Steinbeck At 100

One more from my files, on Steinbeck, who remains my favorite writer. Interesting links, or links to interesting stories abound.One about his co-op on 72nd Streer finally going for sale in 2009, six years after Elaine Steinbeck's death, after apparent resolution of a bitter family feud.

Searching for a story from Newsday ("He's part of our heritage", written by Aileen Jacobson, took me to the Martha Heasley Cox Center for Steinbeck Studies in the ML King Library at San Jose State University.

Found a Facebook page entitled Travels with Stenbeck; neat.

March 19, 2002

ARTS IN AMERICA; The Pride Of Salinas: Steinbeck At 100
By STEPHEN KINZER

SALINAS, Calif.— Here in the fertile California valley that was home to many of the hobos, vagrants, prostitutes and migrant farm laborers who populate the works of John Steinbeck, a yearlong celebration is under way to honor the writer's memory.

There are also events being planned elsewhere, including New York, where Steinbeck lived for the last 18 years of his life. There is a tribute at Lincoln Center tonight, a conference at Hofstra University from Thursday through Saturday and a film series in April and May at City University. A Web site, http://www.steinbeck100.org/ newevents.html, provides information on events in other areas.

The Steinbeck towns like Salinas are no longer ringed by shantytowns filled with hungry Dust Bowl refugees, as in ''The Grapes of Wrath.'' Down the road in Monterey, the immigrants and ne'er-do-wells who populate books like ''Cannery Row'' and ''Tortilla Flat'' have given way to boutique owners.

Yet since Steinbeck's death, in 1968, people here have become zealous guardians of his legacy, so the National Steinbeck Center in Salinas seemed the appropriate place for the cake-cutting that opened what is to be a year of speeches, public readings, concerts, academic conferences, film showings and other tributes.

Steinbeck's works are still widely read in the United States and abroad. Many of his admirers say that is because he conveys a love of the downtrodden, the exploited, the ones he called ''the gathered and the scattered.'' He spent years living among them and portrayed them as deftly as any American writer ever has.

The celebration in Salinas on Feb. 27, the 100th anniversary of Steinbeck's birth, included the reading of official proclamations and the presentation of prizes to local high school students who have studied Steinbeck. It was one of more than 175 tributes to be held this year in 39 states. Together they are said to make up the largest-scale homage ever paid to an American author.

Many of these events are being paid for by the National Endowment for the Humanities, which gave $260,000 to a coalition of 26 nonprofit cultural groups and 100 local libraries.

The California Council for the Humanities is planning an effort to persuade as many Californians as possible to read ''The Grapes of Wrath'' over the summer. Beginning in October, libraries and schools across the state will sponsor discussion groups and other events related to the book.

''The Grapes of Wrath,'' generally considered Steinbeck's masterpiece, grew out of a newspaper assignment to investigate the living conditions in California of migrants from the parched heartland. He wrote it during an intense six-month creative marathon in 1938, and its graphic portrayal of workers suffering at the hands of callous landowners brought him death threats, an F.B.I. investigation and charges of Communist sympathy.

That last charge may have seemed plausible during the contentious 1930's, when anyone speaking out for the rights of the poor was considered suspicious, but it sounds quite odd in light of Steinbeck's later opinions. After World War II he denounced Communists for having ''established the most reactionary governments in the world, governments so fearful of revolt that they must make every man an informer against his fellows, and layer their society with secret police.'' During the 1960's he was one of the few American intellectuals who refused to denounce the United States role in Vietnam.

Steinbeck won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1962. ''His sympathies always go out to the oppressed, the misfits and the distressed,'' the Nobel committee asserted in choosing him. ''He likes to contrast the simple joy of life with the brutal and cynical craving for money.''

In accepting the award, Steinbeck said: ''The ancient commission of the writer has not changed. He is charged with exposing our many grievous faults and failures, with dredging up to the light our dark and dangerous dreams for the purpose of improvement. Furthermore, the writer is delegated to declare and to celebrate man's proven capacity for greatness of heart and spirit -- for gallantry in defeat, for courage, compassion and love.''

