The Nobel Prize in Literature 1962

Hopefully John Steinbeck's assessment 'Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.' will last well into the 21st century.

1952 John Steinbeck Interview
1952-02-11
Voice of America radio broadcast of interview with Steinbeck, discussing how things have changed since he wrote "The Grapes of Wrath."
John Ernst Steinbeck Jr. (February 27, 1902 – December 20, 1968) was an American author. He won the 1962 Nobel Prize in Literature "for his realistic and imaginative writings, combining as they do sympathetic humour and keen social perception." He has been called "a giant of American letters," and many of his works are considered classics of Western literature.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OELMRWaKEAI

Images:
1. John Steinbeck and his 3rd wife Elaine Anderson
2. John Ernst Steinbeck a a child in Salinas, California
3. John Steinbeck 'Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.'
4. John Steinbeck's 1939 novel 'The Grapes of Wrath'

Background from {[https://www.steinbeck.org/about-john/biography/]}
In 1902, Salinas, California was a prosperous farming community, founded about fifty years earlier. Agriculture was the region’s pay dirt. Only fifteen miles from the Pacific, the 50-mile long Salinas Valley was cool and often foggy, temperatures moderate, and the soil rich beyond measure. Ranchers and farmers thrived. Growing wheat and barley in the 19th century, sugar beets in the late 1890s and vegetables and lettuce in the opening decades of the 20th century, growers and shippers’ fortunes would soar during John Steinbeck’s childhood and teens. By the time he went to college in 1919, the valley was about to ship lettuce across America in refrigerated railroad cars. Lettuce became the “green gold” of the Salinas Valley.

John Steinbeck was born in Salinas in 1902, in a stately home on Central Ave (now open as a popular luncheon spot). During his childhood, Salinas had a population of about 5000, was the county seat of Monterey County, and a trading and shipping center for the lower Salinas Valley. The geography and demographics of the valley, the “Salad Bowl of the Nation,” stamped the young boy’s sensibilities. A strong sense of place is evident in his fiction: “I think I would like to write the story of this whole valley,” he wrote to a friend in 1933, when he was 31 years old, “of all the little towns and all the farms and the ranches in the wilder hills. I can see how I would like to do it so that it would be the valley of the world.” In 1952 he published his epic novel about the Salinas Valley, East of Eden.

In fact, Steinbeck would grow up to tell stories that many area Salinas Valley ranchers and farmers would rather not be told—embedded in his novels was Salinas gossip; his characters were often lonely, misunderstood farmers and ranchers; and in his books, dreams of ordinary workers are dashed—his books tell of failed dreams of land ownership in California. The Grapes of Wrath, his signature novel, published in 1939, traces the journey of the Joad family from Oklahoma to California, where they find not the fabled land of their dreams but a place with few jobs, low wages, and inadequate worker housing. Steinbeck’s novel excoriated the greed of the Associated Farmers, business interests in California. That position did not make him a popular figure in his hometown of Salinas.
Today, Steinbeck’s status has risen in Salinas, and the writer who vowed to put his slice of central California on the map of the world—and did so—who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962; and who put the city of Salinas on the map of the world is a favored son.

The National Steinbeck Center, a museum and cultural center in downtown Salinas, pays tribute to his life and lasting impact on American letters and on American identity. The Steinbeck museum explores his ecological vision, his commitment to social engagement, and his many stories about the working class—all of which insure his work is deeply relevant today. Steinbeck’s books have been published in more than 45 languages, and he is, truly, a citizen of Salinas as well as a citizen of the world.

Early Years: Salinas to Stanford: 1902-1925
When Steinbeck was born, his father, John Ernst Steinbeck, was a manager at Sperry Flour mill in Salinas. His mother had been a school teacher, and she was sturdily committed to literature and intellectual pursuits (Steinbeck claimed that he and his sisters were “blooded with culture.”) He had two older sisters, Esther and Beth, and a younger sister, Mary—the sister he was very close to growing up.
Steinbeck’s childhood was placid enough—although early on he saw himself as an outsider and a rebel. He was a restless and curious child. When he was 11, his father lost his job at Sperry Flour when the plant closed, and Steinbeck felt the deep shame of his father’s loss and subsequent failures as a businessman– a feed and grain store Mr. Steinbeck purchased failed to prosper. Only when young Steinbeck was in college did the family fortunes stabilize and Mr. Steinbeck became Monterey county treasurer.
When he was four, Steinbeck was given his own pony, Jill, an inspiration for his later series of stories, The Red Pony.
John was a reader. On his ninth birthday, his Aunt Mollie gave him a copy of Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur: “When I first read it, I must have been already enamored of words because the old and obsolete words delighted me.” Steinbeck and his younger sister Mary would imagine the turrets of Camelot in the sandstone erosions in the Pastures of Heaven, a secluded valley a few miles from Salinas where Aunt Mollie lived. Some twenty years later, Steinbeck would adopt Arthurian tropes and chapter headings in his novel Tortilla Flat. In the late 1950s he and his third wife, Elaine, traveled to England and Wales to research Arthurian legends in preparation for a modernized text of the Arthurian tales. Though the work was never completed in Steinbeck’s lifetime, The Acts of King Arthur and his Noble Knights was published posthumously in 1976.

In early adolescence, John Steinbeck showed a strong interest in writing. During high school, Steinbeck would work late into the night in his attic room in Salinas and sometimes invited friends to his room to hear his stories:: “I used to sit in that little room upstairs,” Steinbeck writes decades later, “and write little stories and little pieces and send them out to magazines under a false name and I never put a return address on them…I wonder what I was thinking of? I was scared to death to get a rejection slip, but more, to get an acceptance.” (Valjean 43). Steinbeck wrote for his high school newspaper. By age 14, he knew he wanted to be a writer and never abandoned that calling.
In 1919, Steinbeck enrolled at Stanford University, hoping to sharpen his writing skills. He took creative writing courses and relished courses in world history. In the summer of 1923, Steinbeck enrolled in a biology course at Hopkins Marine Station in Pacific Grove and there became familiar with the ideas of William Emerson Ritter and found himself especially enamored with Ritter’s concept of the super-organism. (Astro 44) His interest in group behavior informs his fiction of the 1930s, and a growing interest in ecology is articulated most clearly in Sea of Cortez, Steinbeck’s 1941 collaboration with the marine biologist Ed Ricketts. The book is an account of the two men’s 1940 voyage to the Sea of Cortez, collecting marine invertebrates.
He attended Stanford off and on for six years, leaving in 1925 without receiving a degree.

