On May 3 experts from the University of Virginia, San Jose State University, and Claremont Graduate University enlightened 350 attendees of the 34th Steinbeck Festival—held at the National Steinbeck Center in Salinas, California—about The Grapes of Wrath. As different in style as The Grapes of Wrath is from Gone With the Wind, each of the speakers—Susan Shillinglaw, a professor of English at San Jose State University; Stephen Railton, Professor of American Literature and Digital Humanities at the University of Virginia; Rick Wartzman, the executive director of the Drucker Institute at Claremont Graduate University—aligned Steinbeck’s masterpiece with matters of abiding importance, illuminating aspects of an enduring novel that still shocks and surprises.

San Jose State University’s Susan Shillinglaw on Teaching

The author of two books in one year—John and Carol Steinbeck: Portrait of a Marriage and On Reading “The Grapes of Wrath”—Susan Shillinglaw has taught, written, and organized around Steinbeck at San Jose University for 25 years. So familiar with her subject that she can speak flawlessly without notes, the San Jose State University President’s Scholar and National Steinbeck Center Scholar-in-Residence traced the roots of The Grapes of Wrath back to rural Oklahoma, the home of a real-life migrant family named Joat, and connected it to the contemporary concept of one-world ecology, first explored by Steinbeck and Ed Ricketts in the 1930s.

Susan Shillinglaw has taught, written, and organized around Steinbeck at San Jose University for 25 years.

Shillinglaw’s deft description of the four levels of meaning in Steinbeck’s novel unified by this concept seemed perfectly designed to make the long book easier to embrace for classroom teachers, a significant percentage of her audience. The San Jose State University veteran explained why reading long books is still important for students with an apt analogy from personal experience. Earlier in the week, she said, she had attended the stage version of Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men in New York. She noted that Hilton Als, the New Yorker magazine drama critic, panned the production for depending on celebrity casting to draw young viewers to an old play.

Shillinglaw’s deft description of the four levels of meaning in Steinbeck’s novel seemed perfectly designed to make the long book easier to embrace for classroom teachers.

Shillinglaw stated that it was the first time she ever saw a New York audience stand and clap so quickly at the end of a show. If it takes a James Franco to get youngsters to attend live theater, she wondered, what’s the harm? They were there, they were moved, and they loved what they saw. If it takes a teacher’s prodding to induce kids to read The Grapes of Wrath, that’s worth the time and effort, too, she added. Although her students at San Jose State University “self-select” by enrolling in her Steinbeck course, she noted that frequent quizzes are necessary to keep them on track, particularly with long books like The Grapes of Wrath.

The University of Virginia’s Stephen Railton on Reading

Like me, Susan Shillinglaw attended graduate school at the University of Virginia’s rival, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Noting that at one time the Department of English was the University of Virginia’s largest department, she provided a smooth transition for the speaker who came next, the University of Virginia English professor Stephen Railton. Shillinglaw’s focus on Steinbeck is singular: her knowledge of the writer’s life is encyclopedic, and her observations about his work are splendidly spontaneous. Railton’s style is more structured and his scope more synoptic, placing Steinbeck in the broader context of American literary history. Unlike Shillinglaw, Railton delivered his remarks from a prepared script, but that didn’t slow him down. Could it be that he speaks so brilliantly in public because he comes from the University of Virginia, an institution founded by Thomas Jefferson, the U.S. President who wrote effortlessly but had to work hard to project his voice?

Railton’s style is more structured and his scope more synoptic, placing Steinbeck in the broader context of American literary history.

In Chapel Hill we complained that the University of Virginia seemed set on cornering the American literature market. Railton’s presentation suggested that our concern was justified. The editor of works by and about Cooper, Emerson, Whitman, and Twain, Railton has developed digital libraries of Twain, Faulkner, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of the other great protest novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin. As amply demonstrated in his comments about The Grapes of Wrath, this makes Railton a kind of humanities engineer, a new and interesting breed on campus. He certainly knows where the connecting lines lie under the surface of American writing from 19th century Transcendentalism to Naturalism and Modernism, mapping the convergence of these movements in John Steinbeck with ease and connecting The Grapes of Wrath with equal precision to Uncle Tom’s Cabin and to The Wasteland. Consider the relationship of three “Tom’s,” he suggested: Stowe’s Uncle Tom, Steinbeck’s Tom Joad, and the Wasteland poet from St. Louis, Thomas Stearns Eliot.

