BOSTON (AP) — A young and touching letter that creator John Steinbeck penned to his teenage son, providing fatherly recommendation after the younger man confided that he was in love for the primary time, goes up for public sale.
Boston-based RR Auction says the handwritten draft of a letter to his eldest son, Thomas — then 14 — reveals the “Of Mice and Men” creator’s empathy: He refused to dismiss it as pet love.
“While this letter offers an intimate, private glimpse into Steinbeck’s family life, it also expresses his ideas about love with profundity and eloquence,” mentioned Bobby Livingston, govt vp of the public sale home.
In the two-page letter, dated Nov. 10, 1958, the Nobel Literature Prize laureate instructed his son: “If you are in love — that’s a good thing — that’s about the best thing that can happen to anyone. Don’t let anyone make it small or light to you.”
Steinbeck, who received a Pulitzer for “The Grapes of Wrath” in 1940 and the Nobel in 1962 for a physique of acclaimed work, confirmed he was no stranger to issues of the center.
“The object of love is the best, and most beautiful. Try to live up to it,” he wrote. “If you love someone — there is no possible harm in saying so — only you must remember that some people are very shy and sometimes the saying must take that shyness into consideration.”
“Girls have a way of knowing or feeling what you feel, but they usually like to hear it also,” he mentioned. “It sometimes happens that what you feel is not returned for one reason or another — but that does not make your feeling less valuable and good.”
“If it is right, it happens — The main thing is not to hurry. Nothing good gets away,” the California-born novelist wrote, signing his letter merely: “Love, Father.”
John Steinbeck died in 1968, and Thomas Steinbeck died in 2016.
The textual content of the letter has been printed for worldwide audiences, together with in 1989’s “Steinbeck: A Life in Letters,” by Penguin Books.
Legal wrangling over his property has dragged on for many years. In 2020, the U.S. Supreme Court let stand a call awarding Steinbeck’s stepdaughter $5 million in a household dispute over deserted plans for films of a few of Steinbeck’s best-known works.
Thomas Steinbeck, a author in his personal proper, fiercely defended his father’s work, adapting a number of of his father’s books for films and launching authorized efforts to guard the copyrights of his father and others.
Source: www.bostonherald.com”