Apprentice years: Cup of Gold (1929) through The Red Pony (1933-34)
In 1926 Steinbeck briefly lived in New York City, attempting to support himself as a manual laborer and journalist. “I had a thin, lonely, hungry time of it” in New York, he wrote in 1935. “And I remember too well the cockroaches under my wash basin and the impossibility of getting a job. I was scared thoroughly. And I can’t forget the scare.” Steinbeck returned to California and settled in Lake Tahoe, where he worked as a caretaker for an estate and later worked at a fish hatchery. There, working long hours during the freezing winters, he finished his first novel, Cup of Gold (1929), a critically and commercially unsuccessful tale based on the life of the privateer Henry Morgan.
There he also met the woman who would become his first wife, Carol Henning. He was working for Tahoe City fish hatchery when Carol walked through the door, captivated by the sign above his office, “Piscatorial Obstetrician.” A native of San Jose, Carol was a perfect companion for the young writer—smart, witty, engaging and outgoing. And she was devoted to his writing. He followed her to San Francisco and then the two moved to Los Angeles, where they married on January 14, 1930. After a few months in Eagle Rock, the couple moved to central California, living in the Steinbeck family summer cottage in Pacific Grove: “Financially we are in a mess,” Steinbeck wrote to a friend, “but ‘spiritually’ we ride the clouds.”
In the little Pacific Grove house, Steinbeck continued to write feverishly while Carol worked at various jobs. He wrote a friend who was also a struggling writer that both of them “take our efforts to write with great seriousness, hammering away for two years on a novel and such things…We have taken the ordinary number of beatings and I don’t think there is much strength in either of us, and still we go on butting our heads against the English Novel and nursing our bruises as though they were the wounds of honorable war.” At that time, Steinbeck was writing his second book (third published) To a God Unknown, a book that had its genesis in a college writing assignment, a play written by a friend. When the friend abandoned the story line, Steinbeck took it up and wrote and rewrote for over four years, shifting the setting to the San Antonio Valley, near King City, where Steinbeck spent some time as a teenager. This powerful, evocative novel was eventually published in 1933.
In March, 1932, Cape and Smith–later rebranded Jonathan Cape and Robert Ballou, Inc.–accepted Steinbeck’s manuscript of The Pastures of Heaven, a loosely connected collection of short stories set in Corral de Tierra, a small farming community between Salinas and Monterey.

The Red Pony stories as well as the short stories later collected in The Long Valley (1938) demonstrate the writer’s growing talent for depicting the region of his birth. All were written in 1933 and ‘34, a time of great pain (his parents were ill) and great creativity. Each of the four Red Pony stories takes place on a Salinas Valley ranch that was partly modeled on a friend’s Salinas ranch, partly on his grandparents’ ranch near King City. These lucid, evocative tales suggest the beauty of the Salinas Valley and tell the story of Jody Tifflin’s expanding awareness of life and death.

Success: Tortilla Flat (1935) through The Grapes of Wrath (1939)
In 1935, Steinbeck enjoyed his first critical and commercial success with the novella Tortilla Flat, a book that chronicles the adventures of Monterey paisanos. The Arthurian tales were his model. In 1942, the novella was adapted as a film starring Spencer Tracy and Hedy Lamarr.
In the late 1930s, Steinbeck wrote three books on labor issues in California, In Dubious Battle (1936), Of Mice and Men (1937), and The Grapes of Wrath (1939. The first began as a biography of a strike organizer; Steinbeck ended up writing a novel, however, a searing account of a strike in a California apple orchard. Workers and farmers are pitted against one another, with the communist organizers ruthlessly exploiting the conflict. Steinbeck’s empathy for the workers is palpable, for it is they who suffer most visibly in the strike.
Of Mice and Men is Steinbeck’s first play-novelette, an experimental form he developed. (He wrote two others, The Moon is Down in 1942 and Burning Bright in 1950.) The text of Mice, he hoped, would also be the script for a play—an experiment that failed when it was performed in San Francisco shortly after the book was published. A few months later, Of Mice and Men opened on Broadway, with a revised script by George Kaufman (with Steinbeck’s assistance).
The story is about a pair of migrant workers in California, George Milton and Lennie Small. The two friends depend on one another in a world where most working men are lonely, moving from job to job. Steinbeck called his book a little study in humility—it went on to become one of his most beloved books.

