New Video from San Jose State University on John Steinbeck: A Writer’s Vision

December 5, 2023 by Leave a Comment

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San Jose State University’s Martha Heasley Cox Center for Steinbeck Studies continues four decades of distinguished service to scholars, teachers, and students with John Steinbeck: A Writer’s Vision. The recently released video was written by Susan Shillinglaw and produced by the Center’s staff, led by Peter Van Coutren, the Center’s curator. Tracing Steinbeck’s life and work from Salinas, California to New York City and beyond, the 16-minute video uses photographs and recordings from the Center’s extensive collection—as well as voice over designed to sound as old as Steinbeck himself—to summon the period and personality that gave rise to Steinbeck’s greatest fiction. A follow up video is in preparation, about John Steinbeck, Woody Guthrie, and The Grapes of Wrath.

Portrait photos of John Steinbeck by Yousuf Karsh courtesy of the Karsh Foundation.

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Celebrate! Western Flyer Returns to Monterey Bay

October 26, 2023 by 4 Comments

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Western Flyer—the 77-foot fishing boat John Steinbeck and Ed Ricketts took on their famous 1940 trip to the Sea of Cortez—recently returned to Monterey Bay after nearly a decade of restoration in Port Townsend, Washington. Built in 1937 to serve the commercial fishing industry and presently moored in Moss Landing, California, the Western Flyer will be welcomed back after a 75-year absence on November 4, 2023, with a day of family-friendly festivities around Cannery Row and Monterey’s Old Fisherman’s Wharf. Plans include live music, science and art activities, giveaways, merchandise for sale, and plenty of photo opportunities. The Western Flyer will then return to a life of research and education, and once again ply the waters of Monterey Bay and beyond. All this is the result of the vision of the marine biologist-businessman John Gregg, founding board member of the nonprofit Western Flyer Foundation.

Gregg purchased the boat, which had sunk several times over the decades, in 2015, launching the Western Flyer Foundation to save the severely damaged vessel and recruiting the Port Townsend Shipwrights Cooperative for the job. After eight years of labor, the vessel recently received a Classic Boat Award for its restored presence and sea-worthiness. Though the Western Flyer “gained notoriety from its research trip with John Steinbeck and Ed Ricketts, it’s had a long and storied past as a fishing boat,” Gregg said. “Now restored with a hybrid diesel-electric engine and state-of-the-art marine lab, the Western Flyer symbolizes a bridge linking Monterey Bay’s commercial fishing heritage with its leadership in marine science and education.” Gregg said the foundation’s vision is for the revitalized Western Flyer to stir curiosity by “connecting art and science in the spirit of John Steinbeck, Ed Ricketts, and their journey [recounted by Steinbeck and Ricketts in Sea of Cortez, 1941]. The foundation’s tide-pooling, classroom teaching, and on-board programs will introduce students to a renowned coastal ecosystem that many have experienced only indirectly, or not at all.”

November 4 activities begin at 11:00 a.m. and include a welcoming ceremony at the end of Old Fisherman’s Wharf, a boat parade, and tours of the Western Flyer, all free. On hand for the festivities will be the Alaska artist and Guggenheim Fellow Ray Troll, who created the colorful mural panels at the former facility of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) overlooking Steinbeck’s Great Tide Pool in Pacific Grove. The Center for Ocean Art, Science and Technology (COAST)—a nonprofit organization, like the Western Flyer Foundation—seeks to preserve Troll’s work while converting the NOAA building into a research center blending art and science. A fan of John Steinbeck and Ed Ricketts, Troll put the Western Flyer in the picture when he painted the historic mural.

Photo of Western Flyer courtesy National Fisherman magazine.

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A Chance Christmas Dinner with John Steinbeck in 1947

August 24, 2023 by 5 Comments

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A chance Christmas dinner with John Steinbeck helped set the course of a young man’s life as an adventurer and Pan American pilot who crisscrossed the world many times–and then wrote a book about it. Charles Cutting honored Steinbeck by using the year of their meeting in the title of his book, 1947 Europe from a Duffel Bag. The book, which is available on Amazon, also includes harrowing and insightful experiences as a pilot.