A thought that profound is a paper in itself, but Railton moved right on, connecting Steinbeck to other writers in ways equally ingenious. For example, he noted that the author of the  “sentimental” novel The Grapes of Wrath was at heart a literary modernist who heeded Ezra Pound’s call to “make it new” in his writing. But Steinbeck differed fundamentally from Pound, Eliot, and Faulkner, modern writers whose dislike of sentiment created “a kind of gated community of aesthetics” in their work. Unlike his more detached contemporaries, Steinbeck was emotionally engaged, writing “not out of curiosity but impatience, even anger”  and creating in Tom Joad “an existential member of the Lost Generation.” Steinbeck also differed from Naturalists such as Dreiser, Norris, and Crane, students of social Darwinism who wrote about individuals victimized by power in the shadow of the Panic of 1893. The author of The Grapes of Wrath was a meliorist who believed in the possibility of progress. Writing in the deeper shadow of the Great Depression, Steinbeck felt that the natural order for humanity was “evolutionary change, not just unremitting struggle.”

The author of The Grapes of Wrath was a meliorist who believed in the possibility of progress.

So satisfying an insight offers a tempting place to stop, but Railton also looked closely at Steinbeck’s text, observing that The Grapes of Wrath opens on a wasteland, like Eliot’s poem, and that the journey of Tom Joad parallels that of Stowe’s Uncle Tom. Rose of Sharon loses her baby and her brother never becomes an uncle, but unlike Stowe’s protagonist—whose hope is for Heaven—Joad’s breakthrough is post-Christian, an updated version of Emerson’s Over-Soul in which all people participate. Tom learns this religion from the ex-preacher Casy, but unlike Casy, Tom fights back rather than forgiving, “a warrior convert” to the new gospel of social justice. The Grapes of Wrath, Railton concluded, is John Steinbeck’s “Newer Testament.” As if in benediction, the University of Virginia professor sang Casy’s “Yessir, that’s my Savior” to the tune Steinbeck had in mind: “Yessir, that’s my baby.” Like Thomas Jefferson, the self-described “aging hippie” from the University of Virginia has an educated ear.

Claremont Graduate University’s Rick Wartzman on the Burning and Banning of Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath

Susan Shillinglaw extemporized without notes. Stephen Railton performed from a script. Rick Wartzman, the third speaker of the day, projected images from his laptop. It was an appropriate medium for the executive director of Claremont Graduate University’s Drucker Institute—described by Time.com as “a social enterprise whose mission is strengthening organizations to strengthen society.” A former writer and editor at The Wall Street Journal and Los Angeles Times, Wartzman is the author of award-winning investigations of political power in California—The King of California: J.G. Boswell and the Making of a Secret American Empire (with Mark Arax) and Obscene in the Extreme: The Burning and Banning of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. Each of these books explores an archetypal conflict: the price in individual liberty paid to oligarchic greed, the story at the heart of Steinbeck’s masterpiece. Shillinglaw and Railton illuminated the novel’s narrative, context, and connections. Wartzman detailed its aftermath.

Shillinglaw and Railton illuminated the novel’s narrative, context, and connections. Wartzman detailed its aftermath.

Prior to The Grapes of Wrath, a pair of California writer-activists admired by Steinbeck—Jack London and Sinclair Lewis—published prescient novels about a future United States under fascism. George Orwell cited the influence of London’s book on the writing of 1984, the British bestseller that continues to rival The Grapes of Wrath in global popularity. Neither of the earlier novels—London’s The Iron Heel (1902),  Lewis’s It Can Happen Here (1935)—is read much anymore, but Steinbeck would have been familiar with both. If he voted in the general election of 1934, he likely voted for the writer-activist Upton Sinclair, the Democratic candidate for Governor of California. A celebrity socialist with popular appeal, Sinclair was defeated by the well-funded campaign of disinformation waged by California’s corporate elite—including Wartzman’s former employer, the Los Angeles Times. Frank Merriam, the establishment candidate, won the Governor’s seat.

Sinclair’s populist policies prevailed four years later, when Culbert Olson beat Merriam to become California’s first Democratic Governor since 1895. As Wartzman observed, the state’s corporate interests were understandably alarmed. A Mormon atheist from Utah, Olson had campaigned for Sinclair in 1934 and supported President Roosevelt’s New Deal. Remarkably, Olson refused to say “so help me God” when his oath of office was administered by a California Supreme Court Justice with the name William Waste. Olson dared to challenge the influence of the Catholic Church in California’s system of public education, provoking the wrath of John Cantwell, the archbishop of Los Angeles, and Archbishop John Mitty of San Francisco. Virtually alone among elected officials in the country’s most geographically exposed state, Olson opposed the internment of Japanese-Americans following Pearl Harbor. In 1942 he lost to the Republican Earl Warren, future Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court.

Olson opposed the internment of Japanese-Americans following Pearl Harbor. In 1942 he lost to the Republican Earl Warren, future Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court.

