BIB_ID
318335
Accession number
MA 2581.4
Creator
Steinbeck, John, 1902-1968.
Display Date
[1966 Dec.].
Credit line
Gift of John Steinbeck, 1967.
Description
1 item (3 p.) ; 31.8 cm
Notes
Part of a collection of letters from John Steinbeck to Alicia Patterson Guggenheim, written during his travels in Vietnam in 1967. 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.
The year of writing is inferred from its placement within the collection; this letter was not published but Steinbeck's numbering system for these letters would most likely make the date of writing early December 1966.
Written on yellow legal pad paper.
The year of writing is inferred from its placement within the collection; this letter was not published but Steinbeck's numbering system for these letters would most likely make the date of writing early December 1966.
Written on yellow legal pad paper.
Provenance
Gift of John Steinbeck in 1967.
Summary
Musing on the use of bugs in warfare; relating the use typhus-infected lice in WW I, potato bugs in Czechoslovakia during the Cold War and the suggestion that there is experimentation with radiation-laced bed bugs to track the enemy in Vietnam; speculating, humorously, on the notion of bugs fighting bugs and how a "whole new kind of professional military man might arise--ant trainers, spider handlers, scorpion experts;" positing that even if bugs were to fight bugs, "it would be inevitable that some groups would be against it. In a free society you can't tear the placards out of the hands of a natural born protester."
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