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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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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Steinbeck Review Connects Life of Steinbeck, COVID-19

July 5, 2021 by Leave a Comment

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Articles by several writers in the Spring 2021 issue of Steinbeck Review, the journal of the International Society of Steinbeck Scholars, reconsider the life of Steinbeck from the point of view of a variety of contemporary concerns, including COVID-19. Stanford professor Gavin Jones headlines the issue with “Steinbeck in a Pandemic,” a survey of Steinbeck’s “biopolitical imagination” as seen in three very different works of fiction: The Grapes of Wrath, To a God Unknown, and The Pearl. Debra Cumberland compares “the themes of borders, migration, and displacement” in The Grapes of Wrath with Gehen, Ging, Gegangen, a novel by the 54-year-old German author Jenny Erpenbeck, while Fredrik Tydal “examines the appearance of The Grapes of Wrath in the Armed Services Editions, the book series that provided the American military with reading material during World War II.” Steinbeck’s World War II novella-play The Moon Is Down gets a fresh look from a textual-critical perspective in Tom Barden’s review of Bibliographia Dystopia, Volume I: John Steinbeck’s The Moon Is Down, by Anthony Amelio, and Steinbeck’s “positive impact on Algerian culture” is traced in a timely piece co-authored by Chaker Mohamed Ben Ali and Cecelia Donahue. Other contributors include Susan Shillinglaw, Christopher Seiji Berardino, and Scott Pugh, whose review of William Souder’s life of Steinbeck, Mad at the World, challenges the conclusions of William Ray’s review of Souder’s book in an earlier issue of the journal.

Photo of John Steinbeck courtesy New York Public Library.

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Christopher Hitchens Recalls John Steinbeck on Route 66

March 5, 2021 by Leave a Comment

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The late, great Christopher Hitchens was both advocate and critic when it came to America. A self-styled Anglo-American best known for his robust defense of USA action in Iraq after 9/11—and for his decidedly un-American defense of atheism as an alternative to any and all religion—the British-born writer and speaker was an astute reader of poetry, politics, history, and fiction, and a powerful voice in defense of authors who combined two or more in their writing, like Orwell, Auden, and Nabokov. References to Steinbeck are relatively rare in the books for which Hitchens, who died in 2011, is best remembered. A passage from “The Ballad of Route 66,” an essay written in Steinbeck’s centennial year of 2002, shows why that’s a shame. Crediting Steinbeck for being the first to call Route 66 “the mother road,” Hitchens makes cross-cultural connections (Marx, Wordsworth) often missed when explaining why The Grapes of Wrath still resonates with readers, 80 years Steinbeck after wrote his fictional (and political) masterpiece:

The title of his 1939 classic—and just try imaging the novel under a different name—comes from the nation’s best-loved Civil War anthem. (It was Steinbeck’s wife Carol who came up with the refulgent idea.) When first published it carried both the verses of Julia Ward Howe and the sheet music on the end-papers in order to fend off accusations of unpatriotic Marxism. But really it succeeded because it contrived to pick up the strain of what Wordsworth called “the still, sad music of humanity.”

First published in the November 2002 issue of Vanity Fair magazine, “The Ballad of Route 66” can be found in Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays, a collection of lesser-known Hitchens pieces published by Nation Books in 2004.

Photograph of Christopher Hitchens by Christian Witkin courtesy of Basic Books.

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Cancel Culture Targets Of Mice and Men—Again

February 8, 2021 by 2 Comments

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America’s cancel-culture movement has caught up with the school district of Newfane, the rural community in upstate New York where a student named Madison Woodruff complained recently about having to read John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, the 1937 novella-play in which the writer explored racism, sexism, and ageism in rural California 100 years ago. A February 2, 2021 report in the Lockport Union Sun & Journal gives the 16-year-old’s reason for objecting to a book that might make her “uncomfortable”: “My main concern is that kids are feeling uncomfortable, and I feel uncomfortable, and I feel if you’re reading a book in school, where school is supposed to be a safe place, you can’t make kids feel uncomfortable because of a book we’re reading.” Citing the December 2020 decision by school district officials in Mendota Heights, Minnesota to remove Of Mice and Men (“the second most frequently banned book in the public school curriculum in the 1990s”), following complaints by parents and staff at Henry Sibley High School, the report quotes Newfane’s high school principal statement in response to Woodruff: “literature is a way to ‘confront’ bigotry.”

