging Dodgers pitcher with a second career solving murders in the sometimes-shady world of big-league sports. Taylor responded to a request for comment:

When asked whether creative writing talent might be genetic, Ms. Knight replied that she didn’t think she had inherited any of her famous forebear’s talent for writing. (I disagree.) However she pointed out that she shares her great-great-uncle’s interest in exposing injustices. In her case, as a baseball reporter working for ESPN, she witnessed first-hand the corrupt and vain owners of the Dodgers starving the organization of cash and driving the team, which is a kind of cultural trust shared by all of us, into the ground. This is what inspired her to start writing about the Dodgers, and she says that sense of outrage, of the very rich abusing the common people, is what motivated her to write the book.

Carol Robles is a Steinbeck historian and Salinas, California resident who has been involved with the National Steinbeck Center since it began and is familiar with members of the Steinbeck family. She shared her impressions of the event as well:

The National Steinbeck Center started the sunny afternoon off with hot dogs, popcorn, and cracker jacks. After our baseball snacks, the crowd filled the stadium seating room to hear young Molly Knight tell us about her first published book. (Her grandmother Toni Heyler, Mary Steinbeck Dekker’s daughter and John Steinbeck’s niece, was in the audience.) Molly seemed so young and innocent, yet so composed and charming as she read to us from her the opening pages. Although I know very little about current baseball teams, her fast-moving talk kept me interested: though different from that of her distant Steinbeck relative, her writing style is delightful. Following the presentation and Q & A session, she signed copies of her book, taking time to talk with each person and writing lengthy personal inscriptions. This lovely young lady completely charmed her audience. Everyone seemed pleased when she announced she was going to write a second book.

Second books, as Steinbeck learned from experience, can prove challenging for young writers. But Molly Knight is building a solid following, and her fans are confident that her National Steinbeck Center audience can be counted on to show up for her next home game.

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Pictures at an Exhibition: Event in Steinbeck Country Marries Nature Photography And Music by Mussorgsky

August 4, 2015 by Leave a Comment

Image of High Sierra photograph by Charles Cramer

If you love Ansel Adams, John Steinbeck, and majestic music, mark your calendar for August 16, when Charles Cramer will perform and exhibit at a free event in Steinbeck Country. Like Adams, the visual poet of Yosemite’s High Sierra who was born in California in 1902 one week before Steinbeck, Cramer is a classically trained pianist who is equally masterful at music and nature photography. Each art form also attracted Steinbeck, a childhood piano student and Episcopal church choirboy who wrote the text for two books of photography, A Russian Journal and America and Americans. The marriage of sound and image being presented by Cramer on August 16 would hold particular appeal for Steinbeck, a lover of Russian music, California landscape, and the art of photography. A piano performance graduate of San Jose State University and the Eastman School of Music, Cramer played for Ansel Adams as a young photography student 30 years ago. Today he teaches photography, publishes his work in books and magazines, and exhibits at multiple venues, including the Ansel Adams Gallery.

Image of Charles Cramer, musician and master of nature photography

The August 16 event will begin at 3:00 p.m. with Cramer performing music including Modest Mussorgsky’s piano suite Pictures at an Exhibition on the concert grand at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in Santa Clara, a San Jose-area city located midway between Ansel Adams’s hometown of San Francisco and John Steinbeck’s Salinas. The musical program will be followed by a reception and exhibition of Cramer’s distinctive nature photography, including dramatic images (like the one above) of Yosemite’s High Sierra. The title of Mussorgsky’s 1874 masterpiece—and Cramer’s August 16 performance and photography show—couldn’t be more appropriate. Mussorgsky composed Pictures at an Exhibition for piano in memory of the painter Viktor Hartmann. Maurice Ravel’s colorful orchestration, completed in 1922, magnified the visual power of Mussorgsky’s music and would have been familiar to Steinbeck, who collected records and listened to Symphony of Psalms, by Mussorgsky’s fellow-Russian Igor Stravinsky, while writing The Grapes of Wrath. “The Great Gate at Kiev,” the theme music for SteinbeckNow.com videos, can be heard in this audio sample of Charles Cramer’s recording of the complete Pictures at an Exhibition. (Pictures at an Exhibition is also the title of an award-winning novel by Sara Houghteling, a former Steinbeck Fellow at San Jose State University.) Attend the August 16 event at St. Mark’s if you can. John Steinbeck, who grew up singing in an Episcopal church, will be with you in spirit. Click to play:

Photo of Charles  Cramer by G. Dan Mitchell.

