Steinbeck & Sag Harbor

John and Elaine Steinbeck first rented a waterside cottage in Sag Harbor in September, 1953. As he wrote to his friend and agent, Elizabeth Otis, “I couldn’t be in a better place… I take great comfort from this wind and from the ocean. I didn’t know I missed it so much.”

Sag Harbor attracted Steinbeck in large part because of its seaside location, solitude, and strong resemblance to Monterey, California where he spent his early years.

In 1955 the Steinbecks bought their Sag Harbor house. “This is fabulous boating country and fishing country … I really love it out here,” John wrote to Webster F. Street in July, 1955.

Steinbeck relished being part of the local community of fishermen, factory workers, and merchants. He often joined in conversations about village concerns at the Black Buoy and other gathering spots. In 1963, Steinbeck helped start the raucous Old Whalers Festival, wrote its “manifesto,” and was its first honorary chairman.

Steinbeck was a keen observer. In the words of Sag Harbor writer Tom Clavin, he “began to view his surroundings [Sag Harbor] as a setting for writing. The area both inspired his creativity and he saw in it elements that could be intertwined with his longtime themes.”

In 1961 Steinbeck published The Winter of Our Discontent, a novel that tackles themes of social change and moral laxity in a small seaside town reminiscent of Sag Harbor, and some say, its local residents. But as Steinbeck writes in his epigraph, “Readers seeking to identify the fictional people and places here described would do better to inspect their own communities and search their own hearts, for this book is about a large part of America today.”

In 1962, during the height of the Cuban Missile crisis, Steinbeck was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, in large part due to this novel. The Nobel Committee acknowledged that The Winter of Our Discontent was the book that convinced them Steinbeck “holds his position as an independent expounder of the truth with an unbiased instinct for what is genuinely American, be it good or bad.”

Steinbeck scholar Susan Shillinglaw contends that from 1960, when he composed this novel, to the end of his life, “Steinbeck stood as America's moral compass.” His trilogy of Sag Harbor books include Travels with Charley (1962), which begins in the cove where he wrestles with his boat during Hurricane Donna; and America and the Americans (1966), essays illuminating Americans’ virtues and lapses.

John Steinbeck died in December, 1968. Elaine Steinbeck, one of the first women Broadway stage managers (Oklahoma, 1943), remained engaged with the Sag Harbor community as an early supporter and trustee of Bay Street Theater. She died in April, 2003.