BIB_ID
318528
Accession number
MA 2581.13
Creator
Steinbeck, John, 1902-1968.
Display Date
[1967 Jan. 5].
Credit line
Gift of John Steinbeck, 1967.
Description
1 item (2 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.
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.
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
Commenting on a piece from a Soviet youth newspaper in which he was accused of being "an accomplice in a murder because I rode in a U.S. helicopter during a mission in Vietnam....It creates a new crime--guilt by observation;" suggesting that "one or more good Russian writers, good but honest observers.....(I know at least a dozen such men personally)---I beg that some of these men be sent as observers to South Vietnam;" suggesting that in return, he would like to be invited to observe in North Vietnam "so that I can observe the other side. Turnabout is fair play;" adding "I know very well that you will see this letter, Komsomolskaya Pravda, but I'll bet 10-1 you will not pass it on to your readers. They must continue to think of me as a murderer--because you have said it so. It is truly a dialectic dementia."
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