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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Native Grandson 2022: County Londonderry Celebrates John Steinbeck

January 28, 2022 by 2 Comments

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John Steinbeck’s blarney-free critique of Depression-era California and post-war America continues to engage fans, scholars, and presenters in disparate places, from Steinbeck’s native state to his grandfather Samuel Hamilton’s Northern Ireland. After noting that Steinbeck visited Hamilton’s birthplace in rural Limavady in 1952, a January 28, 2022 online article entitled “John Steinbeck Festival coming to Roe Valley Arts and Cultural Centre” offers a month-long schedule of local activities kicking off on February 5 and including weekly lectures and concerts, Dust Bowl photography, and a book cover design contest for schoolchildren reading Steinbeck for the first time. Articles in Steinbeck Review on “Dust Bowl Refugees as Reference for Today,” by Kimberly Wright, and “Travels with Charley as American Picaresque,” by Carter Davis Johnson, demonstrate Steinbeck’s enduring attraction for bright young scholars turned on to Steinbeck by their own early reading. Wook-Dong Kim’s essay on “John Steinbeck and Korean Connections” reminds us that Steinbeck’s sympathies and appeal were always international, and Robert DeMott’s review of Chasing Steinbeck’s Ghost—Bill Steigerwald’s rigorously researched correction of the chronology of Travels with Charley—shows that investigation need not be limited to scholars where John Steinbeck is concerned.

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John Steinbeck’s Sag Harbor Home on Sale for $18 Million

February 21, 2021 by 1 Comment

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According to a February 19, 2021 New York Times real estate item that quickly caught the attention of Travels with Charley fans, the modest home in Sag Harbor, New York from which John Steinbeck and his poodle started their 1960 road trip can be yours for just under $18 million—more than Steinbeck and his wife Elaine paid in 1955, but less than the price of comparable waterfront properties for sale in tonier Long Island communities like the Hamptons. Steinbeck’s lifelong attachment to small, secluded spaces extended to the tiny writing cabin that he built on the 1.8-acre site and named Joyous Garde, after the Arthurian legend he learned to love as a boy. The online version of the Times real estate story included this comment from Bill Steigerwald, the Pittsburgh journalist who visited Sag Harbor (the venue for Steinbeck’s last novel, The Winter of Our Discontent) before setting out to discover the actual the driving route—and expose the narrative liberties—taken by John Steinbeck on his unsentimental journey “in search of America.”

bill-steigerwald“In 2010, exactly 50 years after Steinbeck and dog Charley left on the road trip around the USA that became Travels with Charley, I left his Sag Harbor house and retraced his route for my 100 percent nonfiction road book/expose, Dogging Steinbeck. I was kindly allowed to trespass on the property by the man who took care of it and I shot some video. I’ve never been confused with Steven Spielberg, and Peter Coyote was otherwise engaged, and I had no sound man . . . .”

Photo of John Steinbeck’s Sag Harbor property, by Gavin Zeigler for Sotheby’s International Realty, courtesy of the New York Times. Photo of Bill Steigerwald courtesy of truthaboutcharley.com.

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The Best Introduction to Steinbeck’s Greatest Decade

November 11, 2020 by 1 Comment

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The Western History Association, a professional society for scholars of the American West, was founded in 1961, the year John Steinbeck published his final novel, The Winter of Our Discontent, and wrote the final version of Travels with Charley, the work of “creative nonfiction” that continues to attract readers, and controversy, 60 years after Steinbeck’s road trip in search of an America he said he no longer understood. The Western history organization planned to hold its annual meeting in Albuquerque this year; fortunately for fans of John Steinbeck, having to meet online instead meant that the association’s October 14, 2020 presidential address by David Wrobel is now available to anyone looking for the best video introduction to John Steinbeck’s greatest decade of writing, from In Dubious Battle, “The Harvest Gypsies,” Of Mice and Men, and The Grapes of Wrath to The Moon Is Down and Cannery Row. Watch “Steinbeck Country and the America West” and find out how this writing became a British-born historian’s “window on the American West and nation,” from the New Deal to the Great Society—and how “Jeffersonian agrarian myopia” led to “racial blindness” in The Grapes of Wrath, and “creative fictions” about Oklahoma by the author of Travels with Charley.