“I was born in Pacific Grove, California, February, 1930,” Cutting writes. “My father as a young man worked down on Cannery Row in Monterey near our home in Pacific Grove. These were the days when the author John Steinbeck and Ed Ricketts were well known. Because of this connection, I heard stories of these two men and some of their life and times.”

Cutting’s father, F. Douglass Cutting, had gone through a divorce and died when Charles was 12, Charles’s daughter Susan said. Charles’s grandfather, Francis Cutting–a superb plein air artist and Impressionist of the period–stepped in to help raise Charles. Francis would often take the boy with him when painting scenes along the California coast. The boy would play while the grandfather painted the land and sea around them.

Charles’s favorite location was Point Lobos, now a state reserve south of Carmel, and thought by many to be the inspiration for another writer of note who had connections to the Monterey Peninsula–Robert Louis Stevenson. It has been said that a tale about a hidden treasure at Point Lobos led Stevenson to write Treasure Island. But Charles Cutting mainly remembers it for the time spent there with his artist grandfather. When Francis Cutting relocated his studio from Pacific Grove to Campbell, California, he brought Charles with him.

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“By 1946 I was attending high school in Campbell,” Cutting continued. “My girlfriend in those school days was a friend of one of John Steinbeck’s nieces. Through this connection in 1947 my girlfriend and I were invited for Christmas dinner at the home of Steinbeck’s sister [Beth Ainsworth, who ran a boarding house in Berkeley at the time].

“As it happened, John came in unexpectedly from his reporting job in Europe and joined us for dinner. We had a warm visit and discussion of his just completed life in Europe. I was intrigued with his description of current events and life on the continent.

“One year later, I graduated from high school. After completing a summer of work, I combined my summer’s pay with my life savings for a grand total of $400. I set out to see for myself what John Steinbeck had talked about during that Christmas dinner in 1947.”

So at the age of 18, with his possessions in a duffel bag, Charles Cutting was off to explore a continent still recovering from World War II. That exploration would continue through his long flying career, including tense times, such as this expressed in one of his poems as his jet begins its climb over the Outer Hebrides: “Still our four engines strained upward through the vast blue void/Sharp sudden spasm and this machine becomes a problem child . . . .”

A Chance Encounter with a Masterful Painting

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I met Charles Cutting by accident or, maybe I should say, by way of art. Driving home to Pacific Grove from San Francisco several decades ago, I stopped at the Red Barn weekend flea mart off Highway 101 to stretch my legs. I didn’t expect to find anything of interest; it was late Sunday afternoon and booths had been pretty well picked over. But in a large cardboard box I found an early 20th century oil painting of a cypress tree on dunes against a moody sky, likely painted in Pacific Grove’s Asilomar or at Point Pinos or nearby Pebble Beach. A beautiful painting, it was signed F.H. Cutting. Research showed that F.H. stood for Francis Harvey and that Cutting had exhibited prolifically, including the California Palace of the Legion of Honor and the Stanford Art Gallery, winning many awards in his lifetime.

Somehow, that led me to Charles Cutting. Or he contacted me when I inquired on the internet after his grandfather. Neither of us remembers exactly how it happened, but we got to know each other and Charles told me the Steinbeck story as well as stories of his career as a Pan Am pilot. Several years later, in 2007, he published 1947 Europe from a Duffel Bag. He once wrote me, “My encounter with Steinbeck was brief on that Christmas in 1947, but it did have an effect on my future life. I never forgot it.”

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Saved! John Steinbeck’s Retreat in Sag Harbor

May 1, 2023 by 6 Comments

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Thanks to local support and international interest, the waterfront property in Sag Harbor, New York, from which John Steinbeck set forth in Travels with Charley joins three properties in California which were similarly associated with Steinbeck’s life and writing, and similarly saved for posterity through the luck and pluck of community volunteers. On March 31, a nonprofit group called the Sag Harbor Partnership purchased the 1.8-acre Steinbeck property on Long Island Sound—the modest residence, the guest cottage and boat dock, and Joyous Garde, the 100-square foot writer’s work retreat built by Steinbeck—for $13.5 million.

