Meet Elaine Steinbeck, a Fan Hoping to Meet Bruce

At 81, Elaine Steinbeck may be Bruce Springsteen’s oldest fan.

And it’s not just because the rock star’s latest album is bound to sell some copies of her late husband John Steinbeck’s novel “The Grapes of Wrath.”

She was a Springsteen fan even before he named the album’s title song “The Ghost of Tom Joad,” after the main character of the celebrated 1939 tale about social injustice among migrant workers.

“When I heard the album title, I said to John’s literary agent, ‘Find out about this,’ ” she told Pop Eye by phone from her home in New York, which she shared with the writer until his death in 1968. “The agent asked them, ‘Why didn’t you consult us?’ But he didn’t have to. I wouldn’t object. I love Bruce Springsteen.”

Steinbeck has yet to hear the new album, which incorporates the famous speech in which Joad says that wherever there is injustice, “I’ll be there.” But she says that she’s honored that Springsteen found parallels between the story of ‘30s Okies in California and the plight of today’s Latin American immigrants.

Obviously, she is one pretty hip octogenarian.

“I’m 81, but I’m going at breakneck speed constantly,” she says. Upcoming travel plans include a trip to Hong Kong, Singapore and the Javanese and Balinese islands, and another to London, where she’ll present the second John Steinbeck Award, a $10,000 literary prize for fiction dedicated to issues of poverty, race and political injustice.

But first she’s looking forward to meeting Springsteen when she attends his concert Dec. 12 at New York’s Beacon Theatre.

“I can’t wait!” says Steinbeck, who became the Nobel Prize-winning novelist’s third wife in 1950. “I’m taking one of my grandsons and his girl. I hope they let us backstage so I can meet him. How fun!”

She won’t be the first of the Steinbeck clan to have a backstage meeting with Springsteen on his solo acoustic tour.

After last Sunday’s performance at the Wiltern Theatre here, Tom Steinbeck, the writer’s son from a previous marriage, not only thanked Springsteen for reviving the Joad character but also presented the singer with a ring once worn by the novelist.

Jay Parini, author of the recent biography “Steinbeck,” says the fact that Springsteen generally talks more about John Ford’s movie version of “The Grapes of Wrath” than of the book itself does nothing to diminish the Springsteen-Steinbeck connection.

“I think most people come to Steinbeck through that movie or the film of ‘Of Mice and Men,’ ” he says. “There’s nothing wrong with that.”