Image of David Wrobel courtesy of the University of Oklahoma.

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Dogging Steinbeck Started on This Day 10 Years Ago

September 23, 2020 by Leave a Comment

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Sixty years ago this morning, on September 23, 1960, John Steinbeck and his poodle Charley set out from Sag Harbor on the iconic road trip around the United States that would become Travels with Charley in Search of America. Ten years ago this morning I set out from Steinbeck’s seaside house on the eastern end of Long Island and followed his 10,000-mile trail as faithfully as possible.

I admit I had my suspicions that Steinbeck had embellished Charley and had invented some of the colorful Americans he said he met at random. (I couldn’t help it—I was a veteran drive-by print journalist who knew how hard it was on the road to bump into the right people you need for a story.)

But my original intention was not to discredit Steinbeck, show him up, or prove that his 1962 New York Times nonfiction bestseller was a heavily fictionalized and disappointingly dishonest account of his actual journey. My main goal simply was to turn my solo adventure along the Steinbeck Highway into a book that would compare the America of Barack Obama that I saw in 2010 with the America of JFK and Nixon that Steinbeck saw in the historic fall of 1960.

Some of what I saw out my windshield on my mad 11,276-mile dash around the country can be seen in these 16 videos on YouTube.

I’m no documentary maker, as you will see. The videos are largely unedited and the wind is a recurring character. But I visit Steinbeck’s houses, the top of Fremont Peak, and many other places he stopped on his journey.

What I learned about the facts and fictions of Travels with Charley, the character of John Steinbeck, and the nature of America’s Flyover People is documented in my Amazon book Dogging Steinbeck. And Chasing Steinbeck’s Ghost is a guide to where Steinbeck really was on each day of a nearly 11-week search for the country he admitted he did not find.

Illustration by Stacy Innerst.

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What The Grapes of Wrath Warns Us About COVID-19

March 31, 2020 by 5 Comments

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A new report entitled “’The Grapes of Wrath,’ coronavirus edition” cites John Steinbeck’s classic to predict possible effects of the COVID-19 crisis on life in America if the current pandemic results in a second Great Depression. Writing in the March 28 edition of City & State New York, Zach Williams says that “An economic downturn, state border checkpoints and increasing desperation among people across the country suggest that as time goes by the story of coronavirus will only become more like a John Steinbeck novel whose ending no one can yet know.” Comparing New Yorkers today to the migrants in Steinbeck’s masterpiece, the online magazine article—illustrated with this photograph by Dorothea Lange—reminds contemporary readers that California subjected the “bum brigade” streaming into the state from Oklahoma and elsewhere to a Great Depression version of border-crossing stop-and-frisk. “After the American Civil Liberties Union filed suit in federal court,” writes one source quoted in the piece, “the ‘bum blockade’ ended. But the ‘anti-Okie’ sentiment continued.” Today, says Williams, “it is New Yorkers who are facing the wrath of their fellow Americans.”

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A Night at Madison Square Garden with John Steinbeck

February 23, 2019 by 2 Comments

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“Revisiting the American Nazi Supporters of ‘A Night at the Garden’”—Margaret Talbot’s political think piece in this week’s New Yorker—raised the intriguing question posed by Robert DeMott in an email to Steinbeck fans today. Was John Steinbeck aware of the racist rally that attracted 20,000 Hitler fans to Madison Square Garden, the midtown Manhattan building where he’d once done grunt work, on February 20, 1939? Even in California, it’s hard to imagine he wasn’t, despite being otherwise engaged at the time worrying about his novel The Grapes of Wrath, which came out two months later. World War I had sensitized Americans with German names like Steinbeck to issues of loyalty and ethnicity, and anti-New Deal attacks on The Grapes of Wrath included criticism from Americans convinced that Steinbeck and Roosevelt were both Jewish names. Talbot says the Nazi movement in the United States was saved from itself by Pearl Harbor, and that raises another intriguing question for Grapes of Wrath fans. Without the jobs or moral clarity created by World War II, would folks like the Joads have sided with liberals like Steinbeck, or with the pro-Nazi crowd at Madison Square Garden in 1939? As this film of the event shows, it looked a lot like the kind of rally where Americans like the Joads are expressing their enthusiasm for Donald Trump in 2019.

