16 ms·

John Steinbeck’s estate urged to let the world read his shunned werewolf novel

169 points by benbreen 5y ago

justicezyx 5y ago
I don't know how Mr. Steinbeck still enjoyed his fame and legacy while being found as a major benefitciar of intellectual misconduct, and obviously belittle women. When he was writing the grapes of wraith, he was reading Sanora Babb's manuscript from his publisher friends. He was already an established writer, and managed to publish his own work heavily borrowed the structure and major plot from Sanora's work. And obviously, no publishers are willing to publish Snora's work, because Mr. Steinbeck is telling them he is writing one that is very similar (which is obvious, because he is essentially copy the book's story line). Ms. Babb's work is only published in 2004, 70 years later after its original completion in 1930s. I think Mr. Steinbeck probably deserve being stripped of his Nobel prize for this blatant misconduct. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whose_Names_Are_Unknown https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whose_Names_Are_Unknown
- echelon 5y ago
  I have never even once heard this accusation. I skimmed his Wikipedia article and didn't see a reference to any of this. Is there clear plagiarism? The Great Depression wasn't exactly an obscure topic and was still fresh in the minds of many people at the time. What is going on? Is this posthumous cancel culture? Wasn't it prudent to look for similar media and clear the wake? Publishing was a smaller, more difficult world back then and publishers wouldn't back two of the same thing. Wouldn't you drum up support for the novel you worked on? Especially after having struggled for years as a manual laborer trying to make it? Would you willingly table your book that you worked on so that someone else could take your place? Is that malice? Unless there's clear evidence, it's like saying Marvel plagiarizes DC. And that Disney should be cancelled for scheduling their movie premieres around the best moviegoing dates. (Is that highly competitive? Sure. Evil? no...?)
  - elliekelly 5y ago
    The reason you’ve never heard of this accusation is because it was Babb who was wrongly “cancelled” soon after she wrote her novel. She was the subject of intense FBI scrutiny for her “leftist” writing and blacklisted by the “House Un-American Committee” so she fled to Mexico. She also dared to marry an Asian man as a white woman which was not just frowned upon at the time but illegal. Regardless, I think it’s odd you find something utterly unbelievable simply because you haven’t heard it until today. Surely the entire internet is full of true things that you, and I, and most people have never heard of? Not having heard a piece of information before doesn’t make it any less credible.
    - echelon 5y ago
      Good points. > She was the subject of intense FBI scrutiny for her “leftist” writing and blacklisted by the “House Un-American Committee” so she fled to Mexico. She also dared to marry an Asian man as a white woman which was not just frowned upon at the time but illegal. That's awful. :(
      - lucretian 5y ago
        the original comment is itself perhaps over-confident in its accusation. as far as i can tell, the known facts about what materials steinbeck received of babb's are hazy. certainly seems suspicious though.
      - exporectomy 5y ago
        It's still illegal for a white woman to marry an Asian man if she's already married to a white man. Still awful. I'm just making a point that these social norms are pretty relative and if you don't have any underlying system of morals to judge them by, you'll probably just end up reinforcing whatever morals your own society already has, with no regard to their awfulness.
    - justicezyx 5y ago
      Also her leftist tie was derived from her marriage to a Chinese man: """ Howe met his wife, a white woman named Sanora Babb, before World War II. They traveled to Paris in 1937 to marry, but their marriage was not recognized by the state of California until 1948, after the law banning interracial marriage was abolished.[5][13] Due to the ban, the "morals clause" in Howe's studio contracts prohibited him from publicly acknowledging his marriage to Babb. They would not cohabit due to his traditional Chinese views, so they had separate apartments in the same building.[14] During the early years of the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings, Babb was blacklisted due to supposedly having Communist ties from her marriage to Howe; she moved to Mexico City to protect the "graylisted" Howe from racial harassment.[5][15] Howe raised his godson, producer and director Martin Fong after Fong arrived in the United States. """ From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Wong_Howe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Wong_Howe
- bnralt 5y ago