During Steinbeck's childhood in Salinas, his parents often read aloud to him and his three sisters. He spent hours in the attic of his family home devouring books like ''Adventures of Huckleberry Finn'' and ''Ivanhoe'' and one that became a lifelong favorite, Malory's ''Morte d'Arthur.''

As he grew older, Steinbeck often left Salinas and traveled to the seaside town of Monterey, about 25 miles away. There he developed a bond with cannery workers, fishermen and others on the fringes of society.

Most of Steinbeck's works are straightforward, accessible and easy to read. That has led some sophisticates to scorn them, but it has also attracted legions of admirers. One of them is Anne Wright, a Silicon Valley marketing executive who attended a Steinbeck memorial reception and dinner in San Jose, Calif.

''His style was like the people he wrote about,'' said Ms. Wright, who confided that according to family legend, she was delivered by the same doctor who delivered Steinbeck. ''It wasn't complex, or if it was, then not in a philosophical way.''

Several bookstores in the Salinas area are featuring Steinbeck's works or mounting special programs about him. At one store a collector and dealer, James Johnson, displayed posters from many of the more than 30 films that have been made from Steinbeck's works, along with copies of his books translated into languages including Farsi, Vietnamese and Slovenian.

''We don't know how many languages he's been translated into, but I have books in about 40 and I'd guess the total is around 60,'' Mr. Johnson said. ''He wrote about the common man, and in the end almost all of us think of ourselves as common. That transcends national boundaries.''

Japan is among the countries where Steinbeck's works are especially popular. A former executive director of the Steinbeck Society of Japan, Kiyoshi Nakayama, attended the Salinas festivities.

''We went through a very poor period after the war, and many people of that generation identified with what Steinbeck wrote,'' said Mr. Nakayama, whose 1998 translation of ''The Grapes of Wrath'' is the eighth to appear in Japanese. ''He is still very popular in Japan, even though there are more scholarly papers written about Hemingway and Faulkner.''

The debate over how Steinbeck compares with Hemingway and Faulkner, titans of his generation who also won the Nobel Prize, may be endless. Some critics have sought to dismiss him as less profound and more superficial than the other two, a straightforward storyteller beloved by high school students rather than a profound intellectual who probed the human psyche. Sometimes he is dismissed as unsophisticated, as when Edmund Wilson complained about ''the coarseness that tends to spoil Mr. Steinbeck as an artist.''

Susan Shillinglaw, a professor of English at San Jose State University and director of the Center for Steinbeck Studies, said she admired all three novelists and did not believe Steinbeck suffered by comparison.

''I love Hemingway's prose, and I think his short stories are some of the best in the language, but Steinbeck did the same kind of listening and simplifying,'' Ms. Shillinglaw said in an interview after addressing the crowd at Salinas. ''Steinbeck has more heart and soul, more empathy. He reaches out to readers with a participatory prose that invites us to engage, rather than writing as an observer the way Hemingway often does.

''Faulkner was certainly complex and experimental in a way that Steinbeck was not. He was more in touch with the modernism of people like Joyce and Virginia Woolf. But to compare him to Steinbeck is like comparing Picasso to Matisse. They weren't trying to do the same thing.''

Ms. Shillinglaw is the co-editor of a newly published anthology of Steinbeck's journalistic work, ''America and Americans,'' and also of a forthcoming book in which 23 American and foreign writers pay tribute to Steinbeck and assess his cultural influence. Contributors include Arthur Miller, Norman Mailer, E. L. Doctorow, Kurt Vonnegut and T. C. Boyle.

Among those who joined the celebration in Salinas was Thom Steinbeck, the author's only surviving child, who bears a striking resemblance to his father.

''He was an animist,'' Mr. Steinbeck said of his father while reminiscing between public appearances. ''He would tip his hat to dogs. He'd talk to screwdrivers, start a conversation with a parking meter at the drop of a hat.''

Mr. Steinbeck said that after years of monitoring the royalty checks the family receives for his father's works, he has developed a theory about the rises and falls in his popularity.

''Every time people are being driven out of work by powerful institutions that they think are against them, when there's unemployment and economic trouble, sales increase,'' Mr. Steinbeck said. ''When you have boom times like the mad 80's and there's plenty of money around, sales go down. It all depends on the age we're in.''