2023-12-05 23:31
San Jose State University’s Martha Heasley Cox Center for Steinbeck Studies continues four decades of distinguished service to scholars, teachers, and students with John Steinbeck: A… Read More
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Steinbeck Now — An International Community Of John Steinbeck Lovers Blog
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Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck, plus The Grapes of Wrath, made this Nobel in literature among the most popular writers of novels. Visit SteinbeckNow.com.
2023-10-26 22:44
Western Flyer—the 77-foot fishing boat John Steinbeck and Ed Ricketts took on their famous 1940 trip to the Sea of Cortez—recently returned to Monterey Bay after nearly a decade… Read More
2023-08-25 00:29
Jane Fonda, the actress-activist daughter of John Steinbeck’s friend, the actor Henry Fonda, will receive the 2023 John Steinbeck “In the Souls of the People” Award on Sep… Read More
2023-08-24 19:18
A chance Christmas dinner with John Steinbeck helped set the course of a young man’s life as an adventurer and Pan American pilot who crisscrossed the world many times–and then… Read More
2023-05-01 00:43
Thanks to local support and international interest, the waterfront property in Sag Harbor, New York, from which John Steinbeck set forth in Travels with Charley joins three properties in Ca… Read More
2023-04-30 23:30
“Woody is Just Woody,” an exhibition expressing the inspired connection between the author of The Grapes of Wrath and the folk singer Woody Guthrie, is on display through August… Read More
2023-03-28 01:07
John Steinbeck shadows the world of Palo Alto like a superannuated ghost. The subtitle of Malcolm Harris’s new nonfiction bestseller—A History of California, Capitalism, and the… Read More
2023-03-27 22:32
Reading, teaching, and translating Steinbeck, the subject of San Jose State University’s first Steinbeck conference since 2019, attracted a reported 30 attendees to the downtown San J… Read More
2023-03-22 17:51
The word pajaro means bird in Spanish, and Central California’s Pajaro Valley may have inspired the setting of John Steinbeck’s 1936 American strike novel, In Dubious Battle. Bu… Read More
2023-02-06 23:34
Undated Sumi ink portrait of John Steinbeck by Eugene Gregan
A photograph Thom Steinbeck admired of his father inspired the expressive, high-energy Sumi ink brush painting of John Steinbeck… Read More
2023-02-01 04:07
The November 2022 publication of Steinbeck’s Imaginarium was propitious. Its publisher, the University of New Mexico Press, published Steinbeck and His Critics: A Record of Twenty-Fiv… Read More
2023-01-31 00:01
J.R. Moehringer was worth the million dollars he reportedly received for ghostwriting Spare, Prince Harry’s account of life in the House of Windsor as this generation’s prodigal… Read More
2022-10-10 19:00
Together with the Martha Heasley Cox Center for Steinbeck Studies, the Center for Literary Arts at San Jose State University will present the 2022 John Steinbeck “In the Souls of the… Read More
2022-06-13 19:16
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… Read More
2022-05-26 18:09
San Jose State University invites proposals for papers and panels on reading, teaching, and translating John Steinbeck for the Steinbeck conference to be held March 22-24, 2023 at San Jose… Read More
2022-03-02 20:19
John Steinbeck’s wrote The Moon Is Down to inform Americans and inspire people in the formerly free countries of Europe—Norway, Denmark, Holland, France—occupied by Hitler… Read More
2022-02-20 22:35
Sunday, February 27, 2022, marks the 120th anniversary of John Steinbeck’s birth in Salinas, California. To celebrate this occasion, the Monterey Public Library and the Martha Heasley… Read More
2022-01-28 21:35
The January 24, 2022 New Yorker magazine puts John Steinbeck in the friendliest possible light—twice in one issue—by exploiting his popularity as an enduring cultural meme for p… Read More
2022-01-28 18:56
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… Read More
2021-12-01 00:15
When John Steinbeck died on December 20, 1968, Jimmy Costello wrote his obituary for the newspaper that was then called the Monterey Peninsula Herald. Jimmy was the paper’s city… Read More
2021-10-20 03:56
First, let me say that the recently released facsimile edition of John Steinbeck’s handwritten manuscript for The Grapes of Wrath is stunning. Published by SP books in France, it&rsqu&helli…Read More
2021-09-28 19:37
John Steinbeck was no accidental tourist when it came to the Republic of Mexico. Although he later expressed a preference for the mother culture of Spain, he traveled to Mexico early and of… Read More
2021-08-11 20:49
Another new book on John Steinbeck, the second published by a major press in less than a year, promises to turn the heads and hearts of scholars and fans alike by reassessing Steinbeck&rsqu&helli…Read More
2021-07-05 22:11
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… Read More
2021-06-19 20:59
It was a time in the mid-1930s. The writer William Saroyan (in undated photo) was driving from San Francisco to Los Angeles and, some miles down the road, decided he’d like to visit J… Read More