When Olson took office on January 2, 1939, California’s power structure shook, setting the stage for the burning and banning of The Grapes of Wrath. Wartzman’s narrative of events between April and August 1939 was dramatic. During that turbulent time, Carey McWilliams—a Los Angeles writer-activist allied with Sinclair and employed by Olson—published Factories in the Field, a survey of migrant worker conditions in California caused by the rapacity of the state’s corporate landowners. McWilliams’ dry statistics vindicated Steinbeck’s angry book, blunting the impact of counter-Grapes of Wrath efforts by writers such as Ruth Comfort Mitchell, Steinbeck’s summer neighbor in genteel Los Gatos.

McWilliams’ dry statistics vindicated Steinbeck’s angry book, blunting the impact of counter-Grapes of Wrath efforts by writers such as Ruth Comfort Mitchell, Steinbeck’s summer neighbor in genteel Los Gatos.

Mitchell may not have been related to the Georgia author of the same name who wrote Gone With the Wind, the 1936 bestseller that became an award-winning film the year The Grapes of Wrath was published. But in the context of Stephen Railton’s remarks, Margaret Mitchell’s pro-Confederacy fantasy can be read as a work of delayed anti-Uncle Tom’s Cabin fiction; Wartzman noted that two-dozen anti-Uncle Tom books appeared during Harriet Beecher Stowe’s lifetime. Ruth Comfort Mitchell’s Of Human Kindness, a polite work written to counter the perceived obscenity of The Grapes of Wrath, was quickly forgotten. Gone With the Wind remains second only to the Bible in continuing U.S. sales, far ahead of The Grapes of Wrath, its spiritual opposite.

Who burned The Grapes of Wrath when it first appeared? In Bakersfield, California, Clell Pruett—a man who hadn’t read the book—posed for the camera as he lit the match. Pruett’s employer was Bill Camp, head of the anti-labor, anti-Grapes of Wrath Associated Farmers organization in Kern County; Camp enlisted Pruett for the photo-op to prove that real farm workers didn’t appreciate how Steinbeck had portrayed them. Following Pearl Harbor, Pruett left California and returned to Missouri to mine lead. That is where Rick Wartzman interviewed Pruett not long before he died. Pruett still hadn’t read The Grapes of Wrath but promised Wartzman that he would. When he did, he told Wartzman that reading hadn’t changed his mind.

In Bakersfield, California, Clell Pruett—a man who hadn’t read the book—posed for the camera as he lit the match.

Pruett’s feelings about The Grapes of Wrath were shared by people in Steinbeck’s hometown, where a 1936 strike by lettuce-packers was suppressed and The Grapes of Wrath was later burned. Like Jack London and Sinclair Lewis, John Steinbeck feared fascism in America and thought he recognized its signs in California. A dramatic instance involved Salinas and the violent reaction of the town’s citizens to the 1936 lettuce strike. Steinbeck’s response was L’Affaire Lettuceburg,  a vigorous denunciation of local power brokers in short-fiction form. The piece was so scathing that Steinbeck—on the advice of his wife and in the interest of his safety—retracted the manuscript and refused to let it be published, proactively burning his own book. As I sat in the National Steinbeck Center audience listening to the stellar speakers who had come to Salinas from San Jose State University, the University of Virginia, and Claremont Graduate University, I pondered the remark about John Steinbeck made by the town’s former mayor in his morning introduction: “He used us in life; we use him in death.”

When the National Steinbeck Center presents the 34th Steinbeck Festival on May 2-4, the annual celebration will honor the 75th anniversary of The Grapes of Wrath. But as readers of John Steinbeck are aware, what went before is as important as the now in any story. This is part of the story behind the John Steinbeck festival begun in the writer’s hometown in 1980.

A Festival for John Steinbeck in the Writer’s Hometown

The first Steinbeck Festival was held in Salinas, California, a small city with a significant agricultural industry, in June of 1980. Labeled a literary festival by its founders—John Gross, the Salinas, California librarian, and David Aguilar, a teacher at Hartnell College—the modest event was cosponsored by the library and the college, a community college with a reputation for civic outreach. Along with artifacts from John Steinbeck’s life, there were films, lectures, panel discussions, and a stage play. Some participants got college credit for attending, but the three-day event was open to anyone. Best yet, it was free—bus tours included. People in Salinas, California came together to honor a celebrated son, and the annual Steinbeck Festival was on its way.

The first Steinbeck Festival was held in Salinas, California, a small city with a significant agricultural industry, in June of 1980.

The 1981 festival was even bigger than the first. A 13-day event featuring 23 speakers, 10 films, seven stage performances, seven bus tours, and several ambitious exhibits, its keynote speaker was the award-winning actor Burgess Meredith, John Steinbeck’s longtime friend. The educational mission and academic connection remained strong, coordinated by Hartnell College and the Salinas, California library and advised by Jackson Benson, the San Diego State University professor who was writing John Steinbeck’s official biography.