The Grapes of Wrath is Steinbeck’s signature novel, published in 1939. Its roots are journalistic. In the fall of 1936, he was asked by the San Francisco News, a liberal publication, to investigate conditions in migrant labor camps near Bakersfield, California. Living conditions in roadside camps appalled him, and his series of newspaper articles “The Harvest Gypsies,” exposes migrant woe. He also describes life in a federal government camp, where workers were given decent housing and running water.
Both his wrath and his optimism are woven into The Grapes of Wrath, a book that he researched for nearly two years after his first investigative trip to the Central Valley. As he was composing the novel, Steinbeck wrote to his literary agent, Elizabeth Otis, in 1938: “I must go over into the interior valleys. There are about five thousand families starving to death over there…The states and counties will give them nothing because they are outsiders. But the crops of any part of this state could not be harvested without these outsiders. I’m pretty mad about it… Funny how mean and little books become in the face of such tragedies.” A fierce sense of outrage informs Steinbeck’s greatest novel, published in April, 1939.
The New York Times listed The Grapes of Wrath as the best-selling book of 1939, and by February 1940, 430,000 copies had been printed. That same month, the novel won The National Book Award, and later that year it won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. While wildly successful, The Grapes of Wrath also proved to be Steinbeck’s most controversial novel to date. His sympathy for the plight of migrant workers led to a backlash against him: in Oklahoma (the book made the state look poverty stricken), in California (the book made farmers and growers seem greedy and selfish) and in many other parts of the country (the gritty language of the Joads was shocking for many). In August of 1939 the Kern County Board of Supervisors banned the book from schools and libraries in 1939, a ban that lasted until 1941.
Throughout most of the 1930s, Steinbeck had shunned publicity, and the firestorm over The Grapes of Wrath swamped him. He fell ill and his marriage to Carol began to fall apart—Steinbeck wished only to retreat from the publicity and requests for money and aid. In March 1940 he and his close friend, marine biologist Ed Ricketts, sailed to the Gulf of California to collect marine specimens. (Carol went along, although she is scarcely mentioned in the subsequent book.) Throughout the 1930s, Ricketts, who collected marine specimens for a living and sold them through his laboratory, Pacific Biological, was a major influence on Steinbeck’s writing and thinking. According to Steinbeck’s loving essay about his friend, “About Ed Ricketts,” the two met in a dentist’s office and immediately struck up a friendship based on mutual admiration for each other. More likely they met at a party, and Steinbeck’s reference to the dentist’s office was an inside joke between the two—Ricketts had bad teeth. As “About Ed Ricketts” demonstrates, their bond was complex and deep from the time they met in 1930 until Ricketts’s death in 1948. (“About Ed Ricketts” was published as an afterword to the Penguin edition of Log from the Sea of Cortez, 1951.)
In 1941, Carol and John separated, divorcing in 1943. Shortly thereafter Steinbeck married Gwedolyn “Gwyn” Conger, with whom he would have his only children, Thomas and John Steinbeck Jr.

War Years: 1943-1945
Steinbeck was a patriot, as were many Americans after Pearl Harbor, as the U.S. entered World War II. Denied a commission in the armed forces because of his suspected communist leanings—he was investigated by the FBI after the publication of Grapes—Steinbeck devoted himself to writing propaganda for the war effort. He followed a bomber team around American, recording their training regime in Bombs Away: The Story of a Bomber Team (1942). That same year he published another play-novelette, The Moon is Down, about an occupied village in Northern Europe. He imagined what it would be like to live in a town where freedoms disappeared—and to many Europeans, he seemed to have captured the terror of Nazi occupation. In some countries during WWII, a person could be shot for having a contraband copy ofThe Moon is Down.
He also wrote a film treatment called “Lifeboat,” about a stranded group in the Atlantic. Alfred Hitchcock’s film, Lifeboat, based on Steinbeck’s film treatment was released in 1944. Since substantial changes were made to his script, Steinbeck unsuccessfully petitioned to have his name removed from Hitchcock’s film.
Shortly after marrying Gwyn in 1943, Steinbeck was hired by the New York Herald Tribune to report on the war in Europe. He went first to England, then North Africa, and then joined a commando unit led by Douglas Fairbanks Jr., their mission diversionary tactics off the coast of Italy. Steinbeck threw himself into the war effort, and his letters to Gwyn during this period reflect his patriotism as well as fascination with ordinary lives:
“I see these thousands of soldiers here and they are going through the same thing. There’s a kind of walk they have in London, an apathetic shuffle. They’re looking for something. They’ll say it’s a girl—any girl, but it isn’t that at all.”
In 1958 Steinbeck’s war correspondence was published as Once There Was a War. Writing to a friend, Steinbeck had this to say about his war dispatches: “There are many things in them I didn’t know I was writing—among others a hatred for war. Hell, I thought I was building the war up.”

The Post-war years: 1945-1951
“I have been working madly at a book and Gwyn has been working calmly at a baby,” Steinbeck wrote to a friend in 1944, “and it looks as though it might be a photo finish.” Cannery Row was published 1945 and Thomas Steinbeck was born in 1944.
Cannery Row is a complex book—in part gentle comedy about characters who live and work on Monterey’s Ocean View Avenue. In part it’s Steinbeck’s own post-war novel, suggesting his horror of death and loneliness witnessed when he was overseas. It’s also a tribute to his friend Ed Ricketts’s holistic vision, a vision that embraces all of life– the movement of a hermit crab to visionary insights. While working on the novel, Steinbeck wrote to his college roommate Carlton Sheffield, “You’ll find a lot of old things in it… Maybe we were sounder then. Certainly we were thinking more universally.” The novel became so famous that Ocean View Avenue in Monterey was renamed Cannery Row in 1958.
After the end of the war, Steinbeck published The Pearl , an elaboration on a story he had heard in La Paz during his trip with Ed Ricketts to the Gulf of California. While traveling to Mexico to help with the film adaptation of the novel, Steinbeck became inspired by the story of Emiliano Zapata, and subsequently wrote a screenplay based on his life. Viva Zapata was directed by Elia Kazan and starred Marlon Brando and Anthony Quinn in 1952.
While living with Gwyn in New York, Steinbeck received devastating news from California. Ed Ricketts had been hit by a train while attempting to cross the tracks in Monterey. Steinbeck hurried west, but he arrived too late. Ricketts died from injuries sustained from the accident on May 11, 1948.
Ricketts’s death devastated Steinbeck. The the two men had shared an intense working relationship as well as a deep personal friendship. “We worked and thought together very closely for a number of years so that I grew to depend on his knowledge and on his patience in research,” Steinbeck writes in “About Ed Ricketts.” “And then I went away to another part of the country but it didn’t make any difference. Once a week or once a month would come a fine long letter so much in the style of his speech that I could hear his voice over the neat page full of small elite type… It wasn’t Ed who died but a large and important part of oneself.” (Shortly before Ricketts’s death, Steinbeck and Ricketts had planned another collecting expedition together, this time to British Columbia. The resulting book was to be called The Outer Shores and would have focused on marine life near Alaska.
Immediately after returning to New York after Ricketts’s funeral, Steinbeck faced another blow. After nearly six years of marriage, Gwyn Steinbeck asked for a divorce. The divorce, combined with the shock of Ricketts’s death, sent Steinbeck into a long depression. In 1948 he returned to the cabin in Pacific Grove and threw himself into his work.

