John
Steinbeck: From Salinas to Stockholm
John
Steinbeck: From Salinas to Stockholm marked the gift to
Stanford of the Wells Fargo Steinbeck Collection. The exhibition
opened on Steinbeck's birthday, February 27 in the Peterson
Gallery of the Cecil H. Green Library. It featured previously
unknown writings by California's only Nobel laureate in literature
as well as many rare family photographs that cast new light
on Steinbeck's life. The Wells Fargo Collection was presented
to Stanford as part of Wells Fargo's celebration of California's
sesquicentennial.
Steinbeck first came
to international fame with In Dubious Battle (1936) and
The Grapes of Wrath (1939), impassioned novels about
strife and suffering in Depression-ridden California. He is
also widely known and beloved for his sensitive evocations of
the lives of society's misfits in the novellas Tortilla Flat
(1935), Of Mice and Men (1937), and Cannery Row
(1945). The major achievements of his later years are East
of Eden (1952), an epic recreation of the Salinas Valley
and his own family's role in its historical development, and
The Winter of Our Discontent (1961), a scathing indictment
of American spiritual poverty. Many of Steinbeck's literary
works also became popular, often Oscar-winning motion pictures,
featuring leading stars from Hedy Lamarr and Henry Fonda to
James Dean and John Malkovich.
The exhibition traces
Steinbeck's life from his childhood in Salinas and his student
days at Stanford through his apprentice years in New York and
at Lake Tahoe to his decades of popular success, which culminated
with the Nobel Prize in literature in 1962. In addition to unpublished
manuscripts and photographs, the exhibition displays Steinbeck's
private letters to family and friends, personally inscribed
copies of his books, and many scarce artifacts from his careers
in Hollywood and as a journalist in Russia, in Italy during
World War II, and in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War.
Among the rarities
on display from the Wells Fargo Collection is a letter Steinbeck
wrote his uncle just after publishing The Grapes of Wrath,
in which he abandons the social focus of his famous Pulitzer
Prize-winning novel and announces a radically new, scientific
direction for his writing. The exhibition concludes with a typescript
of Steinbeck's Nobel Prize acceptance speech that is inscribed
to his oldest sister, Esther Steinbeck Rodgers, who originally
assembled the Wells Fargo Collection.
The catalog John
Steinbeck: From Salinas to Stockholm was published by the
Stanford University Libraries in conjunction with this exhibit.
The cost is $12 per copy plus tax and shipping. To order, please
visit the Special Collections publications
web site or contact Lisa Marie Hall at 650-725-1021 or via
e-mail at speccollpubs@stanford.edu
Image:
John Steinbeck as a high school senior, June 1919, from John
Steinbeck: From Salinas to Stockholm, Stanford University
Libraries, 2000, page 13.