The True Adventures of John Steinbeck, Writer, Arrives

Like Hartnell College, San Diego State is a public school with community spirit, and the festival’s academic ties attracted government support. Funded by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the 1982 festival moved to the first weekend in August, with public readings from John Steinbeck’s books, a pair of well-attended panel discussions, 18 lectures, 15 film showings, and four tours. As in 1980 and 1981, the 1982 festival was free.

The fourth festival included the first book publication event held anywhere to launch Jackson Benson’s definitive life of John Steinbeck.

It was also a prelude to 1983, when the fourth Steinbeck Festival opened with a premiere: the first publication event held anywhere to launch Benson’s The Adventures of John Steinbeck, Writer, still the definitive life of John Steinbeck.  Although college credit continued to be available and literature remained foremost, the new venue chosen for the festival—Salinas, California’s Community Center—reflected the dramatic growth in attendance and the increasing importance of local volunteers, including tour guides who received special training in advance.

From Russia to Hartnell College with Love—For Reading

The 1984 festival went global. Although centered in Salinas, California, it was augmented by the presence of the Second International Steinbeck Congress, bringing together authorities on John Steinbeck from throughout the world. Among the 34 featured speakers were scholars from India, Japan, and Korea; other events included 10 bus tours, 16 films, and four plays. Among the funders was the California Council for the Humanities—like the National Endowment for the Arts grant, an enviable “good housekeeping seal of approval” for a community event begun and staffed by volunteers.

John Steinbeck’s hopes for international cooperation were coming to fruition in Salinas, California.

Until recently, the annual festival continued to occur during the first week in August, running 4-5 days and attracting a variety of Steinbeck scholars, fans, and visitors to Salinas, California. Bus tours and films remained popular. But 1989 was a really big year. The 50th anniversary of the publication of The Grapes of Wrath drew international attention and became the inevitable focus of the festival. Glasnost was in the air, and scholars from the Soviet Union even came. John Steinbeck’s hopes for international cooperation—expressed 40 years earlier in A Russian Journal—were coming to fruition in Salinas, California.

A Son and Spouse of John Steinbeck Participate in Person

The festival’s 50th-anniverary focus on The Grapes of Wrath set the pattern for the future, and festivals in the 1990s frequently highlighted single books, including East of Eden, The Red Pony, America and Americans, and Cannery Row. The annual event continued to take place the first weekend in August so that educators from across the country—a mainstay of the audience—could attend.

When offered accommodations elsewhere, the writer’s widow insisted on staying in the same Salinas, California hotel where the festival’s speakers were lodged.

However, the speakers weren’t always academicians. John Steinbeck IV, the writer’s younger son, was among the notable speakers with a personal connection. Elaine Steinbeck, John Steinbeck’s third wife, also attended one year. When offered accommodations elsewhere, the writer’s widow insisted on staying in the same Salinas, California hotel where the festival’s speakers were lodged.

National Steinbeck Center Calls Salinas, California Home

More and more volunteers were needed to make the annual event successful, and eventually it seemed that everyone got involved. If you lived in Salinas, California, then you—or someone you knew—was already pitching in when the Steinbeck Festival celebrated its 15h anniversary in 1996. Banners were hung across Main Street. The water company used their Pitney Bowles machine to promote the festival on customer-billing envelopes. Local companies donated printing and other essential services. Festival posters showed up in storefront windows all over town.

By the time the National Steinbeck Center opened in downtown Salinas, California, and took over event management in 1998, the literary festival devoted to the city’s greatest celebrity and dedicated to public education was well-established, well-attended, and well-respected.

By the time the National Steinbeck Center opened in downtown Salinas, California, and took over event management in 1998, the literary festival devoted to the city’s greatest celebrity and dedicated to public education was well-established, well-attended, and well-respected.

Pre-festival activities this year included events in Washington, D.C., and elsewhere. May 2-4 activities include bus tours to familiar places in Steinbeck’s fiction—the Hamilton Ranch near King City, the historic Spreckels site near Salinas, and Ed Ricketts’ lab in Monterey—plus a number of evening surprises.

But that’s where we began: the foreground of a story with a background in Salinas, California volunteerism, public spirit, and community pride.

As interim director of the Martha Heasley Cox Center for Steinbeck Studies at San Jose State University, I have been particularly gratified by the university’s 75th anniversary celebration of The Grapes of Wrath. Ongoing events open to the public began with a colorful exhibition of book covers from foreign editions of The Grapes of Wrath, which has been translated into 45 languages since it was first published. As noted in my earlier post, the exhibition was created by Peter Van Coutren, the Steinbeck Studies Center’s archivist, and features little-known information about the novel’s history. (If you are visiting the Martin Luther King, Jr. Library on the San Jose State University campus this month, check out the exhibition on the fifth floor. It ends soon.)