The 1950s and 1960s
In 1949, the actress Ann Sothern visited Steinbeck in Pacific Grove over Memorial Day weekend. She brought along a friend, Elaine Scott, who would become Steinbeck’s third and final wife. Less than a week after Elaine’s divorce from the actor Zachary Scott became final, the couple married on December 28, 1950. Later they moved into 206 East 72nd Street in New York City, Steinbeck’s home for the next 13 years.
Early in 1951, Steinbeck began again to compose the novel he had planned for years. Steinbeck intended East of Eden to be the “big work” of his career. As he explained to Pascal Covici in the diary he wrote concurrently with the novel (later published as Journal of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters), Steinbeck addressed East of Eden to his sons:
I am choosing to write this book to my sons. They are little boys now and they will never know what they came from through me, unless I tell them…I want them to know how it was, I want to tell them directly, and perhaps by speaking directly to them I shall speak directly to other people… And so I will tell them one of the greatest, perhaps the greatest story of all—the story of good and evil, of strength and weakness, of love and hate, of beauty and ugliness… I shall tell them this story against the background of the county I grew up in.
Set largely in the Salinas Valley, East of Eden is, in part, based on Steinbeck’s maternal family history. Stories of the Hamilton family are paired with the a “symbolic story” of the Trask family, a rewriting of the Cain and Abel biblical story. In this epic novel of intertwined stories, Steinbeck captures his own history as well as the history of the Salinas Valley—and he also grapples with the pain and consequences of his divorce from his second wife, Gwyn. Gwyn is Cathy/Kate in the novel, a manipulative woman who destroys many around her. The novel took nearly a year to complete, and was finally published in 1952. Shortly after, Elia Kazan directed the film version of the final part of the novel, which starred James Dean in his debut performance.
Steinbeck traveled widely with his third wife, Elaine, and he supported himself writing journalism about his travels.
In the late 1950s he turned to one of his life-long ambitions, to write a translation of Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur for twentieth century readers. To facilitate his research, Steinbeck spent ten months in Somerset, England with Elaine, gathering material and working on the translation. The work was never completed in Steinbeck’s lifetime.
When he returned to America from England in late 1959, he was distressed by what he felt were America’s moral lapses. Out of that distress (the quiz show scandal was breaking news), he wrote a novel about a man’s own moral quandary, The Winter of Our Discontent (1961).
Publication of that novel earned him the Nobel Prize for Literature, which he was awarded for his body of work in 1962. His is “realistic and imaginative writing, combining as it does sympathetic humor and social perception,” said Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy Anders Osterling in his presentation speech.
That year also saw publication of one of his most endearing books, Travels with Charley (1962). “I’m going to learn about my own country,” Steinbeck wrote to a friend, before he began his trip around America. He felt that he had lost touch with his own country:
I, an American writer, writing about America, was working from memory, and the memory at best is a faulty, warpy reservoir. I had not heard the speech of America, smelled the grass and trees and sewage, seen its hills and water, its color and quality of light. I knew the changes only from books and newspapers. But more than this, I had not felt the country for twenty-five years.
Travels with Charley chronicles this trip of roughly 10,000 miles across the United States, from Maine to California, to Texas and into the racial tension of the south—the most searing moments in the book. The often elegiac tone of the work marks shift from Steinbeck’s previous work, and some critics were disappointed. However, in writing about America from a distinctly observational but highly sympathetic standpoint, Steinbeck returns to familiar ground.
In 1964, Steinbeck was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Lyndon B. Johnson, with whom the writer was personally acquainted.
His final book of the 1960s was America and Americans (1966), a book of essays about the American character and the common good. Topics considered include ethnicity, race, and the environment; it is a text relevant to the twenty-first century.
Steinbeck was, throughout his career, curious and engaged, a writer to the end. Perhaps due to his friendship with Johnson, or perhaps because one of his sons—eventually both sons–were serving overseas, Steinbeck wanted to go overseas to witness the realities of the Vietnam War. In 1967, he traveled to Vietnam to report on the war for Newsday, a series called “Letters to Alicia.” He visited combat zones, including remote area where his younger son.was posted. Steinbeck, manned a machine-gun watch position while his son and other members of the platoon slept. During his weeks in Vietnam, Steinbeck grew disenchanted with the war and the inaccurate reports given to the American people. As his wife Elaine said, Steinbeck changed his mind about the wisdom of the Vietnam war, but he did not live long enough to write more about that war.
Throughout the mid-Sixties, Steinbeck’s health continued to decline. He suffered increasingly frequent episodes resembling mini-strokes, and eventually died at his home in New York City on December 20, 1968.

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'Steinbeck In Vietnam'- UT Professor Tom Barden on NPR
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kmDQD7H0tMY

Images:
1. John Steinbeck in South Vietnam, in 1965 LBJ asked him to visit South Vietnam and report back to him personally
2. John Steinbeck in a UH-1 reflecting on what he has observed in South Vietnam
3. WWII War Correspondent John Steinbeck with captured Nazi naval flag
4. John Steinbeck holding an M-72 grenade launcher while talking with infantrymen in Vietnam

Biographies
1. Steinbeck in Vietnam
2. Steinbeck in WWII

1. Background from {[https://www.airspacemag.com/military-aviation/steinbecks-dispatches-from-vietnam-3883122/]}
December 31, 1966, Saigon: Remember how the lordly jet cuts its engines at 35,000 feet and floats gently toward the earth like Mark Twain’s polyhedron on lonely pinion? Well, that’s not the way you land in Saigon. Your friendly pilot pulls the plug and scuttles down like Walter Kerr leaving the theater or water making an exit from a bathtub. I guess he figures that the quicker he gets in, the less chance he has of taking a hit from a [Viet Cong] crossbow.