Photograph courtesy Marshall Curry / Field of Vision

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TV Tour of John Steinbeck’s USA Free Courtesy of Europe

February 1, 2019 by 2 Comments

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John Steinbeck said in 1961 that he wrote Travels with Charley because he’d been in Europe so long he’d lost touch, and sympathy, with America. As shown by John Steinbeck’s USA—the Great Literary Tour series documentary available through April 29 on ARTE TV—America is looking stranger than ever to Europeans in 2019. A Franco-German venture with EU funding, ARTE (Association relative à la télévision européenne) provides serious cultural programming free, without commercials, online and on European television. Narrated in German with English subtitles that probably didn’t mean to be funny, John Steinbeck’s USA combines rare archival footage with interviews, commentary, and video filmed at a variety of venues—a hard shell Baptist church in Brunswick, Vermont; a gun-happy hunter’s house in Deer Isle, Maine; a trailer park home in Middle America—that sync with Steinbeck’s schedule in Travels with Charley. True to the sense and sensibility of Steinbeck’s semi-fictive classic, it’s one literary tour for Europeans that no American with Steinbeck’s anxiety about America’s future should miss.

Video image from John Steinbeck’s USA courtesy ARTE TV

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Steinbeck Made 1968 Stick

December 4, 2018 by 2 Comments

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This AP image from John Steinbeck’s December 23, 1968 funeral, at St. James Episcopal Church in New York, appears in a recent Ravalli Republic photo essay that attempts the question, “What was it about 1968 that shook the foundations of American life, defining the end of one generation and the beginning of another?” Given the competition and the source—a county paper in Hamilton, Montana—it’s remarkable that Steinbeck’s death made the cut for a year characterized by assassination, war, and the election of a president who later resigned in disgrace. Located on the Wyoming border, Hamilton, Montana wasn’t named for the Irish grandfather immortalized in East of Eden. But, like Salinas, it’s the county seat, and it’s about the size Salinas was when Sam Hamilton died and Steinbeck was born. Steinbeck celebrated the beauty of Montana in Travels with Charley, and the life of towns like Hamilton in America and Americans. If his death still sticks in the minds of Ravalli Republic readers in this momentous year, gratitude rather than surprise would be the right response.

 

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Vote Early and Vote Often for The Grapes of Wrath in 2018

August 10, 2018 by Leave a Comment

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The Grapes of Wrath, the book John Steinbeck finished writing in time to vote for Culbert Olson as Governor of California in 1938, is still running strong with readers, despite naysayers like the Los Gatos Republican who wrote a counter-novel, now forgotten, in 1940. This year The Grapes of Wrath has competition in the race for Great American Read—a project of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, with support from the Anne Ray Foundation, to encourage reading by allowing anyone over 12 to vote early and vote often for his or her favorite from a list of 100 novels, all in English, that polled well with viewers. The contest would probably appall Steinbeck, a one-man, one-vote Democrat who thought popularity pageants were stupid, especially where writers were concerned. Among the books we know he read was Two Years Before the Mast, a seagoing Grapes of Wrath written in 1840 by Richard Henry Dana, the Massachusetts lawyer and reformer who coined the phrase “vote early and vote often” in a letter about election rigging in his day. Great American Read rules permit repeat voting by the same person and reward social networking to spread the word about books, 21st-century style. So get with the program. Vote early and vote often for The Grapes of Wrath.

 

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