The Dust Bowl and Great Depression Take Center Stage

San Jose State University’s celebration of The Grapes of Wrath continued last month with a staging of Frank Galati’s award-winning 1989 dramatic adaptation by the Department of Television, Radio, Film, and Theatre Arts in collaboration with the Steinbeck Studies Center. The well-attended run of this play, directed by Laura Long and supported by Professors David Kahn and Barbaby Dalls, included a gala reception starring Susan Shillinglaw, the former director of the Steinbeck Studies Center, Professor of English and President’s Scholar at San Jose State University, and Scholar in Residence at the National Steinbeck Center in Salinas. Shillinglaw’s new book On Reading “The Grapes of Wrath” was recently published by Penguin, and she signed copies for an enthusiastic crowd. Other San Jose State University faculty members led by Scot Guenter helped develop a Grapes of Wrath “readathon” sponsored by the SJSU Campus Reading Program—a 24-hour public reading of the entire book, also performed in April.

The Music of The Grapes of Wrath in Concert on Campus

When Viking Press published The Grapes of Wrath on April 14, 1939, John Steinbeck became both famous and infamous for his sympathetic portrayal of the Joads, a symbolic Dust Bowl migrant family from Oklahoma whose trials and tribulations in California made the author deeply unpopular with American Agribusiness. But the book won a Pulitzer Prize in 1940, and John Ford’s movie adaptation starring Henry Fonda is now part of our picture of life during the Great Depression. Steinbeck said that he wrote the novel with the structure of music in mind. Its operatic overtones inspired composer Ricky Ian Gordon and librettist Michael Korie to create a new opera based on the novel, first staged by the Minnesota Opera. The work will be performed in an unstaged concert version by San Jose State University’s music department on May 9 and 11. The speaking role of narrator will be filled by a pair of famous playwrights: Octavio Solis and Luis Valdez. A painting by Ron Clavier donated by the artist and inspired by the novel will be on display in the lobby.

Bravo! Ricky Ian Gordon and His Grapes of Wrath Opera

Ricky Ian Gordon (shown here) was born in 1956. Since its Minnesota premiere in 2007, his operatic treatment of The Grapes of Wrath has been performed in Salt Lake City, Pittsburgh, and Los Angeles, among other cities. Of the Los Angeles production, Los Angeles Times critic Mark Swed wrote that “the greatest glory of the opera is Gordon’s ability to musically flesh out the entire eleven-member Joad clan,” praising the composer for successfully merging Broadway musical theater with classical opera in the work. Writing in The New Yorker, Alex Ross compared it to “American popular music of the twenties and thirties: Gershwinesque song-and-dance numbers, a few sweetly soaring love songs in the manner of Jerome Kern, banjo-twanging ballads, saxed-up jazz choruses, even a barbershop quartet.”  A two-act concert version of the opera directed by Eric Simonson and narrated by Jane Fonda was performed at Carnegie Hall in 2010. This version will be used for the San Jose State University production in a pair of performances beginning at 7:00 p.m. on May 9, and at 2:00 p.m. on May 11, both in the Hal Todd Theater on the San Jose State University campus. The musical production will also be directed by Laura Long.

San Jose State University Professor Sings Pittsburgh Role

The tenor Joseph Frank, director of the San Jose State University School of Music, sang the role of Grampa Joad for the Pittsburgh Opera’s production of Gordon’s Grapes of Wrath in 2008. The complete opera, recorded live by the Minnesota Opera, is available in a three-CD set with libretto liner notes on the PS Classics label. The vocal score and a selection of arias are available from Carl Fischer.

This is the year of The Grapes of Wrath—its 75th anniversary—and the cause for self-reflection for readers of John Steinbeck, including me. My version is both personal and professional. I teach at San Jose State University, one of the world’s top centers of John Steinbeck research, and for the second time I am serving as interim director of the University’s Martha Heasley Cox Center for Steinbeck Studies while Nicholas Taylor, the permanent director, is on leave.

John Steinbeck Studies at San Jose State University

When I accepted the same post on a permanent basis in 2005, I was—to be frank—wet behind the ears, despite my apprenticeship 10 years earlier filling in for Susan Shillinglaw, the Steinbeck Studies Center director, during her sabbatical. I had a solid enough background teaching and writing about American Modernism, the era that includes John Steinbeck, although too often Steinbeck is ignored in academic discussion of his less popularly-read contemporaries such as Willa Cather, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Gertrude Stein, and T.S. Eliot. But I made some embarrassing errors anyway—like revealing my lack of familiarity with the 1950 stage production of Burning Bright, Steinbeck’s third, last, and least-successful experiment with the play-novella form following Of Mice and Men and The Moon Is Down.