2021-06-19 17:24
Twenty years ago I took photographs of Monterey County’s Steinbeck Country to present at the Steinbeck Centennial Conference held at Hofstra University in New York. The images, togeth… Read More
2021-05-31 19:08
John Steinbeck was a versatile writer whose portfolio includes at least one unpublished novel, Murder at Full Moon, described by the Stanford English professor and Steinbeck scholar Gavin J… Read More
2021-05-31 18:03
Nick Taylor, the popular San Jose State University English professor and fiction writer who has served as director of the Martha Heasley Cox Center for Steinbeck Studies since 2011, recentl… Read More
2021-04-17 18:02
It was a slog at times, and Ernest Hemingway the man repeatedly came off as a really unlikable jerk, but I made it through Ken Burns and Lynn Novick’s Hemingway fest on PBS. Boy, was… Read More
2021-04-17 16:31
William Souder’s Mad at the World: A Life of John Steinbeck has won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in biography. The announcement was made at a virtual ceremony on April 16, 2021. A… Read More
2021-04-14 22:54
The California writer Ruth Comfort Mitchell had no desire for animosity to develop between herself and her Los Gatos neighbor John Steinbeck. To her mind Steinbeck was a “literary lio… Read More
2021-04-14 21:16
Published 82 years ago today, the classic 1939 novel The Grapes of Wrath may have been birthed by John Steinbeck over nine months of intense daily labor in the mountain home he shared with… Read More
2021-03-14 15:43
This play is drawn from stories told to me by people named Jimmy and Lily and Herb and Carole and Jean and others, all but one of them now gone and, of course, my imaginings. It wants simpl… Read More
2021-03-05 23:57
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&md&helli…Read More
2021-03-05 21:42
Since its founding 140 years ago in December, the Los Angeles Times—the largest-circulation U.S. daily published east of the Mississippi—developed a reputation for in-depth repo… Read More
2021-02-22 01:16
John Steinbeck preferred coasts to mountains, but the opposite is true of Joshua Powell, the artist-author of an artful new book, The Pacific Crest Trail: A Visual Compendium. Quoted in a F… Read More
2021-02-21 22:31
According to a February 19, 2021 New York Times real estate item that quickly caught the attention of Travels with Charley fans, the modest home in Sag Harbor, New York from which John Stei… Read More
2021-02-08 19:15
In a room on the main floor of the Steinbeck House in Salinas, California—formerly John Steinbeck’s bedroom, now known as the Blue Room—visitors can inspect a glass displa… Read More
2021-02-08 18:38
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… Read More
2021-01-24 22:55
“The Last Fish Hopper,” undated painting by Patricia Michielssen
I was given two astounding assignments early in my time at the Monterey Peninsula Herald, now the Monterey County… Read More
2021-01-01 03:01
Of the four gospels, Steinbeck’s favorite was the one written by John. He paraphrased it loftily in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, and he was partial to its name. Mining the books… Read More
2020-11-28 22:01
In 1853, the chief book critic for The Spectator wrote an unfavorable review of Charles Dickens’s novel Bleak House that reflected the high-minded tone of the weekly magazine, founded… Read More
2020-11-19 17:16
A pair of celebrity philanthropists with marquee humanitarian projects and progressive political agendas will discuss “Giving Back” in a live-stream event that will end with one… Read More
2020-11-11 19:48
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 Disconte… Read More
2020-10-15 23:16
Timed to coincide with the October 13 publication of Mad at the World, Bill Souder’s critically acclaimed life of John Steinbeck, the website IrishCentral’s repost of a 2002 pro… Read More
2020-10-15 21:16
Major newspaper reviews of Mad at the World, released by W.W. Norton and Company this week, continued the process of recalibrating public perception of the life of John Steinbeck begun by W… Read More
2020-10-09 19:48
Michele Speich, executive director of the National Steinbeck Center in Salinas, California, has announced a pair of public program initiatives with upcoming target dates. “We are kick… Read More
2020-10-09 18:39
According to a report from the Associated Press, “The Supreme Court is leaving in place a decision awarding the late John Steinbeck’s stepdaughter $5 million in a family dispute… Read More
2020-10-08 22:28
“Poison Cup of Gold”—the October 1, 2020 Wall Street Journal review of William Souder’s new life of John Steinbeck, by Sam Sacks—further escalated pre-publicat… Read More
2020-10-06 19:49
Mad at the World, the new life of John Steinbeck by biographer William Souder, continues to attract pre-publication praise, most recently in an October 1 Washington Post review by Alexander… Read More
2020-09-30 00:56
John Steinbeck, who was in Maine on his Travels with Charley road trip at this time in 1960, did not see the historic first TV debate between JFK and Nixon, but he heard it. He wasn’t… Read More
