About The Center for Steinbeck Studies

Since 1973, the Martha Heasley Cox Center for Steinbeck Studies has served researchers, teachers, students, and the public. The Center's collection is the country's preeminent Steinbeck archive, housing over 40 000 items, including letters, manuscripts, first editions, films, memorabilia, original art, and secondary works. Major international conferences have included "The Grapes of Wrath, 1939-1989: An Interdisciplinary Forum" and "Steinbeck and the Environment." A central purpose is outreach. Twice yearly the Center publishes an award-winning journal, Steinbeck Review .

An authoritative website introduces the writer's work in cultural contexts. At San Jose State University's Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. library, where the Center is housed, several invited lecturers have discussed his works, life, and legacy. Campus-wide programs like "The Year of Steinbeck" (1996) have sparked interest in his wide-ranging appeal. Steinbeck's work embraces theater, music, and film--great film adaptations like Lewis Milestone's Of Mice and Men (1939), John Ford's The Grapes of Wrath (1940), Elia Kazan's Viva Zapata! (1952) and East of Eden (1955). The searing play, musical, and opera, Of Mice and Men. And the music of Aaron Copland, Woody Guthrie, and Bruce Springsteen. In short, SJSU's Center for Steinbeck Studies' central mission is to promote Steinbeck's enduring legacy as broadly as possible, to honor America's best-loved writer of conscience, compassion, and unwavering commitment to the too-often muted voices of ordinary people.

Painting by Judith Deim.  This is the only known painting of Steinbeck at work, here writing Sea of Cortez in 1941.  Note how Steinbeck is holding his pencil, an adaptation to the callouses he developed on his writing hand.