Of course, I had huge shoes to fill when I became the permanent director in 2005. Susan Shillinglaw’s stature as a John Steinbeck scholar was enormous when she stepped down as director of the Center at San Jose State University, where she continues to teach, and it has continued to grow. Part of my learning curve in her footsteps was to deepen my knowledge of John Steinbeck’s life and work, particularly the agony and transcendence embodied in The Grapes of Wrath—a book that continues to create more heat than light for certain readers in Oklahoma and California, and the excuse for latter-day book-banning in places where controversial classics such as Huckleberry Finn are deemed morally unwise or politically incorrect.

Celebrating The Grapes of Wrath in Pictures and in Words

When Viking Press published The Grapes of Wrath on April 14, 1939, John Steinbeck became a national celebrity. The following year his book won the Pulitzer Prize, John Ford made the movie starring Henry Fonda, and Steinbeck’s notoriety spread throughout a world already at war. To mark the 75th anniversary of the novel’s debut on the international stage this month, San Jose State University will sponsor a series of celebrations in honor of Steinbeck’s masterpiece—a work that is integral to California history, relevant to American society, and as well known as Huckleberry Finn to readers as far away as Russia and Japan.

As noted in an earlier post, an exhibition of colorful covers selected from foreign editions of The Grapes of Wrath is currently on display at the Center for Steinbeck Studies. The exhibit, assembled by Archivist Peter Van Coutren, is accompanied by information about the novel and its background. I recommend it to anyone visiting the Martin Luther King, Jr. Library on the San Jose State University campus.

Thanks to the efforts of San Jose State University faculty members such as Scot Guenter, the SJSU Campus Reading Program will sponsor a Grapes of Wrath “readathon”—a public performance of the entire novel, starting at 6:00 p.m. on April 16 and ending 24 hours later, more or less. Individuals who participate as readers will receive a gift, along with listing on the Spartans Care Read-a-thon Honor Roll. (In case you’re wondering, “Spartans” is the designation for San Jose State University’s sports teams.) Signing up is easy.

Reprising the Stage Version of Steinbeck’s Masterpiece

Thanks to the hard work of David Kahn, the chair of San Jose State University’s Department of TV, Radio, Film and Theater Arts, and his colleague Barnaby Dallas, the Coordinator of Productions, a main attraction will be the stage production of The Grapes of Wrath at the Hal Todd Theatre on the San Jose State University campus. The play—Frank Galati’s adaptation of John Steinbeck’s novel—is directed by Laura Long and runs April 11-12 and April 15-19. The April 16 performance features a pre-performance reception and a post-play “talkback” with Susan Shillinglaw about her new book On Reading The Grapes of Wrath. Tickets can be purchased online.

Galati’s adaptation of The Grapes of Wrath premiered at Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theater in 1988 and ran for three years. It also traveled to London and New York, where it won the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award for best play of 1991. Galati received two 1990 Tony Awards—Best Play and Best Direction—for his work, which also garnered a half-dozen acting award nominations for cast members Gary Sinise, Terry Kinney, and Lois Smith. Galati, a former professor at Northwestern University, was inducted into the Chicago Gay and Lesbian Hall of Fame in 2004. San Jose State University produced his Grapes of Wrath in the 1990s, so this month’s run is a celebratory reprise.

In May there will be more—but I’ll save that for another time. Who said April was the cruelest month? At San Jose State University, it’s the coolest—thanks to John Steinbeck and The Grapes of Wrath.

Since 1938, The Grapes of Wrath has been translated into more than 25 languages. In February, San Jose State University kicked off the novel’s 75th anniversary with an exhibit of 15 colorful covers selected from foreign editions of The Grapes of Wrath housed at San Jose State University’s Martha Heasley Cox Center for Steinbeck Studies. Each cover is featured on a different poster designed specifically for the exhibit; each poster includes a quotation from The Grapes of Wrath or from Working Days, Steinbeck scholar Robert DeMott’s edition of journal entries made by Steinbeck during the writing and controversial aftermath of the novel and movie starring Jane Darwell and Henry Fonda (shown here). Unfortunately for collectors, the posters are one-of-a-kind items destined for the Center’s extensive archive of Grapes of Wrath manuscripts and memorabilia. Fortunately, the 75th anniversary Grapes of Wrath exhibit is free and open to the public on the fifth floor of the Martin Luther King, Jr., Library, a joint venture of San Jose State University and the City of San Jose, California.