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The Road from The Grapes of Wrath to Ferguson, Missouri: How Current Events Keep John Steinbeck Relevant

March 11, 2015 by 7 Comments

Image of Ferguson, Missouri police confrontation

In the 1980s, it was E.M. Forster. In the 90s, Jane Austen and Henry James. Fitzgerald, Faulkner, and Hemingway had their turn, along with writers of B-list bestsellers whose names have faded, like the films made from their books. In 2015, Hollywood’s Favorite Author is the American Nobel Laureate John Steinbeck. Again.

Image from John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath

The Roots of the Recent John Steinbeck Renaissance

Interest in Steinbeck is surging. Steven Spielberg is reportedly preparing a remake of The Grapes of Wrath. Jennifer Lawrence has signed on to play the lead in East of Eden. Recently the actor James Franco, who starred on Broadway last year as George in Of Mice and Men, announced that next month he will start filming an adaptation of Steinbeck’s little-known 1936 novel In Dubious Battle.

Interest in Steinbeck is surging. Steven Spielberg is reportedly preparing a remake of The Grapes of Wrath.

This isn’t Steinbeck’s first trip to Hollywood. Between 1939 and 1957, eight of his books were made into movies, and he wrote original scripts for four more. The best of these films became classics, like John Ford’s Grapes of Wrath; Lewis Milestone’s Of Mice and Men; and Elia Kazan’s East of Eden.

This isn’t Steinbeck’s first trip to Hollywood. Between 1939 and 1957, eight of his books were made into movies.

But these films were made more than half a century ago. When John Ford’s movie of The Grapes of Wrath debuted in 1940, just a year after Steinbeck’s novel was published, the Dust Bowl was still in the news. How do we explain the Steinbeck Renaissance of 2015? What is it about Steinbeck’s work that resonates with us today?

Image from 1963 civil rights protest in Greensboro, N.C.

From The Grapes of Wrath to Ferguson, Missouri

The answer is a sad comment on our times. Many of the issues Steinbeck addressed in novels like The Grapes of Wrath are as relevant today as they were 75 years ago. Police abuse, for example, continues to be a major problem in America. As we demonstrate solidarity with the victims in Ferguson, Staten Island, and too many other communities, it’s hard not to think of Tom Joad’s famous line from his farewell speech: “Wherever there’s a cop beatin’ up a guy, I’ll be there.”

Many of the issues Steinbeck addressed in novels like The Grapes of Wrath are as relevant today as they were 75 years ago.

Our society also still discriminates against migrant laborers. The undocumented workers who harvest our fruits and vegetables are today’s “bindlestiffs,” as Steinbeck called the laborers George and Lennie in Of Mice and Men. Our politicians talk about immigration reform, but nothing ever happens, and as we argue, produce rots in the fields and those laborers who dare to remain here illegally live in constant fear of deportation. I wouldn’t be surprised if this surprisingly modern conundrum is what drew James Franco to In Dubious Battle, a novel about a farmworkers’ strike in California.

Our society also still discriminates against migrant laborers. The undocumented workers who harvest our fruits and vegetables are today’s ‘bindlestiffs.’

But there’s one more reason Steinbeck resonates today. He famously said that his job as a writer was “to reconnect humans to their own humanity.” In this era of braggy Christmas letters and sanitized Facebook personas, it’s easy to forget that when we suffer, we are not alone. Steinbeck showed us humanity in all its forms, not only the happy family on vacation, but the poor and dispossessed, the filthy, the starving, and the mad. It’s no subject for a Facebook post, but it never goes out of style.