Like the Steinbeck family home in Salinas, like Ed Ricketts’s lab on Cannery Row and the fishing vessel the two men sailed in Sea of Cortez, the Sag Harbor compound where Steinbeck wrote his final novel, The Winter of Our Discontent, will foster learning and creativity. Under local nonprofit management since the 1970s, the Steinbeck House in Salinas offers daily lunch and venue tours. Doc’s Lab—gifted to the City of Monterey 25 years ago by Ed Larsh—incubated the Monterey Jazz Festival. Restored and rehabilitated after being rescued from the waters of Port Townsend, Washington, the Western Flyer will return to Monterey Bay in 2023 for use as a mobile marine biology classroom. One vision is to sail the boat on learning excursions through the Panama Canal to Sag Harbor, connecting the western and the eastern spheres of John Steinbeck’s personal and literary worlds.

John and Elaine Steinbeck purchased the Sag Harbor home in 1955 and used it part-time until his death in 1968. Subsequently the property was deeded to the trust established by Steinbeck’s widow, who died in 2003. The secluded Suffolk County property was listed for sale in February 2021 for $17.9 million. Almost two years later to the day, the Sag Harbor Partnership completed its purchase for $13,5 million, obtaining an additional commitment for the $10 million endowment needed to maintain the property, fund a writer’s residency program, and support community outreach.

As the two-year delay showed, the asking price was too high, and that gave the citizens of Sag Harbor time to act. In Steinbeck’s terminology, when these networks organized and moved into action they became a phalanx, a coming together of concerned individuals as a single social entity, one powerful enough to protect their environment from external threat—preventing demolition and redevelopment by securing the property for noncommercial use. Steinbeck saw the phalanx as an unstoppable force, moving in one direction with a mind and a will of its own. Sag Harbor proved his point.

Fortune helped pave the way. Not long ago, the State of New York empowered Suffolk County to impose a two percent tax on real estate transactions, with the funds collected to be managed by a Community Preservation Fund in support of projects that contribute to the physical, social and cultural health of the area. In Suffolk County, these funds have helped acquire open space, parkland, and historic properties—like the Steinbecks’—through use and conservation easements. The neighboring Town of Southhampton contributed $11.2 million from its portion of the Community Preservation Fund, the Sag Harbor Partnership raised $2.3 million in private donations, and the State made up the $750,000 difference to clinch the deal.

Parallel to this effort, the organizers considered how best to care for the property and create programs consistent with Steinbeck’s legacy and Sag Harbor’s culture, which the Steinbecks loved. Steinbeck’s adopted town has a rich literary history, and creating a working retreat for writers—as Joyous Garde was for Steinbeck—became the the primary focus. Inquiries about managing the property were made to private and public institutions, but found limited interest. Then a major donor suggested going to “where the papers [of Steinbeck’s work] are located.” Thus the search for an academic partner led to the University of Texas in Austin, where Elaine Steinbeck was born. After her husband’s death she contributed a large tranche of material to UT’s Harry Ransom Center, an internationally recognized repository of materials on American and European writers. Attachment to place is a powerful force in Steinbeck’s fiction, and several of the people associated with the Elaine Steinbeck Trust live in and around Austin. Like her, they attended UT, and their university came on board. UT’s Michener Center for Writers, which is named for James Michener, will operate the Sag Harbor writers program.

In a miraculous period of 24 months, the Sag Harbor Partnership organized its forces, negotiated the purchase price, and (in the words of SHP’s March 31 press release) helped insure “the future of Steinbeck’s legacy and his contributions to our cultural heritage.” As Susan Mead, SHP’s co-president, noted, “The Steinbecks loved their Sag Harbor place and were involved in Sag Harbor’s village life.” Comparable dedication by community volunteers led to the purchase of Steinbeck’s childhood home from private owners almost 50 years ago. The stately old Victorian has became a local landmark, but one with national and international significance. John and Elaine’s modest little bungalow in Sag Harbor has a similarly bright future.