[Ca. January 1967/Vietnam]
Did you know that the airport at Saigon is the busiest in the world, that it has more traffic than O’Hare field in Chicago and much more than Kennedy in New York—Well it’s true. We stood around—maybe ten thousand of us all looking like overdone biscuits until our plane was called. It was not a pretty ship this USAF C-130. Its rear end opens and it looks like an anopheles mosquito but into this huge anal orifice can be loaded anything smaller than a church and even that would go in if it had a folding steeple. For passengers, the C-130 lacks a hominess. Four rows of bucket seats extending lengthwise into infinity. You lean back against cargo slings and tangle your feet in a maze of cordage and cables.
Before we took off a towering sergeant (I guess) whipped us with a loud speaker. First he told us the dismal things that could happen to our new home by ground fire, lightning or just bad luck. He said that if any of these things did happen he would tell us later what to do about it. Finally he came to the subject nearest his heart. He said there was dreadful weather ahead. He asked each of us to reach down the paper bag above and put it in our laps and if we felt queasy for God’s sake not to miss the bag because he had to clean it up and the hundred plus of us could make him unhappy. After a few more intimations of disaster he signed off on the loud speaker and the monster ship took off in a series of leaps like a Calaveras County frog.
Once airborne, I got invited to the cockpit where I had a fine view of the country and merciful cup of black scalding coffee. They gave me earphones so I could hear directions for avoiding ground fire and the even more dangerous hazard of our own artillery. The flight was as smooth as an unruffled pond. And when we landed at Pleiku I asked the God-like sergeant why he had talked about rough weather.
“Well, it’s the Viets,” he said. “They have delicate stomachs and some of them are first flights. If I tell them to expect the worst and it isn’t, they’re so relieved that they don’t get sick. And you know I do have to clean up and sometimes it’s just awful.”

January 7, 1967/Pleiku
In my opinion the chopper is the greatest invention since the wheel. In eight days I have covered areas and put down in places it would have taken many months to visit on foot and that would be the only way to travel since there are few roads, and many of these are impassable, and what railroads there once were are cut and mangled by the fighting. I think I have traveled in every kind of chopper we have save one, or rather two. There is a single-place bubble I’ve missed because I can’t fly the thing, and I haven’t been on the giant Sky Crane, which looks like a huge dragonfly or praying mantis and which can take in its arms anything it can grip. It has transported a complete operating room with surgery continuing during flight. Eventually, when we have enough of them, the Crane will be of major logistical importance.

January 7, 1967/Pleiku
I wish I could tell you about these pilots [10th Cavalry, Huey helicopter]. They make me sick with envy. They ride their vehicles the way a man controls a fine, well-trained quarter horse. They weave along stream beds, rise like swallows to clear trees, they turn and twist and dip like swifts in the evening. I watch their hands and their feet on the controls, the delicacy of the coordination reminds me of the sure and seemingly slow hands of [Pablo] Casals on the cello.... You will gather that we are now in V.C. country, where every tree may open fire and often does. Maj. Thomas dips into a stream bed cascading down a twisting canyon and you realize that low green cover you saw from high up is towering screaming jungle so dense that noonday light fails to reach the ground. The stream bed twists like a snake and we snake over it, now and then lofting like a tipped fly ball to miss an obstruction or cutting around a tree the way a good cow horse cuts out a single calf from a loose herd.

February 2, 1967/Saigon
Soon after I arrived in South Vietnam, I became aware of the constant presence of slow, low-flying, fixed wing, single engine airplanes that coast and cruise about, circling and quartering. And it wasn’t long before I began to hear about the F.A.C. or Forward Air Controllers. They are among the bravest and the most trusted and admired men in this shattered country, and to the enemy, the F.A.C. must be about the most feared. I had heard many stories of their duties and their accomplishments and just a day ago I was allowed to fly with one on three separate and different missions, and it was an experience I will not soon forget.
As usual it was an early trip through the roiling traffic of Saigon to the 120th Helicopter Operations at Tan Son Nhut Airport. It gets light late this time of year. At 0710 it was still dawn. Then there was the quick and businesslike chopper trip to My Tho in the Delta district. At breakfast I met my pilot, Maj. William E. Masterson, called “Bat” of course, the Forward Air Controller for the Seventh ARVN Division, a strong good looking officer with a very knowing and humorous eye. He was a B-52 pilot who volunteered for FAC. Indeed, I may be wrong, but I believe all FAC pilots are volunteers.
Our aircraft was an O-1 “Bird Dog,” a single-engine, propeller driven, fixed wing Cessna which moves at 90 to 100 knots and has two seats, one behind the other. It is the same aircraft you see all over America, a slow, dependable job with fixed landing gear, fairly safe if its single engine is properly maintained. Our craft carried four rockets on the wing tips, two M-16 carbines, hand operated and mainly for self-defense in case of a forced landing, and a number of smoke bombs for signaling and marking.
We had no parachutes. They would take up too much room and flying as low as the FAC fly—anywhere from 200 to 2,000 feet, you couldn’t get out in time anyway. We did wear the armored vests which are said to take the sting out of small arms fire.
Major Masterson, Bat, said, “They don’t shoot at us much because we can call in an air strike in a few minutes and snipes just don’t want to take the chance. But if we should get hit, I’ll set down easy if I can and then we pile out and hit for cover with the M-16s and wait for rescue.”
I was pretty clumsy getting into the back seat with the thick vest on, and butter-fingered getting the belt and shoulder straps tight. There was no fooling around. The prop soared and brought the oil up to pressure. On the edge of the airstrip a ground man pulled out the pins from the rockets arming them and passed the pins in to me.
The little ship danced down the runway and jumped into the air. I had earphones and a mouthpiece for communication. Our first mission was visual reconnaissance, called naturally VR, and it is unique and fascinating work. Each FAC man has a sizable piece of real estate for which he is responsible. He flies over it every day and sometimes several times a day. He gets to know his spread like the back of his hand and he looks at it so closely that he is aware of any change, even the smallest.
I asked what Bat looked for. “Anything,” he said, “absolutely anything.” We were flying at about 500 feet. “See that little house down there? The one right on the river edge.”
“I see it.”
“Well, I know four people live there. If there were six pairs of pants drying on the bushes, I’d know they had visitors, and maybe V.C. visitors. Look at the next place—see those two big crockery pots against the wall? I know those pots. If there were three or four, I’d investigate. Oh! Oh!” he said and swung suddenly in over the paddies away from the river. About ten water buffalo were grazing, standing in the watery field. Our bird dog swung low and the beasts raised their heads at us.
“V.C. transport,” said Bat. “See, how thin they are? They’re working them hard at night.” He made notes on the detailed map on his lap. “We’ll flare tonight and maybe catch them moving.”
“Tell me some other things you look for,” I asked.
“Well, there are so many things I don’t know where to start. Too many water plants torn loose. Lines in the mud on the canals or the riverside where boats have landed, trails through the grass that have been used since yesterday. Too many people in one place or not enough people where they should be. We spotted a flock of Charleys because one pair of blue jeans was hanging on a peg in a house where there shouldn’t be blue jeans. Sometimes it’s too much smoke coming from a house at the wrong time. That means they’re cooking for strangers. I can’t begin to tell you all we look for. But sometimes I don’t even know what it is I’m seeing. I just get a nervous feeling, and I have to circle and circle until I work out what it is that’s wrong. You know how your mind warns you and you don’t quite know how.”
“Like extrasensory perception?”
“Yes, I guess something like that,” he said.
We followed the river down to the sea and then moved along the beach south and eastward to where the Marines had recently landed. Their beachhead was manned and we turned inland and swept right and left until we found the advance force moving painfully through the flooded muddy country, all mangrove swamp and nastiness. Masterson talked to the ground. “I can’t see anything up ahead,” he told the weary command. “But don’t take my word. You know how they can hide.”
“Don’t we just!” said the ground. We swung back toward the river quartering the country like the bird dog we are named for. On a canal ahead, a line of low houses deep in the trees was slowly burning, almost burned out. “Ammunition dump,” said Bat. “We got it yesterday. Must have been quite a lot from the secondary explosion we got. Have to go back to refuel now. We’ll have a bite of lunch and then we’ve got a target, I think a real good one.”
Not very long afterwards we dipped down on the little airstrip as daintily as a leaf and taxied in. I handed the pins out the window and the ground man stuck them into the holes that disarmed the rockets. And then we drifted to a fueling place and I edged my way out of my seat. The ground was a little wavy under my feet.