Like Shakespeare, John Steinbeck Can Create Discomfort

nick-taylorAlso quoted in the article is Nick Taylor, director of the Martha Heasley Cox Center for Steinbeck Studies and professor of English at San Jose State University, who defended Steinbeck’s right to be candid and the reader’s right to be uncomfortable. “She’s absolutely justified in having these feelings,” said Taylor: “I think Steinbeck would’ve said she was completely justified, though he would’ve added, ‘And that’s entirely my point.” Two days after the report appeared, the paper published a letter from a former student who credited her Newfane English teacher with introducing her to another comfort-challenging author: “I always felt safe in school no matter what our assignment was. I had a brilliant English teacher and when I was Madison’s age he introduced us to Shakespeare, who wrote comedies, tragedies, sonnets and poems, and historical works. Shakespeare is the most-recognized playwright in the world. His works could make you feel uncomfortable if you chose to interpret them that way.”

Lead photo: Lon Cheney and Burgess Meredith as George and Lenny in Lewis Milestone’s 1939 film version of John Steinbeck’s 1939 classic. Photo of Nick Taylor courtesy Martha Heasley Cox Center for Steinbeck Studies.

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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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John Steinbeck Helps Physicians Self-Heal

September 21, 2020 by Leave a Comment

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“Using the Humanities to Help Heal”—an August 13, 2020 feature post by E.J. Iannelli—leads its report on an innovative program for post-graduate students in internal medicine at the University of Washington with the experience of Travis Hughes, a third year UW internal medicine resident in Spokane, Washington, who found an unexpected path to self-understanding in East of Eden, the 1952 novel John Steinbeck believed he was born to write. Encountering the “malformed soul” of Steinbeck’s character Cathy Ames for the first time during a “Daily Dose of Humanities” discussion session designed to help primary care physicians better understand their patients and themselves, Hughes said that Steinbeck’s case history of a sociopath with “no remorse and very little empathy” left him with an important lesson: “that I shouldn’t lose touch with my emotions.” Along with long distance medicine and COVID-19 pandemic protocols, “the adoption of electronic medical record (EMR) software has sterilized the emotional connection between medical professionals and their patients”—a connection which can be recovered by insights gained from art, music, and literature. “I find that I learn not only about shared human experience but also about the people that I work with based on the choices of art that they bring in,” says Hughes of the program. “It puts my heart and mind in a more generous, empathetic position. And it makes me think about what life is like as a patient. I’m not just seeing a lab value, I’m seeing a person who’s similar to me.” The program is the brainchild of Dr. Darryl Potyk (at left in photo, with internal medicine residents), the chief for medical education at UW’s school of medicine in Spokane, Washington.

Photo by Young Kwak courtesy of The Inlander.

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After Travels with Charley, Pittsburgh Newspaper Journalist Finds Staying Home with COVID-19 Easy

June 30, 2020 by 1 Comment

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I’m a very lucky man.

Living in an old money-pit at the top of a hill in the woods and having no neighbors was always a sweet deal for an underpaid Pittsburgh newspaper journalist.

But in the medical and political madness of our times, they have become priceless gifts.

When summer is in full swing my 12 acres are ridiculously green and lush. I like to say it’s like being in Vietnam, but I have no idea what I’m talking about because I dodged that jungled corner of the world half a century ago.

On any given morning here in Western Pennsylvania, my Montana-raised wife Trudi and I can look out one of our 20 oversized windows and see a Disneyland of birds, chipmunks, rabbits, squirrels, groundhogs, and deer. In the spring and fall, wild turkeys parade past my house. Where they spend their summers I don’t know.

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Birds are everywhere. They wake us up at dawn and dart through the under-story all day. Turkey vultures circle silently above our 1938 vintage metal roof. Robins and doves have built nests in the crooks of our rain gutters. Woodpeckers have drilled holes in our ancient redwood siding for their homes.

The young Rough-Legged Hawk that flashed by our kitchen window and snatched a baby dove from its nest last month has moved on to tougher prey. At night we hear the local gang of coyotes howling and yapping, but during the day they are as invisible as the owls hooting somewhere in the dark.

Living in the woods in an old house means coexisting with nature—literally. It’s not just spiders, ants, and stink bugs. At one time or another, our uninvited house-guests have included birds, bats, frogs, toads, mice, snakes, and a teen-age raccoon who came in a kitchen window and thought it could live behind the cereal boxes.

During our pandemic and national shutdown, I’m even more blessed to be living in Penn’s Woods. For some strange reason unknown to the disease experts Pittsburgh and the western half of the state were spared the worst of the COVID-19.

