John Steinbeck: The Centennial

Circa 1937, the "Exploitation Department" of United Artists Corporation distributed this promotional article to newspapers in hopes that they would print it. It's one of the artifacts on display in the fascinating new HRC exhibition, "John Steinbeck in His Time: A Centennial Exhibition," in the Leeds Gallery on the UT campus.

"John Steinbeck in His Time: A Centennial Exhibition," which is on display at the Leeds Gallery on the UT campus until July 31, includes the Depression-era images everyone associates with Steinbeck: dust storms, itinerant workers, and farmers so angry about being unable to make a living off the land that they stop working in order to protest. The exhibition focuses on Steinbeck's contemporary reception, so as you walk past the photographs, manuscripts, and placards, you'll come across the telling news that after The Grapes of Wrath was published, the governor of Oklahoma denounced it as unrealistic. A promotional article about Steinbeck from the Thirties loudly proclaims that "America was proud of its front porch until John Steinbeck showed the backyard," which is overstating the case by just a tad, perhaps. Still, the trope that literature should wake people up, maybe make them squeamish about injustice and themselves, seems somewhat neglected now.

This exhibition, whose artifacts are culled from archives at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, reminds us what it's like to make people angry by writing. But it also depicts what eventually happens to the person making everyone upset. In July 1961, seven years before he died, Steinbeck wrote a letter to his longtime editor, Pascal Covici, after he had completed a three-month road trip to research Travels With Charley. "Through time, our nation has become a discontented land," Steinbeck wrote. "I've sought an out on this -- saying it is my aging eyes seeing it, my waning energy feeling it, my warped vision that is distorting it, but it is only partly true. The thing that I have described is really there. I did not create it. It's very well for me to write jokes and anecdotes but the haunting decay is there under it."

John Steinbeck would have turned 100 next Wednesday. The National Steinbeck Center, in collaboration with a number of libraries and museums, has organized a national celebration, "Bard of the People: The Life and Times of John Steinbeck" (see www.steinbeck100.org). Many libraries and universities across the nation are throwing parties, including a tea at the Stanley Tubbs Memorial Library in Sallisaw, Okla. The HRC is contributing by throwing a party on UT's West Mall, between the Tower and Guadalupe, on February 27 from noon to 5pm, with readings of Steinbeck at Barnes & Noble Guadalupe. A reception in the Leeds Gallery, on the fourth floor of the Flawn Academic Center, takes place from 5 to 7pm.