94 LONGISLANDPRESS.COM • SEPTEMBER 2019
REAR VIEW
JOHN STEINBECK
SAGE OF SAG HARBOR
By ANNIE WILKINSON
The last thing he wanted was to be
recognized. Wearing a fisherman’s
cap and rubber boots, the famous
writer walked the streets of what he
dubbed “a handsome town,” chatting
with locals at Cove Deli or relaxing at
The Black Buoy bar with his dog Charley.
Sag Harbor offered him peace, he
told friends and colleagues.
Recently, on August 16, to honor the
writer posthumously, officials broke
ground on what will become John
Steinbeck Waterfront Park. The
1.25-acre property will connect with
its iconic windmill and Long Wharf
Village Pier through a walkway.
The grassy parkland, one of the last
remaining waterfront parcels downtown,
is open to the public.
The picturesque scene is a far cry
from the dust-stripped earth and
starving migrant farmworkers
whose hardscrabble existence
Steinbeck captured in The Grapes of
Wrath. His novel earned accolades
from peers and readers — selling
10,000 copies per week at one point
— but if not for this college dropout’s
sharp reporter’s eye, the searing
story would have been limited to
magazine articles.
SHY BUT SMART
John Ernst Steinbeck Jr. was born in
Northern California in 1902. By the
time he was 14, the shy but smart
kid was locking himself in his
room, writing poetry and stories.
He wanted to be a writer.
He attended Stanford University
for five years but quit in 1925.
Moving to New York City, he
worked briefly in construction
and as a newspaper reporter, but
returned to Monterey County to
do manual labor while developing
his beautiful and simple writing
style.
As Steinbeck labored over words
and physically exhausting work,
the decade-long Great Depression
created chaos as more than
1 million Americans fled the
dried-up Midwest and Southern
Plains, heading to California. But
with too many laborers and too
little employment, unemployed
workers’ ramshackle tent camps
proliferated. In 1936, the San
Francisco News hired Steinbeck
to write “The Harvest Gypsies” series
about the corruption-plagued
John Steinbeck lived in Sag Harbor toward
the end of his career.
government camps and horrific
conditions the migratory families endured.
Steinbeck described them as
"nomadic, poverty-stricken harvesters
driven by hunger and the threat
of hunger from crop to crop, from
harvest to harvest … The migrants
are needed … and they are hated.”
In 1937, documentary photographer
Horace Bristol proposed a photo essay
to Life magazine about the workers,
inviting Steinbeck to visit the camps.
Life rejected the pitch saying it was
“not important enough,” Bristol told
the Los Angeles Times, but Fortune
magazine approved.
Steinbeck and Bristol traveled
together, documenting the social
phenomenon. Bristol remembered
Steinbeck as “an extraordinarily
sensitive man,” recalling that “the
writer’s approach was so soft and
good that no one could take offense,”
reported the Times.
But the investigative journalist
realized the story was too big for a
magazine: It should be a novel. That
1939 book revealed the farmworkers’
plight. His years of blue-collar labor
enabled him to write what he knew
— masterfully — earning him the National
Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize
for fiction, and the Nobel Prize, and
his book was made into an Oscar-winning
film. Some of Bristol’s photos
were published in Life that year
and were used to cast the movie.
On receiving the Nobel Prize,
Steinbeck said the writer’s duty
was “dredging up to the light our
dark and dangerous dreams for
the purpose of improvement.”
CHARLEY AND SAG
HARBOR
Over the next decade, Steinbeck
served as a New York Herald
Tribune war correspondent
and wrote another best-selling
novel, East of Eden. In 1953, he
rented a Sag Harbor cottage, and
in 1955 bought a small house in
Sag Harbor Cove. He loved the
village and helped found and
co-chaired the Old Whalers’
Festival, now called HarborFest,
and helped create the windmill
next to Long Wharf.
He spent mornings writing in
the property’s shed or on his
boat, writing his Newsday columns
and another novel, The
Winter of Our Discontent. He wrote
to editor Elizabeth Otis, “I can move
out and anchor and have a little table
and yellow pad and some pencils …
Nothing else can intervene.”
Afternoons were spent fishing or
hobnobbing at Sal and Joe’s or Baron’s
Cove resort, or with Truman Capote,
Kurt Vonnegut, and other writers at
The Black Buoy, his beloved standard
poodle in tow.
Steinbeck’s legacy includes 31 books,
including Tortilla Flat and Of Mice
and Men. His last work was Travels
with Charley, about seeing America
with Charlie after departing from Sag
Harbor.
His son Thomas Steinbeck told The
New York Times that his father “ had
been accused of having lost touch
with the rest of the country. Travels
With Charley was his attempt to
rediscover America.”
John Steinbeck died of heart disease
in New York City in 1968.
“The writer’s duty was ‘dredging up to the
light our dark and dangerous dreams for the
purpose of improvement,”
said John Steinbeck.
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