In my largely rural, natural gas-fracking county 20 miles south of Pittsburgh, where 220,000 Flyover People live, we’ve had six deaths from COVID-19. Philly on the East Coast was hit hard, but there have been fewer than 200 deaths in Allegheny County, where Pittsburgh and 1.3 million Steelers-worshippers are located. More than half of the area’s COVID-19 deaths have been in nursing homes and, like everywhere else, only a handful have been under 70.

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Despite Pittsburgh’s relative good luck, the governor’s sweeping shutdown of the state quickly ended my career as a weekend Uber driver. As a worker in the transportation sector, I was deemed by the people in charge to be essential. But closing downtown offices, restaurants, bars, sporting events, and all nightlife in mid-March wiped out 90 percent of Uber’s customers. The evidence—two leased vehicles that rarely leave—sits in our driveway.

Miraculously, my potential financial disaster turned into a windfall when 1099-contract workers whose jobs were wiped out by COVID-19 were made eligible to receive $600 a week under the federal Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act.

I wish I could say I’ve been using my government-paid vacation to write another book or catch up on my Cicero or Saroyan. But mostly I’ve been mowing my weedy token lawn, playing golf twice a week, and wasting time ranting and raving about political things I can do nothing about on Facebook and Twitter.

But I haven’t been a total bum for three months.

I’ve been trying to get Hollywood interested in my tragically overlooked 1948 Jim Crow history book, 30 Days a Black Man, which I hope Netflix will make into a series co-starring Jeff Daniels and Denzel Washington.

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On my website I posted the original newspaper series in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that 30 Days is based on. In 1948, star newspaperman Ray Sprigle collaborated with the NAACP of Walter White and pretended to be a black man in the Deep South for a month.

Sprigle shocked the oblivious white North with his angry, powerful, nationally syndicated account of the oppression, discrimination, and humiliation 10 million blacks suffered every day under Old Jim Crow. Sadly, his mostly forgotten series about life in America’s apartheid is timely as hell.

And oh yeah.

I also put together a small Kindle book called Chasing Steinbeck’s Ghost, which is a time-and-place-line of the 10,000-mile road trip Steinbeck took in the fall of 1960 for Travels with Charley.

Ten years ago in September I retraced Steinbeck’s route as faithfully and accurately as possible for what became my 2013 nonfiction book Dogging Steinbeck.

The Chasing Steinbeck’s Ghost timeline is as accurate as I could make it. It includes a bunch of photos I took of such things as Steinbeck’s Sag Harbor home, the trendy places he hung out at in San Francisco, and the big ranch in Texas where he and Elaine spent Thanksgiving.

There also are a few excerpts pulled from Dogging Steinbeck about some of the many fictions and fibs Steinbeck and his editors at Viking Press slipped into what until I came along 50 years later was marketed and taught as a work of nonfiction.

I hope my little guide doesn’t ruin the fun for others who want to follow Steinbeck’s tire tracks. Traveling around the USA to see America and meet Americans—post-COVID 19, of course—is a road trip everyone should experience at least once.

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How The Grapes of Wrath Helps Fans Face COVID-19

April 26, 2020 by Leave a Comment

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“Shattering Illusions of a Benign World”—an April 17, 2020 Wall Street Journal book review by the writer Robert D. Kaplan—compares the Dust Bowl disaster depicted by John Steinbeck in The Grapes of Wrath with the contemporary calamity of COVID-19. Citing Steinbeck’s 1939 novel as “a powerful, inspiring story of human resilience in the face of unfathomable hardship” with a hard-but-hopeful lesson for the age of COVID-19, Kaplan praises Steinbeck’s masterpiece as “a book about how the natural environment seals human destiny, even while fathoming human character as has rarely been done in literature.” Other fans in high places are drawing similar conclusions. An April 25, 2020 AZcentral.com opinion piece by USA Today contributor Edward A. Pouzar—“Manhattan is the inferno of coronavirus”—finds encouragement for discouraged New Yorkers in “the unbelievable Joad hope which helped the family move forward each day” in their flight from Dust Bowl Oklahoma to Depression-era California. Taken together, the two articles are another reminder of John Steinbeck’s remarkable reputation for relevance beyond the classroom, particularly with readers from the worlds of business and politics. Kaplan, a former foreign affairs reporter for The Atlantic and the author of 19 books of travel and political analysis, is a managing director at the Eurasia Group, a global consulting business that evaluates political risk for private clients. Pouzar is director of risk management for Deloitte’s consulting business in New York, the city Steinbeck once described as the only place he could live after California.

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