Saving Steinbeck's Legacy

One day in the early 1950s, Nobel Prize-winning author John Steinbeck and his wife, Elaine, were driving through Bridgehampton when they saw a sign pointing north to the village of Sag Harbor, and they thought they’d take a chance.

That largely happenstance left-hand turn delivered Steinbeck to the place he had been searching for up and down the East Coast for years — a village with the energy and character of his native Salinas, California.

It’s important to understand that, back then, Sag Harbor wasn’t akin to Newport, Rhode Island, or Long Island’s Gold Coast; rather, it was a rough-and-tumble, working-class fishing port down on its luck. Steinbeck, whose embodiment of the everyman spirit and downtrodden but honest hero is found in novels like “The Grapes of Wrath,” fell in love with the place, as well as its hard-drinking, blue-collar inhabitants, many of whom had no clue about his literary fame.

So, in 1955, the Steinbecks bought a two-bedroom, 1,200-square-foot waterfront cottage on a 1.8-acre spit of land at the end of Bluff Point Road. It was — and still is — an idyllic setting where Steinbeck kept his boat, Fayre Eleyne (named for his wife), and built Joyous Garde, the tiny octagonal writing studio named after Sir Lancelot’s castle in the Arthurian legend. In that studio he penned both “The Winter of Our Discontent,” a 1961 novel said to be based on Sag Harbor, and “Travels With Charley,” as well as many letters before his death in 1968.

Elaine Steinbeck continued to live in the house until her death in 2003. She left the property to her sister, Jean Boone, in a trust. Ms. Boone has also since died, and her son, who oversees the trust, has now put the homestead on the market for the first time since the Steinbecks purchased it.

The asking price? $17.9 million.

The sad truth is that any individual with pockets deep enough to drop that kind of money on the property most likely will see it not for its history but for its development potential. A waterfront property with a dock and sweeping views is a rare commodity in Sag Harbor these days — even if the tiny house is essentially a teardown. A similar property in the village recently sold for $10 million, and that was without a famous author’s name attached to it.

Which is why there’s a new community movement underway. Led by Kathryn Szoka, co-owner of the fabled Canio’s Books in Sag Harbor, the goal is to explore the feasibility of preserving the Steinbeck property, possibly as a home for a writer-in-residence program.

At the very least, Ms. Szoka advocates for the preservation of Joyous Garde, even if it means moving the writing shed off the property and placing it in a museum, where it could be enjoyed and appreciated by the public.

Raising the money needed to purchase the property for such an endeavor seems like a heavy lift, but perhaps between private donations and public funding it could be done.

The idea of preserving literary landmarks is by no means a new concept — Amherst, Massachusetts, for instance, has its Emily Dickinson Museum; Ernest Hemingway’s place in Key West, Florida, is preserved and open to the public, as is the Mark Twain house in Hartford, Connecticut.

And it’s not like there isn’t precedent. The Sag Harbor Cinema, which is slated to open soon, benefited greatly from both state and town monies — including a $1.4 million Empire State Economic Development grant, and another $4 million from Southampton Town’s Community Preservation Fund, which purchased easements to protect the theater’s façade and limit its future use to a cinema arts center.

Perhaps a similar strategy could preserve Steinbeck’s retreat in Sag Harbor. But, with escalating real estate values and high demand during the pandemic, the clock is ticking. There’s not much time to formulate a plan.

As Ms. Szoka herself said recently, “It’s a jewel in Sag Harbor’s literary crown. We have to go for it.” We tend to agree and encourage local officials and citizens to gather soon and develop a plan. Given Sag Harbor’s meteoric popularity, it would seem that if anything is worth saving in the village at this point, it would be the home and writing studio of John Steinbeck — the only Nobel Prize-winning author who ever lived on the East End, a region rich in the arts.

Of course, the irony here is that John Steinbeck himself would likely not be pleased by the ways in which Sag Harbor has changed since his day. Gone are the bars that he frequented and the rough-around-the-edges locals he called his friends. Which is why saving this last vestige of his presence here is so important.

And the notion that his modest home would go on the market for $17.9 million? Well, we imagine he’d probably have a few choice words to write about that.