If Gavin Jones had been a professor there 100 years ago, would John Steinbeck have stayed at Stanford University long enough to finish? Probably not, according to Jones, who addressed the fraught subject of Steinbeck@Stanford at the Stanford University Library on January 30. Jones—who holds the Frederick P. Rehmus Family Chair in Humanities in the Department of English—spoke to a capacity crowd of 200 at the evening event, which was sponsored by the Stanford Historical Society and included a pop-up exhibit from the library’s collection of Steinbeck manuscripts and memorabilia. Credited with contributing to the revival of campus interest in Steinbeck, who enrolled intermittently between 1919 and 1925, Jones used examples of Steinbeck’s early writing to show how Stanford’s emphasis on creativity, collaboration, and interdisciplinary learning shaped the character, context, and content of works like To a God Unknown and Cannery Row—manuscripts of which, in Steinbeck’s hard-to-read hand, were on display at the event. Although he left without earning a diploma and refused to accept an honorary degree, “Stanford was always on his mind,” said Jones. Assuming “the mythology of a misfit” early in his career, Steinbeck was a life-long experimenter whose insights into ecology, empathy, and eugenics—all shaped by Stanford—were, Jones added, ahead of their time and set him apart from literary figures like William Faulkner, who dropped out of Old Miss, and Ernest Hemingway, who skipped college to work as a reporter.
