BIB_ID
317959
Accession number
MA 2519.6
Creator
Steinbeck, John, 1902-1968.
Display Date
[1966 May 14].
Credit line
Gift of John Steinbeck, 1966.
Description
1 item (5 p.) ; 31.6 cm
Notes
Part of a collection of letters from John Steinbeck to Alicia Patterson Guggenheim, written from New York and during his travels in Ireland, England, Israel in 1965-1966. Alicia Patterson Guggenheim was the editor and publisher of Newsday from 1940 until her death in 1963 and Steinbeck addressed his letter "not....to someone who is dead, but rather to a living mind and a huge curiosity" (see MA 2519.39). Steinbeck wrote the letters in this series as a weekly column for Newsday. Letters in the collection have been cataloged individually; see collection-level record for more information.
Place and date of writing from the publication details of this letter in "John Steinbeck and Newsday" by Robert B. Harmon; see publication details below.
Written on yellow legal pad paper.
Place and date of writing from the publication details of this letter in "John Steinbeck and Newsday" by Robert B. Harmon; see publication details below.
Written on yellow legal pad paper.
Provenance
Gift of John Steinbeck in 1966.
Summary
Discussing how quickly the world is moving; saying he wishes that "it would sit still and pant for a while before it climbs on toward the Everest of perfection;" discussing a recent patent for "medical electronics" that would allow a doctor to feed in symptoms and retrieve a diagnosis which would allow "the doctor to be an illiterate howler monkey or a fiddler crab;" he muses about the application of this device to psychoanalysis and adds that "we can only hope that the machines do not develop within themselves a diabolic trait foreign to both doctor and patients--a sense of humor."
Catalog link
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