Photo of Steinbeck’s’ Sag Harbor home courtesy Forbes.

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For John Steinbeck, the Rains in Pajaro Hit Home

March 22, 2023 by 3 Comments

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The word pajaro means bird in Spanish, and Central California’s Pajaro Valley may have inspired the setting of John Steinbeck’s 1936 American strike novel, In Dubious Battle. But the town of Pajaro, California, in Monterey County—the setting of so much great literature by Steinbeck—seems closer in spirit these days to the rained out world of the Joads at the end of The Grapes of Wrath.

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In these tough times for Pajaro, it’s good to remember that the artist who painted the cover image of Steinbeck’s 1939 novel was born there in 1889. His name was Elmer Stanley Hader, and, like Steinbeck, he knew hard times in California. He survived the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire, and he was alert to the field labor strife dramatized in Steinbeck’s fiction. His portrait of the Joad family—tired and tattered, overlooking California for the first time—takes its power, like Steinbeck’s masterpiece, from its empathy.

elmer-stanley-hader-berthaLike Steinbeck, Hader moved on from Monterey County. He pursued his art career, first in San Francisco, then in Paris and New York. His illustrations appeared in national magazines including Cosmopolitan, and he collaborated with his wife Berta in creating more than 30 children’s books and in illustrating many others. Together they won the coveted Caldecott Medal for their 1949 children’s picture book, The Big Snow. His painting for the Grapes of Wrath cover eventually sold for more than $60,000. He died five years after Steinbeck, in 1973. Both men passed away in New York, but neither forgot his California roots. Each would have profound sympathy for Pajaro today, flooded out by The Big Rain of 2023.

Lead image courtesy Los Angeles Times. For more on the subject, read “How a long history of racism and neglect set the stage for Pajaro flooding” in the paper’s March 20, 2023 edition.

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A Steinbeck Vade Mecum by Steinbeck’s Great Evangelist

February 1, 2023 by 2 Comments

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The November 2022 publication of Steinbeck’s Imaginarium was propitious. Its publisher, the University of New Mexico Press, published Steinbeck and His Critics: A Record of Twenty-Five Years in 1957, when Steinbeck was still in touch with “Skunkfoot Hill,” his boyhood rival from Salinas, who chaired UNM’s department of anthropology. Its author, Robert DeMott, is Professor Emeritus of American literature and creative writing at Ohio University, and a major force in Steinbeck scholarship; Steinbeck’s Imaginarium is his valedictory to the community and field of study he helped create. Chapter subjects indicate the book’s range and variety (“Half a Century with Steinbeck,” the writing of Cannery Row, Steinbeck’s journals, Steinbeck and fly-fishing). But the subtitle (“Essays on Writing, Fishing, and Other Critical Matters”) seriously understates the book’s importance to the future of Steinbeck studies. A deep dive into texts, contexts, and connections, Steinbeck’s Imaginarium is certain to become a vade mecum for serious students of Steinbeck in need of a friendly guide.

John Steinbeck’s Gravitational Pull

DeMott’s preface describes his sense of connection to Steinbeck’s life and writing, and his purpose in pursuing both as the chief work of a 50-year career:

For me, the Matter of Steinbeck—by which I mean not just his writings but the overall body of his work, the allied collection of diverse historical, personal, creative, and intellectual materials that make up his achievement and offered possibilities for sustain investigation into his life and career—was never solely a bloodless investigation into his life and career, nor a way to mark academic time and advancement . . . but an attempt to understand and communicate one writer’s important literary, social, and ecological vision that gathered strength, urgency, and relevance as the years went on. Steinbeck’s gravitational pull got stronger over the decades, not weaker.

