BIB_ID
318471
Accession number
MA 2581.11
Creator
Steinbeck, John, 1902-1968.
Display Date
[1967 Jan. 7].
Credit line
Gift of John Steinbeck, 1967.
Description
1 item (4 p.) ; 31.1 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.
In a note at the top of p. 1, Steinbeck indicates the "Date line--a tiny circle cleared with machetes, just big enough for a chopper to set down, in the mountains north west of Pleiku."
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.
In a note at the top of p. 1, Steinbeck indicates the "Date line--a tiny circle cleared with machetes, just big enough for a chopper to set down, in the mountains north west of Pleiku."
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
Relating the details of his flight in a Huey helicopter and his admiration for the pilots; saying that they "make me sick with envy. They ride their vehicles the way a man controls a fine, well-trained quarter horse. They weave along stream beds, rise like swallows to clear trees, they turn and twist and dip like swifts in the evening. I watch their hands and their feet on the controls, the delicacy of the coordination reminds me of the sure and seeming slow hands of Casals on the cello;" describing their landing deep in the jungle to meet the soldiers who were "sacking unhulled rice to be air-lifted to the refugee centers;" criticizing the student anti-war protesters.
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