February 25, 1967/Saigon
It was my last night and I had reserved it for a final mission. Do you remember or did I even mention Puff, the Magic Dragon? From the ground I had seen it in action in the night but I had never flown in it. It was not given its name by us but by the V.C. who have experienced it. Puff is a kind of crazy conception. It is a C-47—that old Douglas two-motor ship that has been the workhorse of the world since early on in World War II.
The one I was to fly in was celebrating its 24th birthday and that’s an old airplane. I don’t know who designed Puff but whoever did had imagination. It is armed with three six-barreled Gatling guns. Their noses stick out of two side windows and the open door. And these three guns can spray out 2,800 rounds a minute—that’s right, 2,800. In one quarter-turn, these guns fine-tooth an area bigger than a football field and so completely that not even a tuft of crabgrass would remain alive. The guns are fixed. The pilot fires them by rolling up on his side. There are cross hairs on his side glass. When the cross hairs are on the target, he presses a button and a waterfall of fire pours on the target, a Niagara of steel.
These ships, some of them, are in the air in every area at night and all night. If a call for help comes, they can be there in a very short time. They carry quantities of the parachute flares we see in the sky every night, flares so bright that they put an area of midday on a part of the night-bound earth. And these flares are not mechanically released. They are manhandled out the open door by the flare crew. I knew the technique but I have never flown a night mission with Puff. I had reserved it for my last night in South Vietnam. We were to fly at dark and hoped to be back by midnight.
I went by chopper to the field where the Puffs live, met the pilot and his crew and had supper with them. Our mission was not general call. A crossroad area had been observed to be used after dark recently by Charley, who was rushing supplies from one place to another for reasons best known to Charley. We were to be directed by one of the little F.A.C. planes I spoke of in an earlier letter.
Because it was hot and no wind in prospect, I wore only light slacks and a cotton shirt. We flew at dusk and very soon I found myself freezing. Puff is not a quiet ship, her door is open, her gun ports open, her engines loud and everything on her rattles. I did not wear a headset because I wanted to move about, so one of the flare crew, a big man, had to offer me an extra flight suit and he said it in pantomime. I accepted with chattering teeth and struggled into it and zipped it up. Then they fitted me with a parachute harness and showed me where my pack was in case of need. But even I knew that flying at low altitude, if the need should arise, there wouldn’t be much time to get out even if I were young and clever.
Forward of the guns and aft by the open door were the racks where the flares stood, three feet high, four inches in diameter. I think they weigh about 40 pounds. Wrestling 200 or 300 of them out the door would be a good night’s work. The ship was dark, except for its recognition lights and a dim red light over the navigator’s table.
They gave me ear plugs. I had heard that the sound of these guns is unique, so I put the rubber stoppers in my ears but they were irritating so I pulled them out again and only hoped to get my mouth open when we fired.
There was a line of afterglow in the western sky, only it was not west the way Puff flies. Sometimes it was overhead, sometimes straight down. Without an instrument you couldn’t tell up from down but my feet were held to the steel floor by the centrifuge of the turning, twisting ship. Then the order came and a flare was thrown out and another and another. They whirled down and the brilliant lights came on. We upsided and looked down on the ghost-lighted earth. Far below us almost skimming the earth, I could see the shape of the tiny skimming FAC plane inspecting the target and reporting to our pilot. We dropped three more flares, whirled and dropped three more. The road and the crossroads were very clearly defined on the ground and then there was a curious unearthly undulating mass like an amoeba under a microscope, a pseudo-pod changing in shape and size as it moved. Now Puff went up on its side. I did know enough to get my mouth open. The sound of those guns is like nothing I have heard. It is like a coffee grinder as big as Mt. Everest compounded with a dentist’s drill. A growl, but one that rocks your body and flaps your eardrums like wind-whipped flags. And out through the door I could see a stream, a wide river of fire that seemed to curve and wave toward the earth.
In May 1967, Steinbeck returned to the United States and told President Johnson what he’d seen. A second debriefing, to Johnson’s cabinet, is archived at the Department of Defense. Steinbeck returned to New York and on December 20, 1968, died of heart failure.
Copyright © 1965, 1966, 1967 by John Steinbeck; renewed Elaine Steinbeck and Thom Steinbeck 1993, 1994, 1995. Reprinted with permission of McIntosh & Otis, Inc. “Vietnam War: No Front, No Rear,” “Action in the Delta,” “Terrorism,” “Puff, the Magic Dragon,” from America and Americans and Selected Nonfiction by John Steinbeck, edited by Susan Shillinglaw & J. Benson, copyright © 2002 by Elaine Steinbeck and Thomas Steinbeck. Used by permission of Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.


