The Stanford University Libraries announced today the acquisition of a major collection of manuscripts, letters, photographs, and books by John Steinbeck that span over 100 years of Steinbeck family history. The collection is that of his eldest sister, Esther Steinbeck Rodgers and was acquired with a lead gift from the Wells Fargo Foundation to the Stanford Libraries.

To be known as the Wells Fargo Steinbeck Collection, the collection will join Stanford's other holdings of Steinbeck books and manuscripts in the Department of Special Collections of the University Libraries.

Michael A. Keller, University Librarian, noted that Stanford already has one of the most important archives on John Steinbeck in the country and this new acquisition will broaden the scope of its collections and allow for further research on Steinbeck's work and his place on the American literary scene. "The collection," Keller says, "significantly strengthens Stanford's reputation as a premier repository for research materials on John Steinbeck."

Byron Scordelis, President of Wells Fargo for the Bay Area, said that the collection is "an important gift to all of California and a wonderful way for Wells Fargo to contribute to the celebration of California's sesquicentennial, given John Steinbeck's eminent and well-deserved reputation as one of a succession of California's stunning sons in the literary Pantheon."

Scordelis noted that it was appropriate that the collection was housed at the Stanford University Libraries because the University has a strong commitment to research and teaching on John Steinbeck and would make the collection accessible to generations of Californians and Steinbeck scholars.

John Steinbeck, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962, was a native of Salinas, California. He attended Stanford during the 1920s before achieving international fame with such classic novels as Of Mice and Men, The Red Pony, The Grapes of Wrath, Cannery Row, and East of Eden. Most of SteinbeckÕs work is set in California and draws on his experience of the Salinas Valley and the Monterey Penninsula. In addition to his fiction, Steinbeck also wrote for the screen, and many of his best-known books became major motion pictures.

The overall breadth of the Wells Fargo Steinbeck Collection makes it an invaluable resource for all scholars and students of John Steinbeck. It features nearly 400 of Steinbeck's letters to his parents, sisters, and other close relatives. It also contains unpublished, previously unknown poems and stories written by Steinbeck in his teens and twenties. Also present are hundreds of family photographs as well as correspondence to the family from Steinbeck's grandparents and other relations. Another important part of the Wells Fargo Collection is a set of first editions of Steinbeck's books, personally inscribed to his sister Esther Steinbeck Rodgers.

The Wells Fargo Steinbeck Collection was preserved by the family of Esther Steinbeck Rodgers and includes transcriptions of his letters, which were prepared and catalogued by Steinbeck's great niece, Ann Dethlefsen Madden. The collection will remain a discrete unit and become available for scholars by August 9, 1999, when the Department of Special Collections reopens in the newly renovated Bing Wing of the Green Library, according to Roberto Trujillo, the Frances and Charles Field Curator of Special Collections.

William McPheron, Curator for British and American Literature at Stanford, remarked that the Wells Fargo Collection "offers a unique view of Steinbeck's relations with his immediate family." "It is especially revealing," McPheron added, "of both Steinbeck's apprentice years, before his first novel in 1929, and of his life in the 1950s and 1960s, when literary success had made him a major public figure."

Many of the Stanford University Libraries' holdings of Steinbeck materials are detailed in A Catalogue of the John Steinbeck Collection at Stanford University, published in 1980. The new guide to the Wells Fargo Steinbeck Collection will be published on the Internet and will be accessible via the Stanford Libraries web space according to Trujillo.

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