  The Wikipedia page you linked to doesn't make the claims that you are. It says that Babb volunteered for the FSA to help migrants, and that her supervisor Collins asked her to keep notes on her work there. Collins seems to have later shared the field work notes from her, as well as others, with Steinbeck when he was doing research. There's no claim that he read (or was even aware of) her manuscript, or that he dissuaded her work from being published (it says her publisher decided not to publish it after The Grapes of Wrath was successful). People can read the summaries of both if they like; there doesn't seem to be a lot of overlap other than they're both about downtrodden Okies trying to make it out West. Edit: Also worth noting that Steinbeck's nonfiction account of migrant workers in California, The Harvest Gypsies, was published two years before Babb began her volunteer work with the migrant farmers.
dfxm12 5y ago
“As Steinbeck wrote Murder at Full Moon under a pseudonym and did not choose to publish the work during his lifetime, we uphold what Steinbeck had wanted,” [the estate's agents] said. This isn't true as the article states earlier that Murder at Full Moon – has survived unseen in an archive ever since being rejected for publication in 1930. As this was never published, how does copyright law affect it? Will the estate have no say in the matter when the novel becomes 96 years old in a few years?
- devindotcom 5y ago
  I have to imagine copyright has nothing to do with it, since it was never copyrighted. They can hold onto it for another century if they want.
  - fastball 5y ago
    That's not how copyright works, no? Copyright exists when you write something, regardless of where you put it.
    - ghaff 5y ago
      Now. Wasn't true then. But others who are probably more knowledgable than I are saying that older non-copyrighted work inherited the modern Berne regime automatically.
  - scratcheee 5y ago
    copyright is automatic and implied, if someone somehow got a legal opportunity to see it, and managed to copy the work (or indeed if the publisher who originally refused it decided to publish it from their records), they would be breaking copyright from the original work regardless. But once the copyright runs out then the publisher can publish it regardless, and a viewer could quietly copy it and publish it, unless someone in the estate made altered copies for anyone viewing it, then the altered copies would have fresh copyright, confusing the whole issue.
    - 5y ago
devindotcom 5y ago
This sort of thing is always tough. Sometimes estates truly do the opposite of an author's intent, such as with Tolkien's Beowulf. I believe it's on record that he never wanted it published. It's not so clear cut here; Steinbeck submitted it for publishing, got rejected, then seemingly spent years improving his art and produced his major works. I certainly don't blame him for not wanting to throw a werewolf murder mystery out there after being recognized for what he must consider his "real" work. But it was commonplace to destroy unwanted manuscripts or simply to say, don't publish it, or destroy it when I die, etc, and he didn't. To me it seems like license to print, as long as the context is explained in a good introduction. Scholars of the American novel will go nuts for it.
- bombcar 5y ago
  The idea behind copyright itself is a give-and-take for society's benefit (it is good to give authors rights to their works to encourage publication, it is good to give the rights to the people at some point in exchange). Tolkien's is an interesting case, for with the Silmarillion he obviously wanted to publish it (he considered it a much better work than the Hobbit or the Lord of the Rings) but he also could never get it completed. His son took over and did his best to compile it. I suspect his Beowulf was similar - he did not feel it was up to his standards. At some point after death, and with due consideration to the heirs and others, I think the historical value of these things outweighs the personal.
  - vlunkr 5y ago
    It certainly is a more complex issue than some commenters are making it out to be. I think these things need to be analyzed on a case-by-case basis. I think both the intent of the author and the manner of presentation are important. With the Silmarillion and other Tolkien works they usually make it abundantly clear that it's not a finished work. As a counterexample, there was the Xscape album from Michael Jackson where they took decades-old demos, had producers make them sound like modern songs, and put his face and name on the cover like it was just a new album. (also the songs mostly suck) That seems like it benefits no one besides Sony.
jandrese 5y ago
It may just not be all that good. The idea that it wasn't published because it was too lurid for the delicate sensibilities of the day sounds like wishful thinking to me.
- klyrs 5y ago
