As one of its most famous dropouts, he is beloved by Stanford. But John Steinbeck is also a favorite son of Salinas, Calif. On June 27, the city unveiled the National Steinbeck Center, a combination museum, study center and archive dedicated to the Nobel-winning writer who sporadically attended classes on the Farm from 1919 to 1925 and later published 31 books.
The $10.3 million center includes interactive exhibits where visitors can haul water in a bucket, as the Joads did in The Grapes of Wrath (1939), or look at plankton through a microscope, as Doc Ricketts did in Cannery Row (1945).
The heart of the center is its archive of 30,000 letters, manuscripts, films and artifacts -- including the “Rocinante,” a camper Steinbeck drove while researching Travels with Charley: in Search of America (1962). Charley is also the subject of the 18th Steinbeck Festival, held at the center this year during the first week of August.
But if you can’t make it to Salinas, remember Stanford Special Collections has its own impressive Steinbeck cache: nearly 29,000 documents that illuminate the author’s work.