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It’s His Party; You’re Invited: Celebrate at Doc’s Lab in San Francisco, Carol and John Steinbeck’s Kind of Place

February 11, 2015 by 1 Comment

Poster image of John Steinbeck's birthday bash at Doc's Lab in San Francisco

“Lovebattles: Carol and John Steinbeck in the 1930s” is an odd theme for a party, but the author’s 2015 birthday celebration in San Francisco perfectly embodies the bohemian lifestyle of John Steinbeck, his wife Carol Henning, and the colorful circle around Doc’s Lab, Ed Ricketts’s legendary gathering place down the coast on Cannery Row. The new Doc’s Lab—a San Francisco club and restaurant with a storied past of its own—will feature spoken word, food and drink, and songs by Woody Guthrie beginning at 7:00 p.m. on February 28. Dramatic entertainment includes the writer Susan Shillinglaw as Carol Henning, the actor Taelen Thomas as John Steinbeck, and the music of Woody Guthrie (The Ballad of Tom Joad) performed by Steve Mortenson.

Image of Susan Shillinglaw, author of John and Carol Steinbeck: Portrait of a Marriage

Susan Shillinglaw will also read excerpts from Carol and John Steinbeck: Portrait of a Marriage, the popular book she wrote that inspired the idea for the unusual evening. Doc’s Lab’s intimate cellar—former home of the famous Beat-era club, Purple Onion—is party-central for the February 28 event, and City Lights Books, the Beats’ literary home just down the street, is the co-sponsor. Doc’s Lab is located at 124 Columbus Avenue on the western edge of San Francisco’s Jackson Square Historic District. But remember: Carol and John Steinbeck were always casual, even when they argued, so come as you are.

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Explore John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row with the Experts on February 21

February 6, 2015 by Leave a Comment

Image of Cannery Row in Monterey, California

Monterey California’s historic Cannery Row, the setting of great books by John Steinbeck, is a deep subject. That’s why the not-for-profit Cannery Row Foundation invites you to explore Cannery Row’s past, present, and relevance to John Steinbeck’s life and writing at a February 21 symposium featuring scholars, filmmakers, and artists from the United States and France. The all-day event will take place in the Monterey Boat Works Auditorium of Stanford’s Hopkins Marine Station, where John Steinbeck took college courses and first learned about the unique ecology of the Monterey, California Bay.

Image of Michael Hemp and historic photos of Monterey, California

Michael Hemp, the energetic author of a popular book about Cannery Row, is the organizer, so expect to be entertained as well as educated. Along with Hemp, speakers include John Steinbeck scholars Richard Astro, Susan Shillinglaw, Steven Federle, and Donald Kohrs; Monterey, California fishing historian Robert Enea; and filmmakers Eva Lothar and Steven and Mary Albert. Historic images showing Monterey, California’s sardine industry from the Pat Hathaway photo collection will be on display, along with paintings and sculpture inspired by John Steinbeck’s great books and Cannery Row characters.

Sign up at symposium@canneryrow.org. The 9:00-5:00 event costs only $25 and space is limited.

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Coming Soon! Marin County Stage-Adaptation Reading of Steinbeck’s In Dubious Battle

October 24, 2014 by Leave a Comment

Image of poster for Marin County reading of In Dubious Battle

Steinbeck lovers are invited to a reading of In Dubious Battle, John F. Levin’s stage adaptation of Steinbeck’s Great Depression labor-strike novel, at California’s Mill Valley Public Library on Tuesday, November 4. The free 7:00 p.m. event is sponsored by the library and the Playwrights’ Lab, the play-development program of the Throckmorton Theatre, a popular Marin County performing arts venue. Hal Gelb—the producing director of the Playwrights’ Lab and a frequent writer for The New York Times, The Nation, and Bay Area print and broadcast outlets—directs. John F. Levin, the author, is a San Francisco-based screenwriter and freelance journalist whose work has appeared in New West, Oui, and McCalls. Mill Valley, host of the Mill Valley Film Festival, is located in southern Marin County, immediately north of San Francisco via the Golden Gate Bridge.

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Kite Runner Author Accepts 2014 John Steinbeck Award at San Jose State University

August 28, 2014 by 2 Comments

Image of Khaled Hosseini, author of The Kite Runner

Khaled Hosseini, author of the bestselling 2003 novel The Kite Runner, will receive the John Steinbeck “In the Souls of the People” Award at San Jose State University on September 10, 2014. The 7:30 p.m. event benefits the Martha Heasley Cox Center for Steinbeck Studies.