steinbecks-imaginariumThe fruits of the author’s passion for the Matter of Steinbeck, in all its forms, have proven to be abundant. They include Steinbeck’s Reading and Steinbeck’s Typewriter, a pair of books that provide helpful lists and important insights into the process of Steinbeck’s reading and writing; After The Grapes of Wrath, a collection of essays with Donald Coers and Paul Ruffin; and critical editions of major works by Steinbeck for Penguin Books and the Library of America: To a God Unknown, Novels and Stories 1932-1937, Novels 1942-1952, The Grapes of Wrath, Sweet Thursday, Travels with Charley and Later Novels 1947-1962 (with Brian Railsback), and Working Days: The Journals of The Grapes of Wrath 1938-1941. Seminars taught and dissertations directed at Ohio University have produced stars like Railsback, founding dean of the honors college at Western Carolina University, and David M. Wrobel, dean of arts and sciences at the University of Oklahoma. DeMott’s directorship of San Jose State University’s Steinbeck Studies Center, early in the center’s development, resulted in the acquisition of one-of-a-kind documents and artifacts, including Steinbeck’s Hermes typewriter. Steinbeck’s Imaginarium builds on this history of scholarly energy, enterprise, and collaboration. But DeMott insists that there is still unfinished Steinbeck business to be done by a new generation. His to-do list for the future includes an unexpurgated edition of Steinbeck’s letters, collected  editions of Steinbeck’s journals and unpublished works, and a volume of Steinbeck iconography and artifacts, like the one on Ernest Hemingway organized by Michael Katakis, Hemingway’s literary executor, in 2018.

Student Scholars in Search of a Mission

But the data provided in DeMott’s survey of conferences devoted to Steinbeck, starting in 1969, raises a troubling issue: the decline in participation, and thus stature, at Steinbeck events. The first such conference, held at the University of Connecticut, celebrated The Grapes of Wrath and featured literary lights like Malcolm Cowley, Granville Hicks, Hyatt Waggoner, Ted Hayashi, Peter Lisca, and Warren French. The Oregon State University conference of 1970, organized by Richard Astro, got the Steinbeck-ecology ball rolling, with Joel Hedgpeth, Jackson Benson, John Ditsky, Robert Morsberger, and Steinbeck’s pal Toby Street in attendance. “Steinbeck Country,” the 1971 conference at San Jose State University, attracted 800 attendees and spurred DeMott’s “fascination for visiting the physical places that inspire literary and artistic works.” Conferences held at San Jose State in 2013, 2016, and 2019 attracted far fewer, despite some effort to encourage student scholars. Steinbeck’s Imaginarium can help rectify this situation if it is taken to heart by this critical audience: young scholars looking for a mission, like Robert DeMott 50 years ago. His reading of Steinbeck texts and contexts—along with detailed notes, lists, and surveys of people, places, and events—provides the necessary information. His personal way of “being in the world” with John Steinbeck—a fellow fisherman, poet, and evangelist for human understanding—should provide the inspiration.

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Why Harry Spared Steinbeck

January 31, 2023 by Leave a Comment

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J.R. Moehringer was worth the million dollars he reportedly received for ghostwriting Spare, Prince Harry’s account of life in the House of Windsor as this generation’s prodigal son. The Pulitzer Prize-winning American journalist knows all about books, and that’s good because Harry doesn’t. A self-styled non-reader, the 38-year-old royal spare asks, on page 13, “Who the fook is Faulkner? And how’s he related to us Windsors?” Literary allusions abound on the path to page 407, most of them to names or sources—Ecclesiastes, Dame Julian of Norwich, Shakespeare, Alexander Pope, Wordsworth, Tennyson, William Ernest Henley—unlikely to have crossed the prince’s prior consciousness. Reviewing Spare for the January 23, 2023 New Yorker magazine, Rebecca Mead praises this “literary artifice,” and the “coherent narrative” created by Moehringer, who “bestowed upon Harry the legacy that his father was unable to force on him: a felicitous familiarity with the British literary canon.”