  When I read Neil Stephenson, I decided to go chronologically. The Big U is quite a bad book, but I enjoyed reading it, and appreciate the perspective I gained by seeing Stephenson grow as an author. Steinbeck fans will probably eat it up, even if it's objectively awful
  - skykooler 5y ago
    Much the same thing for reading Jim Butcher's Dresden Files series, since the first book is basically the first thing he wrote - you can really see the writing style grow over the course of the series.
- SketchySeaBeast 5y ago
  As a lover of turn of the century genre fiction, I imagine it's an attempt to save face more than any question of delicate sensibilities.
pmoriarty 5y ago
All work by an author should just pass in to the public domain upon their death.
- Justin_K 5y ago
  Should everything you've written follow the same suit?
  - bombcar 5y ago
    I think the author's life + 70 years is a good default for anything not explicitly handled elsewhere, as by that point I and everyone involved will be dead (I suppose my grandkids will still be around at that point, but if 70 years of preparation for the publication of my list of Minecraft mods isn't enough, that's their problem). We're not talking personal or private matters here, we're talking something that would have been published if a publisher had said yes at the time. There's obviously a remuneration aspect and the wishes of the author and heirs should be taken into account, but as some point those diminish.
    - skybrian 5y ago
      It’s excessive for long-lived authors. As a society we don’t need to do that much for heirs. Birth + 70 years or 10 years after death, whichever is later, would be more reasonable.
      - bombcar 5y ago
        What I'd like to see is some way to handle abandoned works - something like "if this book/game/movie is no longer in print you can obtain some form of archival copy for a fee, paid to the library of congress and transferred to the author/assigns/heirs if possible". Books can wait around for 70 years to be handled/digitized, but lots of other works are being lost (or are being preserved "illegally").
  - pmoriarty 5y ago
    Yes.
ceilingcorner 5y ago
An artist doesn’t owe the world anything. If he didn’t want to be associated with it, then leave it alone. Have some respect for the way a person chooses to present themselves to the world. The greediness of the contemporary public is really off-putting. It reminds me of how we dig up mummies and place them in museums; completely disregarding the actual human beings that lived and their cultural-religious beliefs, all so that we can stare at them in a museum for 30 seconds.
- jonny_eh 5y ago
  > all so that we can stare at them in a museum for 30 seconds So that we can study them, learn from them, and let them tell us their stories, so that they truly live on after death.
  - ceilingcorner 5y ago
    From their perspective, none of that would be relevant. They had certain beliefs and rather than respect them, we treat them like objects to gawk at.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - anbende 5y ago
      Except that the mummy in the museum isn’t a person. It’s a collection of inanimate organic matter. There are no beliefs there to respect. They ended with the person’s life thousands of years ago. I could see an argument made for modern remains as there are living people/descendants who have a strong connection with the burial beliefs and practices. But make no mistake, even in that case it is about the living and not the dead.
      - ceilingcorner 5y ago
        Sorry, but this is a modern anachronistic statement. To the people that lived, their remains were extremely important. They even built dozens of pyramids to house them, which again, have been reduced to a tourist attraction. The modern world has no respect for anything.
bredren 5y ago
Stephen King has a recent book, “Finders Keepers,” that dramatizes the lost and found works of a fictional western literature author. Good page turner if you like that sort of thing. The characters are part of a minor connected set of stories, largely orbiting around a character Holly Gibney, which are also easy entertaining reading. https://stephenking.com/works/novel/finders-keepers.html https://stephenking.com/works/novel/finders-keepers.html
tclancy 5y ago
"Where ever there's a fight so hungry people can eat, I'll be there. And will eat."
grouphugs 5y ago
no
simondotau 5y ago
In my opinion, an author failing to destroy material is tacit permission to have it published after their death—especially if the main reason why they didn't publish it is embarrassment. A dead person cannot suffer embarrassment. Of course a person can suffer embarrassment before they've died. This is exactly why we should publish whatever we like after death. If it became the norm for famous authors to have their manuscripts raided for interesting works, then such authors will do a better job of not having manuscripts survive their death, solving these silly disputes once and for all.