2020-09-26 22:39
Writing about the prickly presidential election cycle of 1960, John Steinbeck was prepared to find the humor in politics and, when also writing about his favorite comic strip, “Li&rsq&helli…Read More
2020-09-26 19:08
Although Mad at the World: A Life of John Steinbeck won’t be released until October 13, a pair of publications with literary reach have picked William Souder’s scholarly new Ste… Read More
2020-09-23 20:26
The death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg on September 18 raised red flags on issues of personal concern to Americans who admired Justice Ginsburg’s liberal stance on reproductive and voting r… Read More
2020-09-23 18:41
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… Read More
2020-09-21 23:06
Nancy Ricketts, the daughter of John Steinbeck’s collaborator and confidant Ed Ricketts, recalls growing up under Steinbeck’s shadow in pre-World War II Pacific Grove and Monter… Read More
2020-09-21 22:06
“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… Read More
2020-09-21 20:09
William Souder, John Steinbeck Biographer
The author of Mad at the World: A Life of John Steinbeck (William Souder, above) joins an all-star speaker lineup for the Monterey Library’s 7… Read More
2020-09-14 02:32
What is there left to say about the complicated life of John Steinbeck? In a blurb for Jackson Benson’s magisterial 1984 biography, The True Adventures of John Steinbeck, Writer… Read More
2020-08-20 22:17
Watercolor painting of Discove Cottage by Betty Guy
“Bruton is the only spot in the world I have refused to see again since John died.” – Elaine Steinbeck
Elaine Steinbeck… Read More
2020-08-01 21:14
Did John Steinbeck foreshadow the genre-bending literary movements now known as New Journalism and creative nonfiction when he wrote Travels with Charley, his semi-fictional account of the… Read More
2020-07-29 21:19
Chasing Steinbeck’s Ghost—a new Kindle book by the author of Dogging Steinbeck—details the actual and speculative timelines of Travels with Charley, John Steinbeck’s… Read More
2020-07-29 19:19
In a July 24, 2020 San Jose Mercury News report that was picked up by wire services, plans were announced by the Steinbeck House in Salinas, California, to cease restaurant and catering ope… Read More
2020-07-27 23:39
John Steinbeck said Montana was the state he’d pick to live in if he hadn’t been born in California, or become a citizen of the world who now called Manhattan home. In the early… Read More
2020-06-30 19:20
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.
Bu… Read More
2020-06-29 18:01
The latest installment of the long-running saga over who owns creative rights to the works of John Steinbeck is on the way to the U.S. Supreme Court according to Steven Todd Lowe, an entert… Read More
2020-06-27 17:51
Making a virtue of necessity, officials at the National Steinbeck Center have announced that the August 1-2, 2020 Steinbeck Festival will move online, motivated by COVID-19 and the need to… Read More
2020-05-25 02:23
At a recent agricultural technology summit held in Salinas, Steve Forbes called the small Central California city “the Ag-Tech capital of the world.” As director of the Salinas… Read More
2020-05-25 00:33
Like most days recently, my reflections this Memorial Day tend to focus on the failure of John Steinbeck’s vision for America and the rise in racism, militarism, and nationalism foste… Read More
2020-05-22 20:12
An advance copy of Mad at the World: A Life of John Steinbeck in the hands of Steinbeck Now shows why the new biography of America’s greatest writer by William Souder is certain to ma… Read More
2020-05-22 18:53
Theodor Broch, the Exiled Mayor of Narvik, Norway
An essay in the Spring 2020 issue of Steinbeck Review suggests a previously unacknowledged source for the setting, situation, and cast of Jo… Read More
2020-05-01 18:35
J.S., older, at his writing desk in his New York City apartment. Corduroy sport coat, plaid shirt open at the collar. Several pads of lined yellow paper and unopened letters on his de… Read More
2020-04-26 19:26
“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… Read More
2020-03-31 19:33
What would John Steinbeck have to say about the COVID-19 crisis? What would he focus on? I think it would be the plight of the homeless in places like San Francisco and Los Angeles, teeming… Read More
2020-03-31 18:41
A new report entitled “’The Grapes of Wrath,’ coronavirus edition” cites John Steinbeck’s classic to predict possible effects of the COVID-19 crisis on life in… Read More
2020-03-25 20:11
Up Late Reading Birds of America, a book of “proems” by Robert DeMott, is the latest link connecting John Steinbeck scholars with the life and times of John James Aubudon, the p… Read More
2020-03-25 18:25
Terrence McNally, the Tony Award-winning playwright who taught and babysat John Steinbeck’s boys when they were hard-to-manage teenagers, has died in Sarasota, Florida from complicati… Read More
2020-03-06 23:09
The Grapes of Wrath played a part in the monstrous promotional campaign that helped American Dirt become one of this year’s biggest best-sellers.