Of Mice and Men and Brothers Who Fight

The American canon was another matter, and Harry approves of John Steinbeck. “The one piece of literature I remember enjoying, even savoring,” he recalls on page 49, “was a slender American novel,” Of Mice and Men. “Unlike Shakespeare, Steinbeck didn’t need a translator,” he explains. “He wrote in plain, simple vernacular. Better yet, he kept it tight. Of Mice and Men: a brisk 150 pages.” But brevity isn’t the only reason Harry singles out Steinbeck. Unlike Who-the-fook-is-William-Faulkner, Steinbeck is found to be writing about the Windsor brothers in his classic novella. “A story about friendship, about brotherhood, it was filled with themes I found relatable,” says Harry. “George and Lennie put me in mind of Willy and me. Two pals, two nomads, going through the same things, watching each other’s back.” Steinbeck’s story of “two blokes . . . gadding about California, looking for a place to call their own, trying to overcome their limitations” ends with a bullet in the back of the head, however. Did Harry miss the fratricidal point? For greater clarity, Moehringer might refer him to more Steinbeck: to East of Eden, where Cain almost kills Abel, or to Burning Bright, Steinbeck’s tale of bastardy, murder, and family forgiveness.

(Page numbers are given because Spare has no index. I owe the tip for this post to a literary-minded friend who left Florida about the same time I did, almost 20 years ago. Like Harry, we prefer gadding about California.)

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Jacqueline Woodson to Receive John Steinbeck Award on October 18, 2022

October 10, 2022 by 3 Comments

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Together with the Martha Heasley Cox Center for Steinbeck Studies, the Center for Literary Arts at San Jose State University will present the 2022 John Steinbeck “In the Souls of the People” Award to Jacqueline Woodson, author of the 2014 memoir novel Brown Girl Dreaming. The award is given to writers, artists, thinkers, and activists whose work captures Steinbeck’s empathy, commitment to democratic values, and belief in the dignity of people who by circumstance are pushed to the fringes; and the phrase “in the souls of the people” comes from Chapter 25 of The Grapes of Wrath. Woodson is the recipient of a 2020 MacArthur Fellowship and the 2020 Hans Christian Andersen Award. Brown Girl Dreaming, a New York Times bestseller, won the National Book Award, the Coretta Scott King Award, a Newberry Honor, and the NAACP Image Award. Woodson is also the author of Red at the Bone, a New York Times bestseller; Another Brooklyn, a 2016 National Book Award finalist; and books for young readers including Before the Ever After, The Year We Learned to Fly, The Day You Begin, and Harbor Me. The October 18, 2002 awards ceremony will take place at 7:00 p.m. in the Student Union Theater on the San Jose State campus in downtown San Jose, California. During the event Woodson will have an onstage conversation with Michele Elam, the William Robertson Coe Professor of Humanities at Stanford University. The 7:00 p.m. event is free.

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Steinbeck’s History with Guns Post-Uvalde, Texas

June 13, 2022 by 14 Comments

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In May of 1942, three years after writing The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck wanted to arm himself with a Colt automatic for “self-protection.’’ He was living in New York, and the State of New York said he must get a license—something the recent 18-year old elementary shooter in Uvalde, Texas didn’t have to do.

New York said Steinbeck needed four character witnesses to get his license. It didn’t matter that The Grapes of Wrath had won the Pulitzer Prize, or that its author was famous. And no making things up: each character reference, the state demanded, “must be personally signed.” The actor Burgess Meredith and the artist Henry Varnum Poor added their names to John Steinbeck’s New York application. A veterinarian named Morris Segal and actress Sally Bates Lorentz also signed. Doing so took some courage. Steinbeck wasn’t politically popular, and his character witnesses had their own public careers. Could the Uvalde, Texas killer have found four witnesses to vouch for his 18-year old character?

But New York wasn’t satisfied with willing or even well-known character witnesses. It had another question for John Steinbeck: “Have you ever had a pistol license?” Steinbeck replied that he had, in 1938. Presumably he obtained that license in California. And, came another query, had he ever had a license application disapproved? Steinbeck replied, “No.” Well then, the state continued, had he ever had a gun license revoked or cancelled? “No” again. Steinbeck was then “sworn” that all his statements were true and that “the photo attached hereto was taken within thirty days prior to the date of his application.”