169 points by benbreen 5y ago

I don't know how Mr. Steinbeck still enjoyed his fame and legacy while being found as a major benefitciar of intellectual misconduct, and obviously belittle women. When he was writing the grapes of wraith, he was reading Sanora Babb's manuscript from his publisher friends. He was already an established writer, and managed to publish his own work heavily borrowed the structure and major plot from Sanora's work. And obviously, no publishers are willing to publish Snora's work, because Mr. Steinbeck is telling them he is writing one that is very similar (which is obvious, because he is essentially copy the book's story line). Ms. Babb's work is only published in 2004, 70 years later after its original completion in 1930s. I think Mr. Steinbeck probably deserve being stripped of his Nobel prize for this blatant misconduct. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whose_Names_Are_Unknown https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whose_Names_Are_Unknown

echelon 5y ago
I have never even once heard this accusation. I skimmed his Wikipedia article and didn't see a reference to any of this. Is there clear plagiarism? The Great Depression wasn't exactly an obscure topic and was still fresh in the minds of many people at the time. What is going on? Is this posthumous cancel culture? Wasn't it prudent to look for similar media and clear the wake? Publishing was a smaller, more difficult world back then and publishers wouldn't back two of the same thing. Wouldn't you drum up support for the novel you worked on? Especially after having struggled for years as a manual laborer trying to make it? Would you willingly table your book that you worked on so that someone else could take your place? Is that malice? Unless there's clear evidence, it's like saying Marvel plagiarizes DC. And that Disney should be cancelled for scheduling their movie premieres around the best moviegoing dates. (Is that highly competitive? Sure. Evil? no...?)
- elliekelly 5y ago
  The reason you’ve never heard of this accusation is because it was Babb who was wrongly “cancelled” soon after she wrote her novel. She was the subject of intense FBI scrutiny for her “leftist” writing and blacklisted by the “House Un-American Committee” so she fled to Mexico. She also dared to marry an Asian man as a white woman which was not just frowned upon at the time but illegal. Regardless, I think it’s odd you find something utterly unbelievable simply because you haven’t heard it until today. Surely the entire internet is full of true things that you, and I, and most people have never heard of? Not having heard a piece of information before doesn’t make it any less credible.
  - echelon 5y ago
    Good points. > She was the subject of intense FBI scrutiny for her “leftist” writing and blacklisted by the “House Un-American Committee” so she fled to Mexico. She also dared to marry an Asian man as a white woman which was not just frowned upon at the time but illegal. That's awful. :(
    - lucretian 5y ago
      the original comment is itself perhaps over-confident in its accusation. as far as i can tell, the known facts about what materials steinbeck received of babb's are hazy. certainly seems suspicious though.
    - exporectomy 5y ago
      It's still illegal for a white woman to marry an Asian man if she's already married to a white man. Still awful. I'm just making a point that these social norms are pretty relative and if you don't have any underlying system of morals to judge them by, you'll probably just end up reinforcing whatever morals your own society already has, with no regard to their awfulness.
  - justicezyx 5y ago
    Also her leftist tie was derived from her marriage to a Chinese man: """ Howe met his wife, a white woman named Sanora Babb, before World War II. They traveled to Paris in 1937 to marry, but their marriage was not recognized by the state of California until 1948, after the law banning interracial marriage was abolished.[5][13] Due to the ban, the "morals clause" in Howe's studio contracts prohibited him from publicly acknowledging his marriage to Babb. They would not cohabit due to his traditional Chinese views, so they had separate apartments in the same building.[14] During the early years of the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings, Babb was blacklisted due to supposedly having Communist ties from her marriage to Howe; she moved to Mexico City to protect the "graylisted" Howe from racial harassment.[5][15] Howe raised his godson, producer and director Martin Fong after Fong arrived in the United States. """ From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Wong_Howe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Wong_Howe
bnralt 5y ago
The Wikipedia page you linked to doesn't make the claims that you are. It says that Babb volunteered for the FSA to help migrants, and that her supervisor Collins asked her to keep notes on her work there. Collins seems to have later shared the field work notes from her, as well as others, with Steinbeck when he was doing research. There's no claim that he read (or was even aware of) her manuscript, or that he dissuaded her work from being published (it says her publisher decided not to publish it after The Grapes of Wrath was successful). People can read the summaries of both if they like; there doesn't seem to be a lot of overlap other than they're both about downtrodden Okies trying to make it out West. Edit: Also worth noting that Steinbeck's nonfiction account of migrant workers in California, The Harvest Gypsies, was published two years before Babb began her volunteer work with the migrant farmers.