2. Background from {[https://sits.sjsu.edu/context/historical/hist_context_ww2_correspondent//]}
WW II Correspondent
The by-lines of John Steinbeck During WWII
by Felicia M. Preece, MA - University of Toledo
Created after the First World War, the Geneva Convention was an agreement between countries regarding the rules of warfare. These rules attempted to make war as humane as possible and protect the basic rights of anyone involved in future wars. Under the First through Third Geneva Conventions, the journalist was given the same treatment as actual members of the armed forces. If a correspondent was sick, wounded, or captured, they were to be treated with the same regulations as though they were an actual soldier. The correspondent, however, was not to actively engage in combat, carry weapons, or direct the troops (icrc.com). They were intended to be the all-seeing and silent eye of the unit: reporting events and important (but not classified) information to the folks back home. Often, these rules were broken under times of great duress; it was not uncommon for a correspondent to be asked to take up arms if the unit were under heavy fire. One correspondent, Bill Walton, recalled his experience on D-Day. During his briefing, the commanding officer told him he would be issued weapons. Walton, in an attempt to uphold the Geneva Convention, protested. The officer insisted anyone traveling with his unit would be fully armed. Walton went on to admit there were times when he did more than simply carry arms. "Every now and then" he said "in a very tight situation, an officer would hand me arms and say, 'For Christ's sake HELP!' you know. And we didn't advertise this. We never discussed this" (Coté 102). Whether or not Steinbeck was ever in the position to switch from a mere observer to an active participant cannot be found within his dispatches.

During World War II, the most popular type of article being printed in the United States was the human-interest piece. The human-interest style of journalism was popularized by Ernie Pyle, a reporter/war-correspondent who focused on individual soldiers' stories and considered Steinbeck a literary hero of his. Many journalists, following in the footsteps of Pyle attempted to get in close with the infantry and write the stories which they felt accurately represented what was happening on the front. The dispatches sent back from the European theaters were all Americans, separated from the many of the realities of war, had to inform them beyond official notices from the White House. White House announcements were vague, often only listing names of battles, the outcome, and information regarding casualties, whereas the human interest pieces made famous by Pyle focused on individual soldiers and units, using full names and hometowns to humanize those fighting. These articles did not attempt to valorize the soldiers but rather show them as people with hopes, fears, and quirks.John Steinbeck with a captured Nazi flag

Aside from showing the human side of the war, these articles were a way for those back home to hear about how their loved ones were doing. Steinbeck wondered if perhaps the greatest grievance of the soldiers was the problems with the postal service. It might take weeks for a letter from either the States or the front to make it to its destination. By publishing the names of individuals or their units, the soldiers became local heroes and their current safety was established.

For Steinbeck, there was no glitz and glamour to being a correspondent. His name still promised paper sales, but his function was much more subdued compared to other "celebrity correspondents." Correspondents such as Ernest Hemingway, Steinbeck, and even Pyle brought a greater readership to the papers back home; however, this was not the only reason they were particularly valuable during the war. Because of their celebrity statuses, these men were able to see more, talk to more people, and do more than the average correspondent. Pyle as the exception (his fame came from his journalism during the war, while "celebrity" correspondents were famous for other reasons before the war), this celebrity status seemed to help in many situations, except in gaining the respect of the other correspondents. Steinbeck, who never had a successful journalism career, was considered under qualified and inexperienced.

Steinbeck spent the early months of 1943 moving to New York, marrying his second wife, Gwyn, applying for and being rejected for several OWI (Office of War Information, a precursor to the CIA) commissions, and finally attempting to find any excuse possible to get to Europe. After his last attempt to secure OWI approval to make a film (for use as propaganda) in England fell through, Steinbeck appealed to his friend Lewis Garnett to help him get a position with the New York Herald Tribune as a correspondent. This job would "not only give him the opportunity to taste the action that he now craved, but would also finally free him from all the petty jealousies and all the red tape that had been throttling his work for the government" (Simmonds 165). After receiving the final accreditations from the paper, the War and State Departments, and the commander of the North European Theater, Steinbeck was cleared to head to England. The plan was that he would be sent to England to cover the preparation of troops to be sent to the Second Front and to remain with them when the invasion occurred. He would submit five hundred to a thousand words per day on whatever topics he chose (Simmonds 166). The draft board in Monterey, California still had to release Steinbeck so that he could sail for London. While the State Department of California took their time processing Steinbeck's draft release request, he applied for and received his passport. By the end of May, he would be on a troopship headed for London.