An American physician, writer, and humanitarian, Khaled Hosseini was born in Afghanistan. Like The Kite Runner, his 2007 novel A Thousand Splendid Suns is set in part in his native country, which has experienced foreign invasion, civil war, and occupation by violent forces since he was born in its capital, Kabul, in 1965. His father, a moderate Moslem, served as an Afghan diplomat in Iran and later in Paris before seeking political asylum in the United States with his wife, a teacher, and their children.

Khaled Hosseini, the eldest of five, finished high school in San Jose, California, before graduating from Santa Clara University and receiving his M.D. from the University of California, San Diego. He completed his medical residency at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles and continued to practice medicine for more than a year after the publication of The Kite Runner. His third novel, And the Mountains Echoed, was published in 2013.

Image of Khaled Hosseini, founder of The Khaled Hosseini Foundation

The Khaled Hosseini Foundation, a 501(c)(3) charitable organization, provides direct assistance and economic support to elements of the Afghan population most affected by poverty and violence—refugees, women, and children. A multi-ethnic country with ancient roots stretching from China to South Asia, Central Asia, and the Middle East, Afghanistan combines beauty, tragedy, and civility that provide the rich texture and colorful context of Khaled Hosseini’s heartfelt fiction.

Cover image of Khaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner in DVD

The critically acclaimed film version of The Kite Runner was nominated for Academy and Golden Globe awards in 2008 and received a Christopher Award and a Critics Choice Award from the Broadcast Film Critics Association the same year. The name of the John Steinbeck Award comes from Chapter 25 of The Grapes of Wrath, an earlier novel that combined anger and love and also achieved greatness as a movie: “In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.”

Image of Nick Taylor, director of the John Steinbeck Center at San Jose State UniversityNick Taylor—author of Father Junipero’s Confessor, teacher of creative writing at San Jose State University, and director of the Steinbeck Studies Center—makes the connection with John Steinbeck’s masterpiece while noting that Khaled Hosseini is the first writer who is primarily a novelist to receive the annual award since it was established in 1996:

Plenty of novelists know how to tell a good story, and plenty try to raise consciousness through their work, but very few do both. Steinbeck used fiction to call attention to the plight of migrant farmworkers, in particular the “Okies” of the 1930s, a group that many Americans had heard of, but did not know much about. Khaled Hosseini’s work does this for people of Afghanistan, a population most Americans know only from the news.

The last winner of the John Steinbeck Award was the filmmaker Ken Burns. Previous awardees include filmmakers Michael Moore and John Sayles; musicians Bruce Springsteen, Jackson Browne, Joan Baez, and John Mellencamp; labor leader and civil rights activist Dolores Huerta; actor Sean Penn; broadcast journalist Rachel Maddow; and three writers—Arthur Miller, Studs Terkel, and Garrison Keillor.

Image of Lisa Vollendorf, dean of San Jose State University's College of Humanities and the ArtsLisa Vollendorf, dean of San Jose State University’s College of Humanities and the Arts, is actively involved with the Steinbeck Studies Center, which is named for Martha Heasley Cox, Professor Emerita of English at San Jose State University. Known for her warm style, energetic pace, and attention to detail, Dean Vollendorf—whose field is Romance languages—recently helped organize an international conference in Portugal. In her comments for this post she put the 2014 John Steinbeck Award event into local and global perspective:

This fall we celebrate Khaled Hosseini, a globally important author who immigrated to the Bay Area at the age of fifteen. Hosseini credits his teacher, Jan Sanchez, with giving him a copy of John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, an encounter that inspired him to write fiction in English. Hosseini’s artistic achievements are extraordinary; many credit him with single-handedly humanizing modern Afghanistan for American audiences. His humanitarian work has helped create economic opportunities and meet basic shelter needs for refugees, women, and children in Afghanistan. Khaled Hosseini’s artistic sensibilities and humanitarian work make him a perfect recipient of the Steinbeck Award. We are grateful he accepted and we are all looking forward to the ceremony.

Image from the movie version of John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath

Khaled Hosseini expressed appreciation for John Steinbeck and enthusiasm about receiving the John Steinbeck Award in a statement to reporters earlier this month:

I am greatly honored to be given an award named after John Steinbeck, not only an icon of American literature but an unrelenting advocate for social justice who so richly gave voice to the poor and disenfranchised. Both as a person and a writer, I count myself among the millions on whose social consciousness Steinbeck has made such an indelible impact.