John Steinbeck books abound at San Jose State University, home of the Martha Heasley Cox Center for Steinbeck Studies. But not all of the good books found there are about John Steinbeck. Thanks to the Center’s generous founder, Martha Heasley Cox, San Jose State University supports the creation of good books by young writers at a rate far beyond its size. Short stories, novels, memoirs, articles and essays, anthologies: good books of every variety blossom like spring flowers from the Steinbeck Fellows program, an important incubator of up-and-coming writers mentored by San Jose State University’s top creative writing faculty.

San Jose State University Nurtures Writers in Many Forms

The University’s busy Steinbeck Center—the most concentrated collection of John Steinbeck books and manuscripts available to readers and researchers anywhere—initiated the Steinbeck Fellows program in 2001 with a generous gift from San Jose State University Professor of English Martha Heasley Cox, a beloved Steinbeck scholar with vision, energy, and means. To date more than a baker’s dozen of new novels, numerous prize-winning short stories, and a variety of good books about Ed Ricketts, outdoor survival, life in Iran, and other compelling topics have issued from writers who apprenticed in San Jose as Steinbeck Fellows. Charles McLeod, one of 15 fellows in the program’s brief history, won a 2009 Pushcart Prize, had his first novel published by Random House UK within two years, and appeared in an anthology of best new short stories published by Norton in 2012. Sarah Houghteling, a Fellow in 2006, published Pictures at an Exhibition (Knopf, 2009), reviewed in The New York Times. Peter Nathaniel Malae, a 2008 Fellow, has published What We Are (Grove, 2010)—also reviewed in The New York Times—and Our Frail Blood (Grove, 2013).

Public Events Celebrate Spirit of John Steinbeck Books

Good books by the best young writers continue to germinate in the rich Steinbeck soil of San Jose State University, where three current Steinbeck Fellows read from their work recently for a group of eager students, fellow writers, and admiring fans. The talented trio—Vanessa Hua, Tommy Mouton, and Dallas Woodburn (shown here)—were introduced by Paul Douglass, professor of English at San Jose State University and interim director of the Steinbeck Center, where John Steinbeck books, values, and ideas are celebrated year-round in appearances by authors and artists such as Ken Burns, the boyish filmmaker who received the 2013 John Steinbeck Award for creative work embodying the progressive spirit of Steinbeck’s novels, short stories, and nonfiction. The Steinbeck Fellows reading and Ken Burns event occurred within a single week, ample evidence of San Jose State University’s extraordinary commitment to public programming. An energetic official named Ted Cady is the University’s secret weapon in the competition for marquee-event audiences from an ethnically diverse, sensory-overloaded metropolitan market of more than 2 million residents.

Short Stories and Novels in Progress Captivate Audiences

Two of the three Steinbeck Fellows read from new novels nearing completion: Vanessa, a globe-trotting journalist published in major papers including The New York Times, and Tommy, a Louisiana native with an uncanny ear for regional speech. Dallas read from one of her recent short stories, a character study of individual isolation called “Living Alone.”  Each writer’s voice—pitch-perfect, in character, unmistakably original—fit like a glove. Taken together, they exemplified an essential feature of John Steinbeck books at a similar stage of development: good books are best judged at their birth, not by lines in manuscript, but by the writer’s voice, reading aloud to a group of friends like those who gathered at San Jose State University to hear the current crop of Steinbeck Fellows share their recent work. Interested? Read Dallas Woodburn’s “Living Alone,” published in its entirety for the first time online. An upcoming audio blog of Dallas reading her story is—as print publishers say of good books by promising authors—in progress. Watch this space for it early in 2014.

Ken Burns, America’s greatest living documentary filmmaker, discussed his Civil War and Dust Bowl classics and previewed his new film, The Roosevelts, during San Jose State University’s December 6 event honoring him with the 2013 John Steinbeck Award. Burns joins a pantheon of progressive American artists—Bruce Springsteen, Arthur Miller, Sean Penn, Studs Terkel, John Sayles, Joan Baez, Michael Moore, Garrison Keillor, Rachel Maddow, John Mellancamp—previously honored by SJSU’s Martha Heasley Cox Steinbeck Studies Center for inspiring hope “in the souls of the people” through their creative work. Steinbeck’s timeless phrase—also the name of the award—appears in Chapter 25 of The Grapes of Wrath.