dfxm12 5y ago

“As Steinbeck wrote Murder at Full Moon under a pseudonym and did not choose to publish the work during his lifetime, we uphold what Steinbeck had wanted,” [the estate's agents] said. This isn't true as the article states earlier that Murder at Full Moon – has survived unseen in an archive ever since being rejected for publication in 1930. As this was never published, how does copyright law affect it? Will the estate have no say in the matter when the novel becomes 96 years old in a few years?

devindotcom 5y ago
I have to imagine copyright has nothing to do with it, since it was never copyrighted. They can hold onto it for another century if they want.
- fastball 5y ago
  That's not how copyright works, no? Copyright exists when you write something, regardless of where you put it.
  - ghaff 5y ago
    Now. Wasn't true then. But others who are probably more knowledgable than I are saying that older non-copyrighted work inherited the modern Berne regime automatically.
- scratcheee 5y ago
  copyright is automatic and implied, if someone somehow got a legal opportunity to see it, and managed to copy the work (or indeed if the publisher who originally refused it decided to publish it from their records), they would be breaking copyright from the original work regardless. But once the copyright runs out then the publisher can publish it regardless, and a viewer could quietly copy it and publish it, unless someone in the estate made altered copies for anyone viewing it, then the altered copies would have fresh copyright, confusing the whole issue.
  - 5y ago

devindotcom 5y ago

This sort of thing is always tough. Sometimes estates truly do the opposite of an author's intent, such as with Tolkien's Beowulf. I believe it's on record that he never wanted it published. It's not so clear cut here; Steinbeck submitted it for publishing, got rejected, then seemingly spent years improving his art and produced his major works. I certainly don't blame him for not wanting to throw a werewolf murder mystery out there after being recognized for what he must consider his "real" work. But it was commonplace to destroy unwanted manuscripts or simply to say, don't publish it, or destroy it when I die, etc, and he didn't. To me it seems like license to print, as long as the context is explained in a good introduction. Scholars of the American novel will go nuts for it.

bombcar 5y ago
The idea behind copyright itself is a give-and-take for society's benefit (it is good to give authors rights to their works to encourage publication, it is good to give the rights to the people at some point in exchange). Tolkien's is an interesting case, for with the Silmarillion he obviously wanted to publish it (he considered it a much better work than the Hobbit or the Lord of the Rings) but he also could never get it completed. His son took over and did his best to compile it. I suspect his Beowulf was similar - he did not feel it was up to his standards. At some point after death, and with due consideration to the heirs and others, I think the historical value of these things outweighs the personal.
- vlunkr 5y ago
  It certainly is a more complex issue than some commenters are making it out to be. I think these things need to be analyzed on a case-by-case basis. I think both the intent of the author and the manner of presentation are important. With the Silmarillion and other Tolkien works they usually make it abundantly clear that it's not a finished work. As a counterexample, there was the Xscape album from Michael Jackson where they took decades-old demos, had producers make them sound like modern songs, and put his face and name on the cover like it was just a new album. (also the songs mostly suck) That seems like it benefits no one besides Sony.

jandrese 5y ago

It may just not be all that good. The idea that it wasn't published because it was too lurid for the delicate sensibilities of the day sounds like wishful thinking to me.

klyrs 5y ago
When I read Neil Stephenson, I decided to go chronologically. The Big U is quite a bad book, but I enjoyed reading it, and appreciate the perspective I gained by seeing Stephenson grow as an author. Steinbeck fans will probably eat it up, even if it's objectively awful
- skykooler 5y ago
  Much the same thing for reading Jim Butcher's Dresden Files series, since the first book is basically the first thing he wrote - you can really see the writing style grow over the course of the series.
SketchySeaBeast 5y ago
As a lover of turn of the century genre fiction, I imagine it's an attempt to save face more than any question of delicate sensibilities.

pmoriarty 5y ago

All work by an author should just pass in to the public domain upon their death.

