BIB_ID
318352
Accession number
MA 2581.6
Creator
Steinbeck, John, 1902-1968.
Display Date
[1966 Dec. 31].
Credit line
Gift of John Steinbeck, 1967.
Description
1 item (4 p.) ; 31.8 cm
Notes
Date of writing from the publication details of this letter in "John Steinbeck and Newsday" by Robert B. Harmon; see publication details below.
Page 3 of this letter is a carbon copy of the original.
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.
Written on yellow legal pad paper.
Page 3 of this letter is a carbon copy of the original.
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.
Written on yellow legal pad paper.
Provenance
Gift of John Steinbeck in 1967.
Summary
Comparing the quick descent of his plane into Saigon to "Walter Kerr leaving the theater or water making an exit from the bathtub;" relating the activities of his first few days; saying he had fired a round from a 105-mm. howitzer, attended the opening of a new village of 30 brick homes, built with the contributions from the citizens of Gadsden, Alabama; heading to "the range to check out in small arms" to prepare for a visit "north to the mountains and the D.M.Z.;" adding "I don't want to be dead weight. And I've never had much sympathy for the innocent bystander. I want to be a guilty bystander, if necessary. Peaceful though as I am there's a great difference between a dove and a pigeon."
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