From the Civil War to the Dust Bowl and the Roosevelts

During an onstage conversation with public TV-radio host Michael Krasny of San Francisco’s KQED, co-sponsor of the John Steinbeck Award event, Ken Burns described his four-decade directorial career as a voyage of self-discovery among subjects  selected after months of planning from a diversity of tempting topics. Rather than teaching viewers didactically, he noted, “We say, ‘Watch what we just discovered.’” He admitted that he interviewed Arthur Miller for his first film, on the Brooklyn Bridge, without reading Miller’s play A View from the Bridge before driving to the reclusive author’s Connecticut getaway, where the 6-foot, 6-inch Miller refused to let him inside the house. The small, slim filmmaker, in his 20s  and lugging a heavy camera in the dying rural light, recovered fast, using Miller’s entire interview to conclude the documentary. It was the first and last time he included a complete interview with anyone in a film on any subject.

Ken Burns described his four-decade directorial career as a voyage of self-discovery among subjects selected after months of planning from a diversity of tempting topics.

Ken Burns’ Civil War and Dust Bowl documentaries have become classics—along with films on Lewis & Clark, World War II, Vietnam, country music, jazz, and baseball—running frequently on PBS and used regularly in classrooms across America. He noted that several series, including the Civil War and Dust Bowl, have been viewed by schools more than 2,000 times. He said he collected 25,000 still images for his new series on the Roosevelts and used only 2,300 in the final film, describing the intimacy of “hearing the photograph” when holding it in your hand. Comparing John Steinbeck and Mark Twain, he added that the stage-setting “White Town Drowsing” section of his film on Twain, inspired by Twain’s lyrical sketch about his Missouri home town, ended up on the cutting room floor, a casualty of too much footage and too little time. Asked to name America’s greatest president, he replied, “I’m a Lincoln man.”

Ken Burns on the Roosevelts—TR, FDR, and Eleanor

Why the new series on the Roosevelts, scheduled for broadcast on PBS in 2014 with the voice of Meryl Streep as Eleanor? Noting John Steinbeck’s deep connection with FDR, Ken Burns replied that both Roosevelt presidents died early looking much older than their age: TR at 60, FDR at 63. He characterized the Roosevelts as “incandescent light bulbs that burned very brightly”—a phrase some future biographer is certain to appropriate to describe John Steinbeck, who also died in his 60s. Defining his art as “emotional archeology,” Burns added that professional historians aren’t always the best faces or voices for his films. “Experts can get in the way,” particularly in films about war. In his Vietnam documentary, for example, he used only men and women who had fought, resisted, or were directly effected—including Vietnamese soldiers and civilians who survived Vietnam’s civil war.

He characterized the Roosevelts as ‘incandescent light bulbs that burned very brightly’—a phrase some future biographer is certain to appropriate to describe John Steinbeck . . . .

The riveting segment from “The Roosevelts” screened for Ken Burns’ audience showed rare footage of FDR speaking off-the-record from his automobile at the unveiling of Thomas Jefferson’s face on Mount Rushmore in 1936. Cigarette holder in hand, FDR voices his vibrant optimism for America “10,000 years from now,” displaying the survivor’s spirit that, according to Ken Burns, made him our second greatest president. “Lincoln got us through our greatest crisis, the Civil War. Roosevelt saw us through the Great Depression and World War II, the worst crises, after the Civil War, in our history.” Noting that books on both the Roosevelts who became president, fifth cousins from different parties, continue to be produced today, Burns added that First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt—TR’s favorite niece and FDR’s sixth cousin—never received the attention she deserved as the essential link in the Roosevelts’ enchanted family chain. “She was the linchpin” in the Roosevelts’ dynastic life, Burns concluded. “Her story carries the film for the final 45 minutes.”

John Steinbeck and Eleanor Roosevelt: Allies and Friends

For Paul Douglass, professor of English and interim director of the Martha Heasley Cox Center for Steinbeck Studies, the Ken Burns event was a personal moment. Visibly moved while giving the John Steinbeck Award, Douglass attended Amherst College as an undergraduate; Ken Burns—a friend of the popular John Steinbeck biographer, Middlebury College writer-professor Jay Parini—was at nearby Hampshire College at the same time. Under Douglass and his predecessors, the Steinbeck Studies Center collection has acquired numerous items related to Eleanor Roosevelt, who defended John Steinbeck during the bitter controversy surrounding The Grapes of Wrath. She praised The Forgotten Village in her My Day newspaper column in 1941 and interviewed the author for her radio program in 1950. A video clip recorded Mrs. Roosevelt chatting with John Steinbeck and his wife Elaine in a New York restaurant circa 1952. All three supported Adlai Stevenson for president that year. Each would applaud Ken Burns—the Adlai Stevenson of socially progressive filmmaking—today. Like Stevenson in his letters to John Steinbeck, Burns was gracious in crediting “we,” not “I” in accepting the John Steinbeck Award, a tribute to the behind-the-scenes team he says he depends on, and to the unpresidential modesty that he obviously shares with John Steinbeck.