Tickets to the award ceremony can be purchased in person at the San Jose State University Event Center or online at Eventbrite.

Portrait photo of Khaled Hosseini by Patrick Tehan courtesy of the San Jose Mercury News.

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The Grapes of Wrath in Organ Music at John Steinbeck’s Episcopal Church: Event Update

August 15, 2014 by Leave a Comment

Image of St. Paul's, John Steinbeck's Episcopal church, today

John Steinbeck’s childhood Episcopal church in Salinas, California, will celebrate the 75th anniversary of The Grapes of Wrath on August 22, 2014, in a concert of organ music inspired by the music-loving author’s life and work. James Welch, California’s leading concert organist, will perform Franklin D. Ashdown’s recently commissioned Steinbeck Suite, as well as organ music by composers who Steinbeck especially admired or who were living and working in California during the writer’s time.

Image of the original St. Paul's Episcopal Church in Salinas, CaliforniaThe 7:00 p.m. program on August 22—originally planned for Carmel Mission—will take place at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, located since 1954 at 1071 Pajaro Street in the Salinas, California, suburb of Monterey Park. The original St. Paul’s Episcopal Church attended by John Steinbeck (shown at left) was located near the Steinbeck family home on Salinas, California’s historic Central Avenue. (The El Camino Real Diocese of the Episcopal Church, currently headquartered in the Monterey area, plans to move to a large Victorian structure near the Steinbeck House on Central Avenue within the next few weeks.)

Image of John Steinbeck immediately behind the crucifer leaving old St. Paul's Episcopal Church in Salinas, CaliforniaJohn Steinbeck remained active at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church until he left for college in 1919. He was christened by the church’s rector in 1905 and confirmed by a visiting bishop in 1916, and he served as an altar boy, sang in the junior choir, and participated in Boy Scout meetings in the church basement as a teenager. In this photograph he is shown leaving the church, hymnal in hand, behind a young crucifer named “Skunkfoot” Hill on Easter Sunday in 1914. Hill’s name, as well as that of Bishop Nichols of the Episcopal Church in California, appear in The Winter of Our Discontent in an episode based, in part, on John Steinbeck’s childhood. St. Paul’s Episcopal Church plays a less positive role in East of Eden, where Aron’s mother Cathy slips into the back pew to observe her son, a callow convert to the Episcopal Church who is ignorant of the fact that his mother—believed to be dead—runs a Salinas, California, whorehouse.

Image of James Welch, organist for the concert celebrating The Grapes of Wrath The program created by Welch (shown here) will open with organ music by J.S. Bach, the composer John Steinbeck described in Sea of Cortez as “breaking through” to a state of mystical sublimity in sound. It will continue with the Salinas, California, premiere of Ashdown’s Steinbeck Suite, a five-movement work written in honor of the 75th anniversary of The Grapes of Wrath and inspired by scenes from Tortilla Flat and The Grapes of Wrath. Ashdown is one of America’s most widely published composers of church organ music.

Also featured on the August 22 program will be a pair of mid-century California composers who were inspired by the Monterey Peninsula landscape and affiliated with Episcopal churches in San Francisco: Richard Purvis, the organist of Grace Cathedral following World War II, and Dale Wood, the organist at the Episcopal Church of St. Mary the Virgin in the 1970s. It is conceivable that John Steinbeck, who enjoyed hearing organ music and visiting San Francisco, heard Purvis play. Wood’s distinctive organ music style was influenced by musical sources familiar to Steinbeck, including gospel tunes of the type heard in The Grapes of Wrath and incorporated by Ashdown into the lively fourth movement of Steinbeck Suite.

John Steinbeck’s appreciation for Episcopal church ceremony and organ music is evident throughout his writing, nowhere more obviously than in the famous Easter Sunday chapter from Sea of Cortez. Welch’s program will conclude with Wood’s brilliant setting of the chorale “That Easter Day With Joy Was Bright” in recognition of this seminal passage from John Steinbeck’s most philosophical work.

Suggested donation for the August 22 concert is $15 at the door.

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