It did not take long for Steinbeck to discover the animosity felt towards him by the other correspondents. It seemed to the rest of the correspondents that Steinbeck's entry into the war was a mere publicity stunt and it was obvious he was an amateur in the field. Steinbeck never wanted to cause problems or draw attention to himself, he had no interest in encroaching on the space of his fellow correspondents either; all he wanted to do was write "the sort of stories they [the other correspondents] had neither the opportunity nor the inclination to cover" (Simmonds 172). The London Daily Express, in announcing the forthcoming articles of Steinbeck's, wrote that Steinbeck would be "looking at the war not with the object of giving you the latest news and giving it to you quickly, but from the point of view of the man in the ranks" (Simmonds 172). The Herald Tribune happily wrote that Steinbeck's articles were exceeding expectations and that Reader's Digest paid a handsome sum for the rights to reprint them. For the four and a half months Steinbeck was in Europe, he traveled throughout England, North Africa, and Italy. His articles focused on the daily routines of the soldiers, their habits and superstitions, as well as anecdotes about what it was like to be in countries so directly affected by the war.

The tone and style of Steinbeck's articles from the war reflect the style he had developed from his earlier writings such as Of Mice and Men and The Grapes of Wrath. The prose is clear and concise and lacking in extremely flowery language. He employs few metaphors, choosing instead to adhere to the decade old adages of Imagism: the direct treatment of the thing is always best. His sentences are not complex, he does not use contractions, and he does not use inappropriately large words. This style is particularly important to Steinbeck's correspondent work because it allowed his readership to understand and connect with his stories. Families from the backstreets to Wall Street could identify with, and understand, what Steinbeck was trying to portray.

Steinbeck had already shown he was capable of writing wartime propaganda. His novel-turned-play-turned movie, The Moon is Down, as well as Bombs Away! both focus on the war from different perspectives. While The Moon is Down was specifically written as a propaganda piece and while Steinbeck had been trying to get permission from the US and British governments to make a propaganda film, it is not clear that he specifically intended his news articles to be taken as such. Regardless of intent, these articles gave the people back home faith in their troops as well as the overall cause. By showing the soldiers as humanely as he did, Steinbeck created images of the war that people could connect with.

In one dispatch, Steinbeck shares a story about a soldier who recovered a large, ornate mirror from a bombed out house and how he took great measures to transport the mirror and keep it safe. Even while on the front line, Steinbeck shows, the soldiers can still see beauty and they are still able to think about their lives back home. The soldier's mirror eventually breaks and his response is simply that he supposed it wouldn't have looked good in his house back home, anyways (Steinbeck 168-170). This story includes several important notes on the war – the hardships of being on the front lines, observing first-hand the ruins of bombed cities, and the sense that things (or people) coming back home from the war might not acclimate well into a society which had been touched far less by the war. Aside from these sometimes more subtle themes, Steinbeck's articles reminded readers exactly who was fighting the war: neighbors, sons, brothers, husbands; not faceless, emotionless, fearless, thoughtless drones. The portraits Steinbeck paints of the soldiers he is with gave people back home heroes they could root for.

The newspapers were already filled with articles loaded with technical language and names of places which meant little to the average American. Steinbeck provided readers with articles which were quite different from the work of most other correspondents. Steinbeck's attention to detail and his ability to create a vivid picture of what it was like to be among the common soldiers gave his audience an image of war that could almost make them forget there was a war. Indeed, once his articles were collected and published, he wrote in the Introduction "[o]nce upon a time there was a war, but so long ago and so shouldered out of the way by other wars and other kinds of wars that even people who were there were apt to forget" (Steinbeck ix).

The role of the war correspondent, in general, served to inform the general population of things which might have been difficult to understand. Most Americans had never traveled to Europe, some had only a vague idea of where these important battles were taking place. The correspondent had to ensure that their audience was able to understand not only what was happening, but also why. Their job was to build the morale of every citizen during wartime, to gain support for the war effort, and to give the people the hope they needed to carry on. Correspondents whose work gained them fame, like Ernie Pyle, and writers whose fame was already known before they picked up their portable typewriter and sailed for Europe were able to reach a wider audience than the average correspondent. With writings like Steinbeck's, the war became more than statistics, more than body counts and name and place name dropping. The war became a real event, with real people. Even though most people never saw what was happening on the front lines, they were still able to feel its effect and imagine the scenes Steinbeck created with words.

Bibliography
1. Buljung, Brianna. "From the Foxhole: American Newsmen and the Reporting of World War II." International Social Science Review, (86.1-2). 44-64.
2. Bullard, Frederick L. Famous War Correspondents. New York: Beekman Publishers (1974).
3. Coté, William E. "Correspondent or Warrior? Hemingway's Murky World War II "Combat" Experience." The Hemingway Review, (22.1). 90-106.
4. Gladstein, Mimi Reisel. "Mr. Novelist Goes to War: Hemingway and Steinbeck as Front-line Correspondents." War, Literature & the Arts: An International Journal of the Humanities. 258-265.
5. Hemingway, Ernest. By-Line: Ernest Hemingway. William White, ed. New York: Scribner's (1967).
6. Mills, Nicolaus. "Ernie Pyle and War Reportage." Dissent (Fall 2005). 74-78.
7. Riess, Curt. They Were There. New York: Putnam (1944).
8. Simmonds, John. John Steinbeck: The War Years. London: Associated UP (1996). 152-215
9. Stein, M.L. Under Fire: The Story of American War Correspondents. New York: Julian Messner Press (1968).
10. Steinbeck, John. Once There Was a War. New York, Penguin (1986)."

FYI SFC William Farrell LTC (Join to see) LTC Stephen C. Maj Robert Thornton Maj Marty Hogan TSgt Joe C. SFC Joe S. Davis Jr., MSM, DSL Lt Col Charlie Brown SMSgt David A Asbury MSG Felipe De Leon Brown SGT Jim Arnold Sgt Jim BelanusSGT Denny EspinosaMaj Wayne CristSGM Bill FrazerCpl (Join to see) SGT Philip Roncari SGT (Join to see)

MSgt Paul Connors A total of ten months did it for me. Some nice memories remain and I'd rather not have to experience any bed ones. As the saying goes, "Ya can't go back home and expect that everything will be the same." I think we all can agree to that, n'es pas?