John Steinbeck: Big Man in Campus Collections

The work of John Steinbeck, California’s only native son to win a Nobel Prize for literature, continues to evoke a poetic sense of the Central Valley, Monterey Bay and small towns along the Salinas River. But a growing number of students and scholars are learning that two other California locales are necessary destinations for anyone interested in exploring the life and novels of this 20th century giant.

Twenty miles apart from each other, Stanford University and San Jose State have spent decades building special archival collections that include personal notes and correspondence and first drafts of Steinbeck’s works written in longhand.

This fall, both campuses are expecting major new donations from the estate of Elaine Steinbeck, the author’s third wife, who died in April 2003. Steinbeck died in 1968.

The estate has promised Stanford a cache of personal letters from Elaine to her husband, along with the Nobel Prize gold medallion awarded to Steinbeck in 1962 in Stockholm, university officials say.

At San Jose State’s Martin Luther King Library, the Martha Heasley Cox Center for Steinbeck Studies expects to receive an oil painting of Steinbeck done by his friend, Swedish artist Bo Beskow, in 1947.

At a recent exhibit in the Lane Reading Room at Stanford’s Green Library, visitors perused rare items from the school’s Steinbeck collection. On display were three of the 50 foreign language editions of “The Grapes of Wrath,” plus the 1939 U.S. edition, published by Viking Press. (The hardback originally sold for $2.75.) They held up the annotated pages of Steinbeck’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech, which the author delivered in Stockholm in 1962.

And they examined the details of Steinbeck’s 1941 state income tax return. The author earned $21,483 in 1941 and paid $443 in state taxes -- having achieved commercial success with the publication of “Tortilla Flat” in 1935 and “Of Mice and Men” in 1937, not to mention a Pulitzer Prize in 1939 for “The Grapes of Wrath.” There were photos from the movie “Viva Zapata,” the 1952 movie Steinbeck wrote for director Elia Kazan, plus letters to William Saroyan.

“I would love for people to learn that Stanford is one of the two great repositories of research materials on John Steinbeck,” said William McPheron, senior curator of the American and British Collection at Stanford Library. “We are, in a sense, another monument to Steinbeck’s legacy. The great documentation of his career is located here.”

According to McPheron, the strength of Stanford’s archive is its collection of letters and documents, including Steinbeck’s correspondence with three key people: Pat Covici, his editor; Elizabeth Otis, his agent; and Carlton Sheffield, his Stanford classmate and lifelong friend.

San Jose State’s collection holds 50,000 items, including multiple editions of all his books, videos, movie posters, photographs, bibliographic material, critical essays, letters from his personal files, scrapbooks and original drafts of his short stories from the 1930s.

“I can’t say we have the best collection, because that depends on what you’re looking for,” said Susan Shillinglaw, who has served as the Steinbeck center’s director at San Jose State since 1987. “But today, we have the largest amount of Steinbeck material in the country.”

Elaine Steinbeck donated all the material in Steinbeck’s personal files, including letters he received upon winning the Nobel Prize from such people as Princess Grace, John F. Kennedy, Carl Sandburg and John Kenneth Galbraith, Shillinglaw said. Sharon Brown Bacon, stepdaughter of Steinbeck’s first wife, Carol Henning Steinbeck Brown, gave all his ‘30s-era scrapbooks and papers, she added.

“More important, it’s all in one easily accessible room. When you walk into the Steinbeck center in the library, you are literally surrounded by the work of this great writer,” Shillinglaw said.

The two Steinbeck scholars dismiss any notion of a rivalry between the two institutions.

“We have different missions, in which Steinbeck is only one of many American authors we collect in our archive,” said McPheron. San Jose State, in contrast, is committed to maintaining a high public profile for just Steinbeck, he said, adding that he and Shillinglaw “speak often on the telephone.”

Shillinglaw, in turn, said she admires how Stanford’s collection “continues to grow in both volume and excellence.”

Estimates vary on the financial value of Steinbeck’s papers. Certain 20th century authors, such as William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway, are highly collectible. “On the open market, a single handwritten page by Ernest Hemingway would sell for $5,000 to $10,000,” McPheron said. “Steinbeck is not quite as expensive, but he is in a similar league.”

Undergraduates as well as professional biographers use the archives at both universities.

At San Jose State, graduate level courses on bibliography and 1930s-era history, plus Shillinglaw’s three undergraduate English courses with Steinbeck emphases, send students to the center to research weekly essays and term papers. At Stanford, undergraduates in history and English use the special collections archive to write senior theses, a requirement when pursuing a degree with honors.

Such scholarship helps to keep Steinbeck’s work in the public eye.

Another popular program in this vein is San Jose State’s annual “in the souls of the people” award (the phrase is from “The Grapes of Wrath”), which is given to an artist who embodies Steinbeck’s support for the marginalized and downtrodden.

The first recipient, in 1996, was singer Bruce Springsteen, to honor his album “The Ghost of Tom Joad.” Other recipients include filmmaker John Sayles and singers Jackson Browne and Joan Baez. On Friday, this year’s recipient, actor Sean Penn, will be honored in an event sponsored by San Jose State at San Francisco’s Palace of Fine Arts.

Steinbeck’s estate has been in the news recently, with an $18-million civil lawsuit filed by his son, Thomas Steinbeck, and granddaughter, Blake Smyle, against the estate of Elaine Steinbeck. The suit focuses on the issue of copyrights and permissions.

“It is unfortunate that the family is experiencing this turmoil,” said McPheron. But he added that it will not affect the upcoming gift of the letters and the Nobel Prize or harm the ability of scholars to study the Steinbeck papers.

“From a curatorial point of view,” said McPheron, “the great bulk of Steinbeck’s papers reside in university collections that are well cared for and available to the public. That alone represents a tremendous gift to the people that Steinbeck spent his life writing about.”