But John Steinbeck’s classic is… Read More
2020-02-01 23:19
If Gavin Jones had been a professor there 100 years ago, would John Steinbeck have stayed at Stanford University long enough to finish? Probably not, according to Jones, who addressed the f… Read More
2020-01-06 21:55
John Steinbeck © 1954 Yousuf Karsh
Hard news from three different sources suggests the year ahead will be a busy one for followers, fans, heirs, and collectors of John Steinbeck. Steinb… Read More
2019-12-31 22:34
Year-end book lists may be boring, but one outlet’s pick for editor’s favorite in 2019 surprised fans familiar with John Steinbeck’s bumpy treatment by religiously-minded… Read More
2019-12-31 21:11
The Fall 2019 issue of the journal Steinbeck Review, a biannual publication of Penn State Press in cooperation with the Martha Heasley Cox Center for Steinbeck Studies at San Jose State Uni… Read More
2019-12-05 22:14
For the past two years I have been doing research at the LBJ Presidential Library in Austin, Texas on the correspondence between John Steinbeck and President Lyndon Johnson about the Vietna… Read More
2019-12-05 21:14
Did casting cause the closing of Pipe Dream, the Broadway musical created by the dream team of Rodgers and Hammerstein from John Steinbeck’s novel Sweet Thursday? The movie star they… Read More
2019-11-15 03:22
Richard Grant, the British travel writer who plumbed Steinbeck’s Sea of Cortez in the September 2019 issue of Smithsonian Magazine, now sheds light on The Grapes of Wrath—withou… Read More
2019-11-14 23:08
The history, lives, and contribution of female canning workers during Cannery Row’s 20th century sardine boom will be celebrated in a special exhibit at the National Steinbeck Center… Read More
2019-11-14 21:53
Numerous artists drew, painted, or photographed John Steinbeck, but artistic images of his friend Ed Ricketts are relatively rare. This made the chance discovery of a drawing of Ricketts by… Read More
2019-10-14 19:04
Like the recent donation of the S.N. Neighbors collection of John Steinbeck papers to Stanford University, the upcoming sale of John Steinbeck memorabilia by Heritage Auction House in San F… Read More
2019-09-30 23:57
My most recent trip to the Monterey Peninsula as Visiting Scholar at the National Steinbeck Center was organized to further the Center’s connection to the increasingly diverse communi… Read More
2019-09-29 01:00
David M. Wrobel—Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Oklahoma University, President-Elect of the Western History Association, and Visiting Scholar at the National Steinbeck Cen… Read More
2019-08-28 21:17
Anticipating the 80th anniversary of John Steinbeck and Edward Ricketts’s expedition to the Sea of Cortez, and the 75th anniversary of the publication of Steinbeck’s novel Canne… Read More
2019-08-19 21:05
The spirit of John Steinbeck haunts the world of Mark Arax, the award-winning author and journalist from Fresno, California whose latest work—The Dreamt Land: Chasing Water and Dust A… Read More
2019-08-14 04:38
As a humorist I’ve learned that the best gags come from listening to people. Recently I broke one of my rules and picked up a couple hitchhiking on U.S. Highway 1, near Carmel, Califo… Read More
2019-08-09 16:37
One spring morning at Alice’s Dog Park in Pasadena, a few of us dog owners were talking about traveling with your dog when a gentleman in his 80s, named Larry, mentioned Travels with… Read More
2019-08-05 17:44
Inspired by his reading of John Steinbeck and William Faulkner, Carter Johnson writes about the universal human condition, man’s relation to nature, and the texture of rural American… Read More
2019-08-03 01:51
Was John Steinbeck acting as a CIA informant in Paris the summer he wrote the satirical short story for Le Figaro, published in English for the first time in the current issue of The Strand… Read More
2019-07-31 18:47
John Steinbeck © 1954 Yousuf Karsh
The current issue of The Strand Magazine features a fun find—the English version of a whimsically satirical short story John Steinbeck wrote for… Read More
2019-07-30 18:35
John Steinbeck © 1954 Yousuf Karsh
A trove of documents acquired by Stanford University—the S.J. Neighbors collection of John Steinbeck papers, 1859-1999—adds dramatic detai… Read More
2019-06-23 03:29
I was recently asked to consider writing an essay about Steinbeck’s short novel The Pearl to be included in a text series for secondary and undergraduate English education. Frankly Th… Read More
2019-05-10 16:46
The lucky purchase by a young couple in Austin, Texas—of a lost portrait of John Steinbeck painted by an admirer 50 years ago—presents intriguing questions about the author&rsqu&helli…Read More
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