In short, the State of New York in 1942 wanted to know just who in the hell they were allowing to carry a firearm within its borders. Now, 80 years later, should Texas and other states think seriously about doing what New York did then, particularly when it comes to military-style weapons like the ones used to kill 19 schoolchildren and two teachers?

The Winchester Rifle John Steinbeck Gave His First Wife

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I bring this up now because of the Uvalde, Texas massacre and the renewed debate about gun control in America, but also because I am looking at a rifle that John Steinbeck and his wife Carol owned and handled—another indicator that guns were a part of Steinbeck’s life from the 1930s to his death in 1968. The rifle is a Winchester Model 60-22, and Steinbeck gave it to Carol when they were married. Eventually it descended to Carol’s stepdaughter, Sharon Brown Bacon.

“I inherited the Steinbeck rifle from my father, William B. Brown, who was married to Carol Henning (Steinbeck) Brown for many years,” Bacon explains. “Carol, my stepmother, was John Steinbeck’s first wife and predeceased my father,” she continued. “I have always known the rifle to belong to Carol and that she was given it by John after they were married in 1930. At that time they were living in Los Gatos . . . . She used it, in her words, ‘for protection’ while alone there, and later at her home in Carmel Valley.”

Why did Steinbeck feel the need for a gun at all? A woman in Salinas told me years ago that she witnessed a man threatening Steinbeck with a gun in a Salinas park for what he was writing about their town in the run up to The Grapes of Wrath. The woman said she felt traumatized and thought Steinbeck probably did, too. This could be the origin story of the gun license Steinbeck obtained in 1938.

In 1946 and living in New York, Steinbeck wrote to a California friend, a motorcycle cop named George Dovolis, in care of the Monterey Police Department. He asked if Dovolis could ship him a “little thirty-eight,’’ which Steinbeck said he needed “for house protection.” We know Steinbeck had guns stowed away in Monterey or Pacific Grove because he wrote Dovolis, “I am very grateful to you for taking care of my guns while I have been away.” By 1948 Dovolis had transitioned to real estate, and Steinbeck wrote that he wanted to make him a gift of a gun in gratitude for past help.

In 1949 Dovolis, who would go on to found the still-flourishing Boys and Girls Club of Monterey County, returned the favor and shipped “1 box guns’’ to Steinbeck via Railway Express. So until May of that year, at least, guns were still on John Steinbeck’s mind—and about to arrive on his doorstep.

Thankfully, at least as far as we know, they were never used in self-defense. If one of them had been, it’s safe to assume it would have been properly licensed, including the signatures of character witnesses willing to testify that Steinbeck was a person who could be trusted to do the right thing. Perhaps it’s time for character witnesses to be brought back into America’s ongoing gun debate, post-Uvalde.

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Gavin Jones: Reclaiming John Steinbeck for Our Time

August 11, 2021 by 1 Comment

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Another new book on John Steinbeck, the second published by a major press in less than a year, promises to turn the heads and hearts of scholars and fans alike by reassessing Steinbeck’s life and work from a radically contemporary point of view. Like Mad at the World, the widely praised life of Steinbeck written by the Minnesota journalist-biographer William Souder and published by W.W. Norton in 2020, Gavin Jones’s Reclaiming John Steinbeck: Writing for the Future of Humanity (Cambridge University Press, 2021) seeks to rescue Steinbeck from canonical boredom by rebooting the controversy around an author who infuriated the establishment of his time by refusing to stay in a box of others’ making. Steinbeck dropped out of Stanford University without a degree in 1925 and frequently expressed impatience with academic critics and reviewers who tried to nail him to a particular philosophy, movement, or style. A popular Stanford University English professor with three previous books to his credit, Gavin Jones puts a deep reading of selected works, from Cup of Gold (1929) to Cannery Row (1945), to rigorous use in exploring Steinbeck’s treatment of such subjects as eugenics, racism, disability, and environmental degradation—issues that challenge the future of humanity in our time.

Image of Gavin Jones courtesy Cambridge University Press.

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