Justin_K 5y ago
Should everything you've written follow the same suit?
- bombcar 5y ago
  I think the author's life + 70 years is a good default for anything not explicitly handled elsewhere, as by that point I and everyone involved will be dead (I suppose my grandkids will still be around at that point, but if 70 years of preparation for the publication of my list of Minecraft mods isn't enough, that's their problem). We're not talking personal or private matters here, we're talking something that would have been published if a publisher had said yes at the time. There's obviously a remuneration aspect and the wishes of the author and heirs should be taken into account, but as some point those diminish.
  - skybrian 5y ago
    It’s excessive for long-lived authors. As a society we don’t need to do that much for heirs. Birth + 70 years or 10 years after death, whichever is later, would be more reasonable.
    - bombcar 5y ago
      What I'd like to see is some way to handle abandoned works - something like "if this book/game/movie is no longer in print you can obtain some form of archival copy for a fee, paid to the library of congress and transferred to the author/assigns/heirs if possible". Books can wait around for 70 years to be handled/digitized, but lots of other works are being lost (or are being preserved "illegally").
- pmoriarty 5y ago
  Yes.

ceilingcorner 5y ago

An artist doesn’t owe the world anything. If he didn’t want to be associated with it, then leave it alone. Have some respect for the way a person chooses to present themselves to the world. The greediness of the contemporary public is really off-putting. It reminds me of how we dig up mummies and place them in museums; completely disregarding the actual human beings that lived and their cultural-religious beliefs, all so that we can stare at them in a museum for 30 seconds.

jonny_eh 5y ago
> all so that we can stare at them in a museum for 30 seconds So that we can study them, learn from them, and let them tell us their stories, so that they truly live on after death.
- ceilingcorner 5y ago
  From their perspective, none of that would be relevant. They had certain beliefs and rather than respect them, we treat them like objects to gawk at.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - anbende 5y ago
    Except that the mummy in the museum isn’t a person. It’s a collection of inanimate organic matter. There are no beliefs there to respect. They ended with the person’s life thousands of years ago. I could see an argument made for modern remains as there are living people/descendants who have a strong connection with the burial beliefs and practices. But make no mistake, even in that case it is about the living and not the dead.
    - ceilingcorner 5y ago
      Sorry, but this is a modern anachronistic statement. To the people that lived, their remains were extremely important. They even built dozens of pyramids to house them, which again, have been reduced to a tourist attraction. The modern world has no respect for anything.

bredren 5y ago

Stephen King has a recent book, “Finders Keepers,” that dramatizes the lost and found works of a fictional western literature author. Good page turner if you like that sort of thing. The characters are part of a minor connected set of stories, largely orbiting around a character Holly Gibney, which are also easy entertaining reading. https://stephenking.com/works/novel/finders-keepers.html https://stephenking.com/works/novel/finders-keepers.html

tclancy 5y ago

"Where ever there's a fight so hungry people can eat, I'll be there. And will eat."

grouphugs 5y ago

simondotau 5y ago

In my opinion, an author failing to destroy material is tacit permission to have it published after their death—especially if the main reason why they didn't publish it is embarrassment. A dead person cannot suffer embarrassment. Of course a person can suffer embarrassment before they've died. This is exactly why we should publish whatever we like after death. If it became the norm for famous authors to have their manuscripts raided for interesting works, then such authors will do a better job of not having manuscripts survive their death, solving these silly disputes once and for all.